4.16 Why you should notice the paradox of imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome often affects the most high achieving people yet it can still feel so true that you’re “not good enough” and “conning” other people into believing you’re better than you are. In this episode, I discuss a paradox that I see a lot in academics experiencing imposter syndrome - the tendency to simultaneously believe that you are an imposter AND hold yourself to higher standards than you hold other people. I’ll discuss the five past experiences that may influence why you have these paradoxical beliefs and why recognising this can be the first step to overcoming some of these imposterish thoughts. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to overcome imposter syndrome.

****
I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast, and this week I'm gonna be thinking about imposter syndrome again. Now this is something we've been talking about quite a bit in the PhD life coach membership 'cause it's part of the theme for Q4 of 2025, and I think this topic is relevant to everyone, right? I coach people all the way from the beginning of their PhDs through to very senior academics, and imposter syndrome shows up at all stages. But the more I've talked to people, the more I've coached people on this sort of topic, the more I've noticed a paradox that doesn't often get talked about. And so that's what I'm gonna talk about today, this paradox of imposter syndrome.

Now, before we go any further, before I explain the paradox, I do have to just say one thing, which is, I hate the phrase imposter syndrome. Okay. Everyone uses it. I've mentioned this on the podcast before. It makes it sound like it's a medical condition. It makes it sound like there's something psychiatrically wrong with you. None of those things are true. It makes it sound like it's fixed, that you can't do [00:01:00] anything about it, that you need to cure yourself in some way. None of those things are true either. Other people use the phrase imposter phenomenon. I kind of prefer that, I think, although I think people don't generally understand what it means, but whenever I'm talking about imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon, I'm thinking about this tendency that some people have to consider that they are not as good as other people think they are. To believe that they are in some ways, conning other people around them into believing they're better than they are and that is at least in part, a consequence of the environment that you are in. Often we see imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon as some kind of like individual failing, that we should just think better thoughts and be more confident and build our resilience and all those helpful things, uh, helpful things.

When in reality many people are treated like imposters simply because they don't fit the kind of stereotype of what somebody in academia should be like, look like, sound like, behave like. [00:02:00] Okay, so everything I say today is within that context that I'm somewhat skeptical of these imposter behaviors and thoughts as being part of a syndrome, and I'm skeptical of the extent to which they are an individual thought mistake rather than a consequence of the way that people are treated.

However, the mindset piece is the one piece that we have most control over, that we are actually able to work on as individuals. And I think there are many ways that we are maybe not creating our own imposter syndrome, but we are exacerbating it and making it more uncomfortable than it needs to be. So. All those kind of caveats in place. What do I mean by the paradox of imposter syndrome? 

Now, some of you may have heard of something called the Dunning Kruger effect before. This is where people who have the highest abilities are most likely to feel likely they're imposters. And I did a little bit of reading around this, there's some [00:03:00] controversy around the original mathematics, the original analysis that demonstrated this, as to whether it was a real effect or whether it was an artifact or not. But essentially what they demonstrated was that if you were a high achieving person, you were much more likely to feel like an imposter than somebody who was not. Everyone I work with are already in the kind of top end of educational experience, educational performance by virtue of the fact that they're either doing or have done a PhD. I certainly see a very high rate of imposter syndrome amongst these people. I don't have other people to compare them to, so I can't say it's necessarily more than the general population, but it's certainly a very high level for people who are objectively excellent at what they do.

The paradox that I've noticed though, takes that one little step further. It doesn't seem to me that it's just that people who are more capable are more likely to perceive themselves as imposters. [00:04:00] It's that these high achieving people who are having all these imposter ish thoughts are also holding themselves to a standard that is not realistic.

So in my experience, most people are not criticizing themselves for being a bit too average. They are simultaneously telling themselves that they are worse than everybody else. That everyone else can do this more easily. Everyone else is more successful than me and at the same time, they are telling themselves that they shouldn't find this difficult, that they should be able to write a good first draft, first attempt, that they shouldn't need multiple redrafts, that they shouldn't get this much feedback.

