TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: How to beat impostor syndrome | from Fixable

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

Up to 80% of people experience impostor syndrome at some point in their lives—a feeling of inadequacy and anxiety about perceived flaws. In this episode, Anne and Frances break down exactly what impostor syndrome is, why we tell ourselves stories that distort reality, and how to break free from these harmful thought patterns. They also introduce some close relatives of impostor syndrome and discuss the pathway back to confidence and a clear-eyed relationship with our own abilities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us, for you. Up to 80% of people experience imposter syndrome at some point in their lives, or a feeling of inadequacy and anxiety about perceived flaws. I've certainly been there. So today we're sharing a recent episode from Fixable, where hosts Anne Morris and Francis Fry

break down exactly what is imposter syndrome, why we tell ourselves stories that distort reality and how to break free from those harmful thought patterns. Whatever you're dealing with at work, Fixable is here to help, offering actionable insights to create meaningful change in your life and workplace. Listen to Fixable wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you have a problem you want fixed, call their hotline at 234 Fixable. That's 234-34-9-2. 2253 to leave Anne and Francis a voicemail with your workplace problem. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode. You are listening to Fixable, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Anne Morris.

I'm a company builder and leadership coach. And I'm your co-host, Francis Fry. I'm a Harvard Business School professor. and I'm Anne's wife. This is a show where we figure out how to fix things. Believing that you can fix them is a big part of getting there, which is also known as confidence. This is why we decided to focus on confidence

as part of a special series this season. Last week, we spoke to Dr. Ian Robertson about the science behind confidence. We got so much out of that conversation, and we think you will too, so definitely check it out. And we have additional great experts ahead, but we also want to hear your thoughts and your questions. So please keep calling and texting us at 234 Fixable. That's 234, 349-2253, or you can shoot us an email

at Fixable at TED.com. Francis, today it is just the two of us, and we're going to go deep on an aspect of confidence that we see trip a lot of people up, which is the phenomenon known as imposter syndrome. All right, Francis, this is how I propose we do this. I want to spend some time on what imposter syndrome is because it's a phrase that people throw around all the time. And I think it's going to help us fix it to have a better understanding of what it is. And I want to fix it because this is fixable. And then I want us to talk about some of the cousins and variants of imposter syndrome because it's going to help us spot it in ourselves and in other people. How does that sound? I love this frame, Anne, because it's an accurate diagnosis yields a clever prescription.

And we really do need an accurate diagnosis of imposter syndrome. And then we're going to have some pretty clever prescriptions, including bringing the cousins to the table. Yeah, that's what we're going to get into today. We're going to talk about imposter syndrome and also some of its close cousins, including the perfectionist. In addition to the perfectionist, imposter syndrome's family tree includes the soloist, the superhero, and the expert, and we're going to invite all of them to this party. All right, France, we've got a lot to do today, so let's get right into it. Francis, just to get us started here, why is this a question that we care about?

Why spend time on this one? Oh, because it affects so many of us, and it's fixable. Totally. I saw some data when we were prepping for this show, a credible data that said up to 80% of people, experience imposter syndrome at some point in their life. Does that ring true to you? It does. I mean, I think most people visit it occasionally, and some people are permanent residence. And permanent residency is not free. So what's the cost of living with this? Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So it's a pretty grave cost. It's like an internal game. There's loads of self-doubt.

it can eventually lead to burnout. It doesn't just stay on the job. It comes home with you, too. So it's a 24-7-365 thing. Well, maybe let's pull on that thread for a second because I find myself a little ambivalent about this word syndrome because it does feel like a temporary state,

to your point, that it's one of the challenges as we build our way to confidence is that sometimes we have a crisis of confidence, sometimes there's this impostery energy that shows up, but it's not some kind of psychological illness that defines who we are in the world. No, indeed it isn't. I really do think a distortion field, at least that's what helps my brain understand it. We have a distorted view of reality. And I think by the end of this session today, we're going to be able to help loads of people overcome their distortion field.

