Have you ever felt fearful about making a mistake or anxious about being seen as incompetent in your next presentation? If you are constantly feeling this way, and you are not able to enjoy your wins, you may be experiencing impostor syndrome.

Unfortunately, Clance and Gail Matthews found that about 70 percent of people experienced impostor syndrome for at least some part of their careers or even early on as students. And particularly now that remote work is more common, employees tend to feel the impostor syndrome even more often as they lack their manager’s feedback or the visibility required to validate their performance.

People with impostor syndrome (also found as imposter syndrome) experience continuous frustration and anxiety being concerned that they are not good enough, that they will be exposed as incompetent and that everyone else knows what they are doing. As a result, they engage in self-sabotage, overworking and depression.

In psychological terms, impostor syndrome is a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment. According to Psychology Today, people with impostor syndrome feel like frauds despite abundant evidence of their success. They are often well accomplished; they may have numerous academic degrees and certifications to validate their knowledge. However, they are not able to value or enjoy their successes.

The following are some of the signs that show you may feel like an impostor:

1. Work too hard: you overwork to cover up your feelings of inadequacy and end up not managing your time effectively.

2. Downplay your knowledge, abilities, or skills. Therefore, try to get as many certifications and diplomas as possible to showcase your value to others, as you feel you are not enough.

3. Seen as a perfectionist: look over every single detail, and check your emails, papers and exams thousand times to ensure they are perfect. Of course, you never feel they actually are perfect. You feel the pressure to perform at your best in every circumstance, and when you don’t, you feel incompetent and anxious.

4. Seek mentors and constant feedback that is external validation of your performance to find ways to improve and feel enough.

5. Compare to others: why others got a promotion, more money or better qualification than you. You want to be the best. Always.

6. Lack of confidence when showing your accomplishments, speaking up or contributing, afraid of being seen as silly or ignorant.

7. Struggle with pressure and tend to underperform in extreme circumstances.

8. See the world in terms of extremes: You are the best or the worst. You did everything right on an exam or everything wrong; there are no gray areas.

9. Tend to be a people pleaser, focusing more on doing what others want and expect, to feel validated.

How to overcome impostor syndrome

Fortunately, impostor syndrome is not a genetic trait that can’t be changed. It seems that our experiences in your life, family dynamics or specific situations or roles you had to play make you more likely to feel like an impostor. Still, your past doesn’t need to define you. You can react in a different way to the same triggers.

Some tips to overcome impostor syndrome:

• Accept good enough, don’t look for perfection. Perfect doesn’t exist.
• Set realistic standards, and do not self-impose goals that are impossible to meet or even impossible to measure, hence unrealistic and unreachable. This only feeds your sense of “never enough.”
• Use impostor syndrome self-care cards to remind yourself of your worth in moments of anxiety or when “everything is wrong.”
• Reach out to a mentor or coach who can help you see your worth, identify unhealthy triggers and become an accountability partner in your journey to enjoying work-life balance.
• Look at mistakes and problems as opportunities for growth, not proof of your inadequacy and lack of skills. When you lose the fear of making a mistake, you will be able to enjoy challenges, strive for better opportunities, and even perform better as you will be more relaxed and detached from the results.
• Be more grateful for what you get, and do not minimize your daily wins, certificates and past accomplishments. Think about three things you are grateful for every day before going to bed.
• Celebrate successes no matter how small. write them down or keep them well documented so you know where to go back to check when you feel down or not enough. You don’t need a Nobel prize to be considered worthy.
• Do not beat yourself up when you don’t achieve all as you expected: be patient and take it as part of the journey
• Talk to yourself compassionately as if you were comforting your best friend. Acknowledge that you are human and imperfect, like everyone else.
• Define your own terms of success that are not necessarily what others expect. Do not look for external validation, but learn to validate yourself.
• Stop overworking. Set boundaries at work that are healthy for you. Especially if none is forcing you to work so much, prioritize what need to be done and time-box activities to avoid being so perfectionist with everything.

Current work cultures reinforce perfectionism and overworking. Especially now that many workers are remote, the lack of feedback and insecurity are more common, and it is easier to work for long hours, making it really hard to set a work-life balance and identify what is ok and what is too much. Still, by following the recommendations above, you can start to release anxiety, focus on what needs to be done and enjoy your accomplishments.

Call To Action

Do you want to get to your best life at work? If so, follow me to learn more about effective leadership traits and self-improvement tips. Schedule a coaching session to get a one-on-one thinking partner. Take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent how you work, and enjoy it!

Learn more by reading my book We Culture: 12 Skills to Growing Teams in the Future of Work (Quality Press, 2022).

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