And even when you kind of try and normalize those processes that everyone writes a [00:05:00] somewhat shoddy first draft, unless it's something they've written in many formats before, they somehow still believe that that's true, but that they shouldn't, that they should be able to perform at this exceptionally high standard.

That they should be able to do things easily without too much effort and in a way that is pretty good quality first time. Okay. I want you to reflect. Does that feel like your thinking? Are you holding these two really contradictory thoughts in your head? That you're not good enough, that you've convinced everybody that you are, but you've conned them in some way. Yet at the same time, there's an expectation that you should be exceptional.

If that feels true to you, it's okay. I see an awful lot in academia and I have some ideas as to where it [00:06:00] comes from. Now, this is not based in research, what I'm about to say. This is based in my experience of talking with hundreds of PhD students and academics about issues like this and working with them over a period of 20 something years. So this is very much anecdotal, but I really think it is worth reflecting on. Where I think this paradox is coming from is rooted in the background of people who end up working in academia. The vast majority of people who work in academia have been highly successful in either their previous educational experiences or in previous professional experiences. Many, many of you who are going into PhDs who are in academic careers now will have excelled at school. Not all of you. Some of you are going, oh, I didn't, that's okay. I'm gonna come to you in a minute. Okay? But many, many of you will have excelled at school. And the problem is that sounds great, right? We all wanna excel at school. That's brilliant.

The [00:07:00] problem is when you excel at school and when you excel, then into maybe your early university careers as well, is that actually that becomes something that you are really rewarded for, that you really value in yourself, and that kind of becomes part of who you think you are. I am somebody who excels in these ways and often we then wrap up in that a bunch of stories about the ways in which it's okay to excel.

And I sort of identified five things that I see really regularly with my members, with other PhD students and academics that I work with, that show the way their pasts shape the expectations they now have of themselves.

The first is around being the best. So many people who have excelled in [00:08:00] their previous lives, they've excelled in their previous educational experiences take a lot of value from coming top of the class. They expect to be one of, if not the better performance. You know, maybe your class used to rank you, maybe you went to top universities, you got top grades, you beat other people in these various different, relatively arbitrary often performance measures, and that becomes part of your sense of who you are, that I should be somebody who is the best? I'm not used to being somewhere in the middle of the pack. I should be somewhere near the best.

Now the trouble is when you start putting in a room into a university, a whole load of people who've all been top of their class in the past, suddenly you are much more normal than you are used to being. And suddenly this notion that you should be the best doesn't feel so plausible anymore. And the problem is that if [00:09:00] you've spent your whole childhood believing that success is being the best, then you suddenly feel like an imposter. Or you can tell yourself you're an imposter if you are not the best. That somehow some part of your brain believes that you don't deserve to be there if you are not the best.

You are not used to making up the numbers. You're not used to being an average contributor to a particular degree, program, career, whatever it might be. And by the way, that's not saying that you are not the best now, but not all of you can be the best. I'm sorry, I hate to break that to you, but if we have been brought up believing that being the best is what you have to do in order to belong, then suddenly we're in a position where we're telling ourselves we're an imposter, but we're holding it up against the really unfair criteria that the only way to belong is to be the best.

My second thing I've observed, and this [00:10:00] might be different people, okay, might be the same, might be different people. These are people who've been brought up believing that the way to be valued, the way you get rewarded is not just to be very good at what you do, but to be good with seemingly no effort. There's people that take pride in having winged it, that actually if they can do well in a school test, they can do well in exams, whatever it might be, you know, they've written their undergraduate dissertation at the last minute, that that is somehow better, that that is proof of how good you are, that you haven't had to put effort in. And even if you don't believe that, even if you don't actually believe that you shouldn't have to put in effort, if you are somebody that academic work has often come easily to, you won't necessarily have experienced having to put in lots of effort.

Now, that's not the same thing as not having to work hard. Okay? Everyone who has got to where you guys have got to has worked hard at some point in their lives. [00:11:00] But that is not the same thing as spending lots of time sort of tussling with something that you don't understand. Usually the people that have done really well in school have never really experienced or rarely experienced that sensation of, I just don't get this, but I'm gonna need to figure it out 'cause I've got to do it.