But I think it would help to go back to the origin of the word. So it was more than 50 years ago that two amazing psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imez, they wrote a paper called The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women. And that later got shortened to the catchy Imposter Syndrome. So these two women found it. They didn't call it the – This is a sexier title. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they didn't call it the Clants-Imez syndrome. Right. Which we're going to later see was much more common at the time to name it after people. Instead, they just identified the thing and then people started referring to the thing in a catchy way. So I think that that's the first thing is that this has been around for more than 50 years. It started with women in academia who were really high achieving, but they thought they weren't. Yeah, the original paper that this pair of psychologists wrote in the 70s was the imposter financial. phenomenon in high-achieving women. And to your point, they talked to more than 100 kick-ass academics, all-female, and they noticed that there was, I like your word distortion, there was this cognitive distortion that was a thread in the internal experience of these women. And I think there's also good data around the fact that it can and does happen to anyone. It is more common women, it's more common among people who are bringing difference into the workplace, X's in room

full of Y's, you're more likely to see these kinds of questions, should I be here, do I deserve to be here? Are people going to find out that I shouldn't, essentially? Yeah, if you're in the majority or in the center of power, while you can have imposter syndrome, probabilistically, you're less likely to than if you're the less powerful or the more underrepresented. Yeah, I do think these experiences are most clearly understood as distortions. And what's a distortion? It's a story we're telling ourselves about what's happening that diverges from reality. All right, so let's break it down.

Yeah, so I find that the first step that's helpful is to know that we are not the only distortion field in town. And that there is another distortion field, which is actually quite a bit more vibrant than ours. And that is where we overestimate our abilities vis-a-vis reality. So if we're under-appreciating ourselves, there's another syndrome, another distortion that's over-appreciating themselves. It did not get a catchy name. This one was first identified in 1999 by two academics, and they called it after themselves.

So they called it. They were probably not experiencing imposter syndrome. They were not. We don't know for sure, but I don't think so. And so in the landmark paper that introduced it, they also named it the Dunning Kruger effect after each of their last names. So that's the opposite cognitive distortion. It's the opposite. I'm overestimating my abilities in some way. Why do you find this so helpful when you are working with people on imposter syndrome? Because when we talk about this alternative reality. Because one is, because first of all, we all know people who are suffering the Dunning Kruger effect. They're in every meeting we're in. And I want people to realize, as you're unconsciously choosing to underestimate, there are other people that are unconsciously choosing to overestimate. Wouldn't it be better if we all chose to estimate accurately?

And so sometimes it's easier to see it, to see the opposite in someone else or be like, whoa, I'd like you to dial it back. well you know what whoa i'd like you to dial it up got it and so we see that it's actually a choice that it is actually a distortion when we kind of look at it through the mirror uh or whatever the right metaphor is here and i think i i like to say unconscious choice because i'm not sure that people are deliberately choosing to do it but after this session you'll be deliberately choosing to continue doing it when we give you some alternatives okay well let's focus on the 80% uh if that's the 80 20 We're going to care about the 80% of us who have experienced imposter syndrome. How do I know if I am subject to this distortion field?

I'm not sure we can recognize it in ourselves accurately. But if you think you have imposter syndrome, you probably do. That's first number one. But anytime there's any self-diagnosis, go to people who know you and love you and ask them. and they and you don't even have to use the word imposter syndrome you can use the clinical definition in the in the sea of distortions do you get the sense that i am overestimating my accomplishments underestimating or i'm just right on target and see where people come out i believe we are revealing it a lot more than to everyone else but perhaps not to ourselves so let's talk to

the 80% of people who have experienced this at some point in their lives? How do I know if I am distorting my reality in this way? What are some clues that I might be, you know, experiencing the symptoms of imposter syndrome? I love this question because I almost never think about it. People come to me with a self-diagnosis of imposter syndrome and I help them overcome it. So I'm not sure that I've ever helped anyone diagnose it, but that's what you do with your coaching. So let me ask you. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it, um, the clues are in the definition. So if you are regularly experiencing self-doubt, if there's a storyline that pops into your head in the form of anxiety about being found out, if you are attributing your success, uh,

entirely to factors that are outside of your control. I think these are clues that you might be subject to this kind of a distortion field. That resonates because when people have self-diagnosed and they come and talk to me, they do indeed use that language. Okay, after the break, Frances, we're going to get into this. We're going to move on to strategies on how you fix imposter syndrome. I love the fixable part of any conversation. Okay, I am anxious to fix this.

