• Reexamine internal attitudes that equate self-worth with professional accomplishment. Everyone has inherent value beyond what can be enumerated in our CVs.
• Understand the role of perfectionism in your career. Used strategically, it can yield high-quality work; overuse can lead to needless exhaustion with no derived benefit.
• When doing something new, believe in the power of your preparation. Having anxiety about performing in a new endeavor is common and healthy. If you have prepared for the experience, find confidence in knowing your groundwork will fortify you in the new endeavor.
Interpersonal Interpersonal techniques provide approaches where professionals or peers can engage with each other. An objective third party may be able to share personal strategies and insights to another suffering from impostorism. Just as IRs collaborate to find greater success in shared projects and procedures, a partnership can be a powerful way to overcome impostorism.
• Work with an independent professional coach and cultivate a workplace mentor. The guidance of objective third parties can offer new insights and disrupt self-defeating patterns of behavior.
• Express positive feedback and appreciation with team members contemporaneously. Fostering a culture of supportive encouragement builds esteem and fortifies a strong team.
• Recognize the likelihood that impostorism exists widely in our IR peer group. Those affected may be reluctant to step into opportunities for professional development. Look for opportunities to partner with, champion, sponsor and mentor peers in whom you recognize nascent talent.
Institutional Institutional or departmental approaches encourage leaders to act with intention to illuminate and mitigate impostorism in their workforce.
• Promote initiatives within the diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum that teach what is
known about impostorism. An open discussion may be beneficial to the entire organization.
• Encourage leadership styles where individuals are recognized and praised beyond the typical ongoing professional practice evaluation and focused professional practice mechanisms, and which recognizes that practitioners don’t have to demonstrate monumental achievements to be deserving of feedback. Praising your colleagues isn’t emblematic of a cultural weakness. Everyone wants to feel a sense that their work matters, and personal recognition is a powerful way to raise the esteem of workers.
• Structure the work schedule to allow staff time for adequate self-care. Normalize the expectation to leave work on time and discourage needless overtime contributions. Unnecessary overtime is the haven of first resort for those trapped in impostorism.
Conclusion In these two articles, my goal has been to raise the awareness of the cycle of impostorism within the IR community. For some readers, it may be their first exposure to the phenomenon. Others have known about it perhaps not by name but in their lived experience. Many affected are unaware of impostorism and lack deep insights into their behaviors and how they relate to cycles of professional dissatisfaction, anxiety and moods as well as burnout and procrastination. Compounded over time and scope, the pernicious effects of impostorism in IR may be profound. The waste of human potential impostorism extracts from those affected is unacceptably high to those individuals and to our specialty as a whole.
Sadly, many of the key personality traits and drivers of impostorism may have become normalized and considered an inherent part of being a “good physician.” Selflessness, overwork, emotional detachment and perfectionism are some of the qualities we may deem admirable for ourselves and our most respected colleagues. As tools temporarily used for strategic development, they may serve us well, but when overused as a routine way of doing business, these skills may diminish the long-term effectiveness of individual providers and organizations.
Impostorism needs to be better understood, and the internal, interpersonal and institutional tactics used to dismantle it offered in this article are by no means a complete solution— but they are the start of a conversation. Impostorism thrives in high-achievers and is fueled by shame and secrecy. By naming and discussing the phenomenon, we bring it into the open as a means to better care for ourselves so we may be more effective in caring for our patients.
“In cases that I’m competent at, I’m confident enough. Cases which to me felt like they had more riding on them, with risks of bad outcomes, I had far more self-doubt and anxiety and fear of complications.
What has helped me the most in this arena is reevaluating just how negatively I judged myself and how I took bad outcomes too personally. I’m now much more able to simply do my best, and have that be OK. No one wants bad outcomes, but now when they do happen
Hopefully I learn something from them, but they won’t break me.” –A MID-CAREER IR
References
1. McGinnis H. Identifying the impostor within: Part 1: What is imposter syndrome? IR Quarterly. 2022.
2. Mak KL, Kleitman S, Abbot MJ. Impostor phenomenon measurement scales: A systematic review. Front Psychol. 2019;10.
sirweb.org/irq | 17
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