Usually you've got it reasonably quickly. And so again, when we then find ourselves in this kind of hierarchical performance oriented environment where we are all pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, suddenly having to put a bunch of effort in, finding it difficult, having to sort of wallow in that confusion and keep moving forwards and doing it anyway and trying to figure it out a bit at a time that feels like you're doing something wrong, where for the vast majority of the population that's doing it. That's literally how things get done. [00:12:00] They were doing that at school. They were doing that in their undergraduate degrees, if they did them, they were doing that in their early careers. That's just doing it. But when you've grown up as somebody who hasn't had to put that much effort in, who hasn't had to sort of force themselves to kind of really stay engaged with something they really don't understand, then suddenly it feels like failing. It suddenly feels like you're an imposter. When in actual fact you're not an imposter at all, that is literally doing it. The third thing, 'cause some of you might be listening to this going well, neither of those things are me. I was never the best at school. I've always worked really hard, I've never got found things easy. The third one I've observed is people who believe that they could and should be able to do it all to the best of their ability.

This is where those of you who are kind of consider yourselves hard workers and stuff often come in that you were able to do all of your homework and you were able to do it all to a good standard [00:13:00] because you worked really hard, you were committed. Maybe it didn't come easy. Maybe you persisted.

But through that persistence, through that hard work, you were able to tick all the boxes. You were able to do all the things. You did all your readings, you finished all your homeworks, you made your notes beautiful, I'm sure. And suddenly you find yourself now in a place where it's not possible to read it all. It's not possible to write it all. It's not possible to research all the ideas that you come up with, okay? And it's perfectly unreasonable to consider yourself to be able to, but if you have spent your whole life, being somebody who has been able to do it all, who has completed all the extra readings, who does do things for extra credit, has always managed all of these things, then that again, can feel like a fail.

Where again, to the average person, to the normal person, [00:14:00] they accepted it ages ago that they weren't gonna do all the readings, that they weren't gonna be able to complete everything to their best of their ability, that they were just gonna have to get some bits of it done and it will just have to do, and they'd have to suck up getting a C on it or whatever.

Many of you won't have had to experience that before because even through undergraduate and possibly even master's, depending on the nature of your program, it was still possible to do it all. It was even clear what all is. 'cause some of this with PhD, it's not even, and even academics as well, it's not even that you can't do it all. It's that there's no defined boundary of what all is. Anyway, we get to choose the scope of our research. We get to choose what we should or shouldn't have read. We get to choose what we know about and don't know about. Whereas even if you are going, well, you know my master. I definitely didn't do all my reading or whatever you still knew what doing it all would look like. It would be doing all that reading, for example. [00:15:00] Okay, so now you're in a place where there's no clear definition of what all means. There's no way of doing it all anyway. And again, we have a tendency, people like us have a tendency to interpret that as being an imposter, that in some way other people managing to do it all, or it's okay that they're not doing it all, but I should be doing it all. 'cause my conception of being good enough is doing it all.

So we've done being the best, not putting effort in and doing it all as three of my five things so far. The fourth one is around not needing help. So a lot of people who've been high achieving through their lives, whether that was initially at school or whether you went off and did another career first and excelled there. A lot of people really take pride in not having needed help along the way. They were able to just do their homework.

They were able to just prepare for [00:16:00] exams. They didn't need lots of help. And remember, by the way, you're not expected to resonate with all five of these. You might resonate with all, but others you'll resonate with some of them. Not others. Okay. I really resonate with the doing it all and probably sounds awful the being the best as well. I resonate with those ones a lot. I resonate less with the not asking for help side of things. I always quite liked asking for help. It was fine. So you'll resonate with some more than others. And again, if you are somebody who has traditionally been able to do everything without getting any extra help, without actually having to ask about things that you didn't understand, suddenly when you're in a position where you do need to do that again, it can feel like you're failing.

It can feel like you're an imposter. Where in reality, for most people, that's just normality. That just is what you do. You dunno how to do it. You are someone, they help you. You do it. It doesn't mean anything about you as a person, but if you've pinned your self worth on the fact that you don't ask for help, then suddenly you're [00:17:00] holding yourself to a standard that you are never gonna meet.