So let's get into the things that you have seen work for people to break out of this. So I'll give one really practical technique to begin with, which is when we acknowledge that we are not seeing reality accurately, what we want to do is get an accurate portrayal of reality that we believe in. So what I want to do is substitute the mind games that are going on inside my head to distort things with an accounting of what's really going on so that I can at any point in time choose to visit the mind gains in my head or go look at the accurate record. The cool thing about this is that we can keep an accurate record, even though we are also subject to distortion fields.

This blew my mind when we figured it out. That's the heart of my question. How do we get over the fact that we're not reliable narrators when we're in this state? So we're not reliable. Talk to me about an accurate record. Like what is the thing? So the way to get an accurate record, even we, distortors, can give an accurate record if we do it in the moment. So I want us to create a record.

in the moment about how things are going. And what we have found is that we're pretty darn accurate. That is, the objective performance in our subjective assessment are quite close to each other in the moment. It's only when the distance of time that we start feeling like we're frauds and the other things that you said. So what I recommend is let's have a technique, a template that we fill out in a regular basis that's easy to access in the moment. So for example, Let's say that I wanted the solve imposter syndrome in a week. I could imagine having a record each day on whatever performance metrics matter to me, and I'm going to give myself grades real time on those performance metrics,

maybe once a day, maybe once in the afternoon, once in the morning, maybe once an hour. And I'm going to give myself an assessment. It's going to turn out it's going to be very close to accurate. If I do that for five days, by the end of a week, imposter syndrome can creep in. That is, if you just, without my record, if you just asked me, I could have all of that syndrome. But if you let me open the book and say, what does the book say? Well, now there's no syndrome. And so that's, yeah. So let me just use an example. So I'm in a typical office, and I feel this creep in often in a meeting setting, for example.

And so I'm just going to grade myself on my contribution to meetings for an entire week. Is that an example of what you're talking about? That's an example of what we're talking about. And I'm great quality of contribution in the meeting. And so the meeting ends and I just jot this down in a notebook. And then your point is, and I know I want to describe it in detail because I've seen you work with people. And it blows my mind that this. And it works, right?

It blows your mind that this simple technique works. And it really does. So I really want to give people just a like really clear access to, to, to using it. What you are saying is one of the reasons it works is because if you asked me at the end of the week, how did you do on contributions to meeting? You're going to say terrible. You know, because I cannot be trusted. Right. Right. I'm subject to this syndrome. But in real time, like if we're fast enough, we can outrun it. We can outrun it. In fact, you'll have instead of one data point that you're inferior, you're going to actually have 40 data points. That's going to show

Now, I don't know if you were good in meetings or not, but if you were, they'll be disproportionately good. And if you were bad in meetings, they'll be disproportionately bad. What I can say is they'll be accurate, whereas your weekly assessment is going to be inaccurate. Got it. You're really solving for the distortion part of cognitive distortion. You're like, okay, let's replace the story here with some actual data and start to pull our minds out of this. And what was an amazing finding for us is we used to go through such laborious processes to get the data, and we found that even the distortionists could accurately collect data if they did it in the moment, and that has just made this like a DIY project now. Like, we can get over imposter syndrome on our own.

Do you recommend, like, an accountability partner here? Should I be scoring this with someone else? Can that be useful? I think if you find yourself to be a more accurate score with someone else, do it, but it's got to be in the moment. So don't violate the in the moment to get a really good companion. Got it. So you could imagine two people that both subject, that, you know, are both subject to the distortion and you're in a lot of similar meetings, you'd be pretty good buddies. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you can find a friend here. Yeah. Just don't violate the, don't let the time elapse because nothing can save us for the distortion field then. Right. Okay. So you Can phone a friend here is what you're saying.

I'd like you'd be sitting next to them already, but yes. Got it. And you want no time. I really don't. You want to keep this friend close. Yeah. Every moment. Every moment.

I get that. I get that. Time is not your friend. And the more time you spend in this distortion field where you're constantly questioning yourself, the more likely you are to believe that you're actually an imposter. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? I don't think so. Yeah.

I think you're in the 20. percent. Yeah. I think you're in the 20 percent. This is, this creeps up on me, like, all the time without, without realizing it, like little, like little pieces of it. No, in fact, if anything. Things of the syndrome, like float into my cognitive field. If anything. I've never, I feel like you're part of this kind of rare 20 percent. Why not? Well, let me first. You're, you're like a female academic. You're in like the high risk. You're in this high risk category. Yeah. Like this is rampant in academia. Yeah. So, well, the first one is if you ask me, which one am I likely to experience Dunning Kruger or Imposter Syndrome? It's Dunning Krueger. Let's be honest. And, you know, my like picking a gender camp go one or the other, I don't get to pick, but I'm not, it's, you know, if the ladies all experience, it doesn't mean I always experience it. Let's be, let's be honest. These categories are fuzzy. Yeah, they're very fuzzy. So, but I do think that in my distortion field, the longer away I am from something, I tend to put more of a halo on it.

So I do think I have a dunning. I think I'm very objective. But I do with distance, it just gets better. It's like how I interpret silence as applause. Other people interpret silence as concerns. Right, right. So here are other categories. I have seen work, and I'm wondering if they resonate with you.

So one is this whole category, we've talked about this before in the show, creating some healthy distance from that inner critic. Like, I love Dick Schwartz's work on internal family systems. I find it so liberating. It's really fun. Let's name the critic. Let's invite them into the meeting. Let's kick them out.

Let's talk them down. Let's get them out of the driver's seat. I find the metaphor, just wonderful, delightful. And it feels very actionable to me. One of the problems with the word syndrome is it suggests this kind of very black and white, like you're in it or you're not in it. Sometimes this voice pops up and starts yelling at me. Sometimes it's quieter. Sometimes I listen.

Sometimes I don't. Like it is a much more fluid, much more variable, much kind of grayer situation than the word syndrome suggests. And figuring out what my relationship is to that voice and realizing that I have a relationship. relationship to that voice, that this is not necessarily, you know, my highest and best self that is yapping in these moments. I find that a very empowering way to relate to this experience. Yeah. What I would say to that is that your solution is the solution for people that live an examined life. My solution is for everyone else. All right. So let me give you two more categories. I look forward to it. One, I think, is resetting your relationship.

with failure. So this is maybe less examined life and more Carol Dweck, growth mindset, how do we treat setbacks as opportunities to learn instead of the opposite data exercise that you described, which is data that I shouldn't be in this room, I shouldn't be in this job, I don't deserve to be here, which is kind of the default data exercise we're doing. And then when something goes wrong or when I screw up as I inevitably do, then it gets, it gets filtered through my brain as C, I told you so. You didn't deserve this position. So I do think our, how we respond to failure, even small F failure in the meeting. I didn't use the right words. You know, just whatever the small F failure is. I do think if we do it with curiosity about how I might do it

better next time versus judgment, oh my gosh, I didn't achieve. I bet the judgey version of us like widens the imposter syndrome. It makes the distortion field wider. Yeah. And I think this is where I experience you and I, on being on the other side of this line, like line, if this is a, yeah, if this is a spectrum. Oh, it's a two by two. We got a 45 degree angle, dotted line. We got the whole graphic. But, but something, you know, a, won't go well, or I'm aware of a mistake in a meeting, and it will hit me harder than you. Like, it would never occur to you that it was because you were not supposed to be in meeting. That would be such an absurd conclusion to reach.

I can accurately tell if it's a pebble or a boulder, and you will sometimes mistake pebbles for boulders. A hundred percent. I think that's, it's also I love our dear colleagues, Amy Edmondson's work and her recent book, The Right Kind of Wrong. I think, you know, directionally, most people have an unhealthy relationship with failure and mistakes. And so I think this book was such a gift and such a public service. Such a gift. And one of the things I love is that she complicated, you know, there are different kinds of mistakes, but we bring the same emotional reaction to even the good mistakes,

even the great mistakes that teach us things about ourselves, that are on the path to innovation. you know, we need to be out there making a lot of good mistakes in order to make progress as a species, but we have such an aversion to failure that we are getting in our own way. Yeah, she's the perfect messenger for the two-dimensionality of there's like success and failure and you can shoot happy face, frowny face. She's like, no, no, there are some types of failure that are at least as good as success. Yeah. It's mind-blowing for people. It's mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing and true. And once you accept that. Yeah, that sound effect right there. That was Francis's mind being blown. And once you, once you, that, you're like, oh my gosh, well, I want to get