We can't do academia. Whatever stage you're at, we can't do academia without the help of others. Ironically, as you get more senior, for academics listening, as you get more senior, you start relying on the help of those senior to you as before, but also to those junior to you as well. Most academics can't maintain a research profile without the support and assistance of their PhD students and postdocs, particularly in the sort of science, engineering, maths, medicine end of things. But we all need help in order to succeed in academia and believing that we don't, again, positions this imposters in a way that's really unfair.

The fifth thing that I've recognized, and I resonate with this one hugely, although I have overcome it, is that it's okay to do well as long as you don't brag. Now, I don't know what your school was like, but at my school it was not cool to be clever. [00:18:00] It was not on any level cool. To be clever, I was usually top of my classes, certainly until I went to sixth form, and to some extent there as well, to be fair and trust me, the boys did not like the girls who did well at school. Now that sounds like it shouldn't matter, but when you are 14, that really, really matters. And so the last thing I would do at school is tell people what marks I got on a test. The last thing I would want anybody to know is whether I've done all my homework or not. I mean, I usually hadn't, 'cause I'd usually forgotten it existed, but that's a different story. Um, the last thing I would do is brag about my achievements because no one thought they were cool. And when you are 14, being cool is very important.

And this doesn't stop when we get past being 14, right? There can be a real tendency in a wide range of societies to penalize [00:19:00] people who brag about their achievements and to be honest, to particularly penalize people who were socialized as being female, people who come from minority backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So then we've had this whole life where we've reinforced that we've got to do well. We've preferably got to do better than other people. We preferably got to do it with minimal effort. We've preferably got to do all the things and we preferably got to do it with very little help, but we also must be careful not to acknowledge those achievements too much because other people will judge us as being bigheaded.

And then we wonder why we have these screwed up conceptions of who we are and what we're actually good at. Because the problem is if we tell ourselves we're bragging to tell other people about our achievements, what we also do is spend less time telling ourselves about our achievements too. 'cause it somehow feels like bragging, even if it's happening inside your head.

And so we end up in this place where we've rewarded ourselves, where other people have [00:20:00] rewarded us for all this kind of complicated performance that we've put on, and where we can't compliment ourselves on it too much, and where we can't even be seen to be enjoying other people complimenting on it too much.

'cause that might make us look like we are bigheaded too. So we have to like poo poo any compliments or praise that we get from other people. And that's where we end up with this paradox of imposter syndrome, where we are simultaneously telling ourselves that we're simply not good enough and that we've conned other people into believing that we are, and that the standard we are holding ourselves against is completely unfair and unrealistic. So what do we need to do? Okay, that's a whole, like when things are determined by our background experiences, our kind of formative thoughts and all that stuff, it can be really hard to then go, okay, what do we do about that? The first thing is I want you to recognize it. I want [00:21:00] you to recognize where the reason you think you're an imposter is because you are expecting yourself to do something that is unrealistic.

This is not about the times where we think we're an imposter because we literally don't know what we're doing. It's the times where we're criticizing ourselves for being an imposter, for taking multiple drafts to get a decent draft together, for example. Things that in reality are absolutely normal.

I want you just to notice and go, oh, I'm doing that thing where I'm holding myself to an unrealistic standard again, aren't I? We don't have to change it. We have to notice it as a pattern notice as that, oh yeah, I do that thing. And we're gonna notice compassionately, right? We're not gonna be like, oh, I'm being that awful person again. We're gonna notice compassionately, but we're gonna notice it. 

The second thing I want us to do is I want us to really normalize effort and confusion. Now, people have talked about normalizing failure a lot in the past. So they've talked about, you know, people sharing their CV of failures, all [00:22:00] the grants. They didn't get, and all the papers that were rejected and everything, and I think that's great, right? Big fan. I do think it comes from a place of privilege where there's certain types of people that are able to share that information without it adversely affecting them. So I don't think it's perfect, but I do think it's useful, right? It's useful to know that other people have had these experiences, but what I wanted to focus on more is normalizing kind of the storm before the calm. I know that's the wrong way around, but the storm that's before the calm, I want us to normalize the confusion, the difficulties that happen before you get to the version you make public. Because again, people really believe that their research questions should come outta their head fully formed, that they should be able just to sit down, decide what it is, and this is what it is.