to those as quickly as possible. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really cool book. We recommend it to everyone. Yeah. Okay, Francis, let's say I'm leading a team and I observe someone on my team who is kind of subject to these kinds of thoughts and storylines. Is there anything I can do as a leader or manager to be helpful to that person? So here's a classic example of that. In the classroom at HBS, when students first arrive on campus and they were high achievers

before they got to campus, they all initially judged themselves with did I get the right answer that we came up with at the end of class? But that is not the metric you should use for the people that opened the class. We still got 80 minutes to travel. Yeah. Open for class.

It's did I get everyone else to want to engage. engage in it in a productive way. Not that I get the right answer. In fact, probabilistically, if you got the right answer, we're not teaching that case next year. That's not a good class, actually. That's not a good class. So you have to judge yourself based on the time of doing it. But when people arrive on campus, they just think, did I get the right answer or not? And don't control for how long, how long we are into the discussion. Yeah, like when you, and when you have, I think, worked with me on this without even, maybe even

realizing it or labeling it, imposter syndrome, you know, what I have appreciated is you are always solving for, let's look clearly at the situation, let's reach an accurate conclusion. So when you find me in my feelings and kind of open to this conversation, you're not coming to say, don't, you know, you're not coming to take care of me necessarily or protect me from those feelings or tell me that I shouldn't be feeling things or that everything's great. Just giving you a snapshot of reality. So let's talk about reality. And I know you're feeling bad and there may be a reason to feel bad, but let's look

at the column of like where we made progress, where we stumbled, what we could learn. And when I see leaders really creating environments where people like me kind of get over these self-destracting thoughts and contribute more fully, they are creating a true learning environment that includes a healthy relationship with setbacks, which is not that, oh, you're never going to make a mistake. But when you make a mistake, what did we learn? Can we make that learning infectious? Our job here is to be better tomorrow than we are today.

You know, it is building that kind of culture where I think we really set people up for success on this one. Yeah, and what I notice when I interact with you, because you do sometimes have this distortion field after some meetings, and I never know what's going to trigger it. It's not the volume of good and bad. It's something triggered the distortion field for you. No, I don't totally know what gets that bitch out of her seat. No, and maybe, yeah, maybe we should start paying attention so we can see it in the moment. I don't know either, because I'm always surprised. I'm going to say that again for my mother, so you don't have to use bad language. I don't know what gets that inner critic out of her seat.

I don't know. I don't either. It's always a surprise to me. It's always a surprise. But if what I do with you, which is a very high-performing person with a wildly high probability of success, but with occasional pebbles in the way, but you distort pebbles to boulders, I don't do anything to distort pebbles from being pebbles. Like, I don't pretend they don't exist. I talk about them as the pebbles. And I talk about all of the accelerants that happened. and then you get an accurate report card and then you let go of it.

So I think it's important that we don't distort reality to handle it. We just show reality. That's all people with imposter syndrome need is an accurate view of reality. Welcome back. We have defined imposter syndrome. We have figured out how to fix it, and we are going to set ourselves up to spot it more precisely in ourselves and other people. So we're going to do this by meeting the cousins, the variance of imposter syndrome. This is some of Dr. Valerie Young's terrific work. And, for instance, I want to just one by one here. So start us off with the perfectionist. Yeah. I think the most prominent cousin of imposter syndrome is the perfectionist. And now could be some... Yeah, super common. And it could be someone who has imposter syndrome or someone else that you're going to observe it in. But it's the perfectionist. And the perfectionist, if I can summarize it in the crispest way possible, the perfectionist thinks there are two states of nature. Flawless or failure. Yes. Yep. What a debilitating way to go through the world.