That drafts should come out mostly coherent the first time, and [00:23:00] anybody who's been in this game for a while knows that that's not true. Hey, even if you've been in this game for a while and you still think it should for you, you also know that it's not true for other people. You also know that these things are iterative processes that we'll spend ages in a bit of confusion about being unsure as to whether to take it this way or take it that way. What argument will make sense, da, da, da, and that on some random Tuesday in three months time, we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, it's all a bit of a mess. We need to normalize that. I used to show my students the number of drafts it took me to get from like starting writing a paper to the final finished article.

People don't even think about the extent to which articles are changed during the review process. There's this sort of general belief that if you were good, you'd be able to produce a first draft that was something in the order of what you read in a journal article, and no [00:24:00] one does that. So we need to normalize the kind of confusion, the changing of mind, the figuring it out, the not being certain, but muddling through anyway kind of stages, as being part of the academic process, not a sign that you're not good enough to be here. That is literally doing the research.

One of the things that I often talk about with my members is that anybody doing a PhD or working in academia is working right at the edges of human knowledge. You are truly doing things that no one has ever done before. That's the whole purpose of producing original research, and that means we are gonna go in the wrong direction sometimes. That means we're gonna be muddling around in the dark. Sometimes that means that sometimes it's not gonna work, or you are gonna change your mind, or you're gonna find evidence to the contrary, or your model is broken and you need to rerun it, whatever it might be, right?

That is literally what happens when you are [00:25:00] at the edges of human knowledge. It is not a sign that you aren't good enough. It is a sign that you are doing really difficult work with your incredible human brain at the edges of human knowledge, and you will figure it out. And the figuring it out bit is the important part. 

So when you are next telling yourself that you are an imposter, that you have conned them into believing that you are competent enough. I want you to remember. That having a process where you are confused and unsure and figuring it out behind the scenes, and then able to ask for help when you need it, able to kind of present it in its half-formed state and then able to get it to something that looks vaguely competent, IE convincing them, you are competent.

That's doing it. That's not you doing anything wrong. That's not you pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. That is [00:26:00] literally doing it. It's meant to be a mess inside your head. It is meant to be a mess your first draft, it is meant to take a process of figuring it all out. You are meant to make mistakes. You are meant to get help. You are meant to pull it together one way and then change your mind. Do it a different way. All of those things are doing it, and if you can do all that stuff and then get it to a stage where you can calm somebody into believing that you are competent.

That means you are competent. That literally means you are competent. If you can be confused and then get it to a stage where somebody else is believing that you know what you're talking about, and suddenly it is actually clear, that's competence. Competence doesn't start at the beginning of doing something. Competence is where you get to. No one cares if it took like 30 drafts to get it to this stage. Is it adequate for what you want it for now? Yes. And that means [00:27:00] you're competent. That means you're not an imposter.

Does it mean you don't have things to learn? Obviously not. I think half the time imposter syndrome is not imposter syndrome, it's just being a beginner.

And that can be at any stage of the career, beginner in the thing you are doing at the moment. Sometimes imposter syndrome is simply a gap in your skills between where you are at and where you want to be, and we get to focus on actually just practicing and training and getting support and developing those skills rather than telling ourselves, we don't deserve to be here, but the vast majority of the time we are telling ourselves we're an imposter because we're holding ourselves to unrealistic standards, and we're expecting and believing that having a bit of a shambles before you get there means you've done it wrong, rather than it literally just being how you do it. I really hope that's helped you. I know that I can't magically come in and just take out those impossible syndrome thoughts from your head. I wish I could, but please [00:28:00] notice where there is a paradox. Notice where you are holding yourself to unrealistic standards. Notice compassionately, and remind yourself that this is literally you doing academic research. I'm so proud of you all. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.