Its own distortion field. And right now I'm going to be like, oh, my gosh, there are all these distortions. Now, wouldn't we like to sprinkle magic dust on the person who thinks there are two states in the world, flawless or failure, and make that evaporate? Because the quest for flawless is going to take all day and you're going to get nothing else done. You're unlikely to achieve it, but for sure, you're unlikely to accomplish anything else. what I think people get wrong about perfectionism is it is more about escape from failure than pursuit of the perfect because it presents as pursuit of the perfect but the cognitive distortion is that mistakes and failure are going to reveal that I don't belong here

right it's that mistakes are so costly that I'm going to to avoid them, use all of my energy to avoid them, cover them up, keep other people from them, pretend that gravity doesn't apply to me. Yeah. I love the, it's an escape from failure because that's indeed what it is. If you think there are two states to the world, flawless or failure, you're going to try to be flawless so that you are not a failure. By any means necessary. By any means necessary. And almost always, it's way too laborious. And so you will as a perfectionist accomplish so much less in the world than other people that are unburdened by that binary and see it much more as a continuum and realize that worrying about which font you selected

for the paper that you submitted is not going to matter but you could spend a month sorry but one could spend a month thinking about that and you know what everyone else that you're competing against and bad fonts and that is a black and white world that I will live in and die on Okay. Well, while people who are inefficiently doing that, you know what the rest of us are doing? Inventing fire. No, I know. I know. And getting feedback, getting early feedback. This is a phenomenon back to our women in academia. This is a phenomenon that you have observed from the beginning of your career that this perfectionist instinct would lead women academics to take so much longer. To take so much longer in writing the paper. Meanwhile, the men were putting stuff out there. getting feedback, co-producing, better results, and really learning, and the women were denying themselves that opportunity. Which leads us to the second cousin. And the second cousin is the soloist. And so in the example you just had, the women are doing it alone in their quest for perfection.

And the men are not going it alone in their quest for good enough, in their quest for this is a publishable paper. And the flawed story here is, I cannot ask for help. Asking for help is a sign of weakness. It, again, it will reveal that I don't belong here. And so to your escapist thing, that's exactly right. I'm escaping the weakness associated with help, which is, I don't even want to call that a distortion. It's just baldly incorrect. I don't know a single person of great accomplishment that got it without help. Not a single one. So you know, in fact, the pattern is even stronger that the people we see like continuously rise in organizations are, they truly excel at asking for help. And creating, shameless. Shameless and creating ecosystems that could help.

And just think about it. You alone are going to compete against me and all the people I can galvanize to help me. What is the probability you have of winning? I'm going to round it off to zero. So the problem with the soloist is that you will have such a mediocre ceiling that you can achieve in the world. And that's so sad because you had all of the raw materials to get there. And this comes at a huge cost to organizations. Because people, in addition to people not being so far away from the frontier of what they can contribute, problems just don't get escalated at the right time. And learning, it doesn't become infectious. In fact, I said to you, would you rather have a team of soloist or a team of team players?

Give me a more mediocre team than a bunch of fantastic soloists. All right, tell us about the superhero. This is one where the person has the mistaken impression that what they're bringing to the table is effort. And so by hook or by crook, they have to work harder than everyone else. So this is the person who secretly goes to the gym. This is the person who secretly stays late. This is the person who in secret exhausts them.

doing all of these, putting in all of this extra time. Again, I think probably as a soloist when they're doing it, but they're putting in the extra hours as if there is a participation trophy. And once you get out of Little League, there are no more participation trophies. But the superhero is acting like there is a participation trophy and that if I work harder, I win. And it's just not true. Yeah, the lie here, I mean, I love very. of kind of what's the lie and all these. I like that frame too. Yeah, the lie here is that in order to prove my value,

I have to go above and beyond constantly. The individual cost is self-evident, maybe. We've talked about burnout in the show. And at the group level, I think when this becomes normalized, obviously those costs, the cost of burnout and risks of all these stuff go up, but there's also this phenomenon of exhausted mediocrity. There's no strategic prioritization. There's no sense of this task is more important than this other.

It's all like we're just going to we're just going to out effort. We're going to out all the time on all of the things. Yeah. Yeah. And this try harder mentality, you're not going to win against anyone of consequence and they're going to have a better life because if you want to think great ideas, you have to be well rested and well nourished and well exercised. Well, the person who's competing on effort, they have let those things go long ago.

So I would say that it's the superhero thinks the only way they can compete is with the participation trophy of effort. And I have yet to meet a person for whom that's actually true. And the tragedy is they're covering up the really good stuff in the panic to get the thing that they think matters. And it doesn't. Yeah, we hear that from so many leaders that, oh, I got here by working harder. For sure, you worked hard. But first of all, no, you didn't. There's always people that are working harder than you, always.

But that's not your true superpower. And that's not your superpower. I want you to get here by being in peak condition. I mean, what do we know about the always on? Yeah, they never win. They never win. All right, close us out with the expert. So I think expert is a sibling.

of the superhero on this part, which is instead of working harder, this is the person that is going to compete by having more knowledge on the topic than anyone else. So they're the encyclopedia in the room. Yeah. They're just going to have more details, more knowledge, more accessible stuff, as opposed to more judgment, more creativity. They're going to have more of the hard knowledge. This one, I think, is also as problematic at the others. If I think in the age of AI, which one of these is likely to go away, it's that one, because that AI just makes that a laughable positioning. So I do think this one is going to dissipate over time, but certainly up until now, we all know the person who thinks, oh, well, then that means, you know, blah, blah,

they had to take time to get blah, blah, blah, and they're putting all that blah, blah, blah, their head and we can only fit so much in our head. I'm always like, oh my gosh, imagine if you didn't have to store that, you know what we could be putting in that beautiful mind? But yeah, so, but it's the lie, it's a similar lie to the other, to the, to the, to it's cousins, which is I have to know, I mean, all of these are lies that are supposed to keep us safe that ironically make us more vulnerable, right? But this one is I have to know everything in order to prove my value. And if I don't, yeah, if I don't know something, And again, you can see it's also why we call them cousins, because you're more likely to go it alone.

Because if you really didn't think you had to go it alone, you wouldn't think you had to know everything. So why, let me ask you this, why is it worth it, why is this pattern helpful to us? Yeah, because by the time we go through all of these, everyone is nodding with either I've experienced it or I know others that experienced it. And these aren't good places to be. So now let's return to imposter syndrome. You know what we've done? We've created a can-do spirit to wanting to get out of imposter syndrome and a path to get out of it, which is it's a distortion from reality. And so that's all we have to do. We only have to overcome a lie.

We're just distorting reality. So we're going to now get back in touch with reality. Yep. Love it. So we're going to wrap this up here. I like that we have a vocabulary now because we're going to be able to return to it again and again in this season. And what do you want people to take away from this conversation? If you have self-diagnosed as imposter syndrome, I don't want it to be your dirty little secret.

You are in wonderful company. I mean, wonderful company. And A number one, B number two, it's ordinary enough that you don't have to go to extraordinary lengths to overcome it. So don't think about it only at two in the morning. think about it at two in the afternoon, when we can use really practical steps to overcome it. Yeah, I love that. I want to challenge this word syndrome just because, you know, by the time 80% of us are experiencing it, it's a pretty normal experience of work and life.

And it comes and goes, you know. And so the sooner we can see it in ourselves, the sooner we can kind of take action to expose the lie and to your point, replace it with something that is closer to the truth. And the sooner we can spot it in other people, the faster we can intervene and bring people back to the safe raft of a healthy and honest relationship with our reality. I love the safe raft. And when Pauline and Suzanne wrote about it, they call it. it the imposter phenomenon. And when Dunning and Kruger found the opposite, they called it an effect. I don't know who actually first called it a syndrome, but they didn't do us any favors. Yeah. I'm going to refer to it as the imposter experience. That's how I'm going to call it. I love it. That's how I'm going to refer to it going forward. The experience of a feeling like

an imposter. All right. Francis, that is our show. Will you read us out? Thank you so much for listening. Please send us any and all questions you have about confidence at work. We love the topic and it's fixable. It's also okay if you have other questions in addition to confidence. We want to help you solve those problems too. So please keep reaching out. Send us a message. Email, call, or text us at fixable at ted.com. 234.36able. That's 234-349-2253. Fixable is a podcast brought to you by Ted and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Fry. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Ban Ban Chang, Michelle Quint, Danielle Baloreso, and Roxanne Highlash. Our show is mixed by Louis at Storyard.

Thank you.