Thursday, twenty to seven in the evening, on the bus home. Your phone lights up with an email from your manager: “The client signed. Your presentation did it. Thank you.”
You read it twice. Two stops later you have already replied “Thanks! Really a team effort” and started a list in your head: the slide you finished at midnight and the colleague who sent you the figures on Monday. By the time you get off, the story has been rewritten. The client signed because of the figures and a good mood in the room. You happened to be the one holding the clicker.
Underneath sits a quiet conviction that sounds like honesty. They overestimate me, and one day someone will notice. It feels safer to call that modesty. The popular name for it is impostor syndrome, although it is not a diagnosis. What follows is general information about a common experience. It does not diagnose anything and does not replace a doctor or a mental health professional.
A bookkeeper who files every win under luck
Picture a small, very diligent bookkeeper in a back office of your mind. Everything that happens at work crosses the desk and goes into a ledger. Mistakes are easy to file: straight into the column marked Proof. Successes take longer. The bookkeeper holds them up to the light, frowns, and puts them somewhere else. Luck. Other people's help. They were being kind. Nobody checked properly.
The psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described this accounting in 1978, in the paper that named the impostor phenomenon. Over five years they had worked with more than 150 high-achieving women, among them students with top grades, women with PhDs and respected professionals. None of that changed what these women believed about themselves. Graduate students put their exam scores down to luck or to misgrading. One professor told the authors, “Some mistake was made in the selection process.” A department chair said she held the job because her abilities had been overestimated.
That first sample was mostly white, middle- to upper-class women, and the authors say so.
If the bookkeeper's voice sounds familiar, it is a close relative of the inner critic. The critic comments on everything you do. The bookkeeper has a narrower job: making sure that nothing good is ever credited to your account.
Why more success never settles the account
The obvious cure would be more evidence. Get the promotion, finish the degree, win the next client, and the books should balance. Clance and Imes saw something else. Their clients were afraid of being found out, so they worked very hard. Hard work brought good results and approval, then a short relief. Then the success was filed under effort, a temporary quality, and the next task brought the same fear. The authors called the cycle reinforcing and the good feelings short-lived, because the underlying sense of being a phony stayed untouched.
So the midnight slide is part of the trick. Every late night that ends well becomes one more proof that you only get by when you overprepare, and the result goes on someone else's account. If your sense of worth already rests on output, this will sound like the trap we wrote about in why self-worth isn't earned.
How common is it? Nobody knows precisely. A 2020 systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, led by Dena Bravata, gathered 62 studies with 14,161 participants. Depending on the questionnaire and the cutoff, between 9% and 82% of participants reported impostor feelings. A range that wide says as much about measurement as about the feeling. The review found impostor feelings in men and in women, with particularly high rates in ethnic minority groups. They often appeared together with depression and anxiety, and were linked with burnout. These are associations, so they cannot tell us which comes first.
There is one more thing the ledger hides. In four studies published in 2022 in the Academy of Management Journal, Basima Tewfik of MIT Sloan looked at what she calls workplace impostor thoughts, the belief that others overestimate your competence at work. In one study, doctors in training who had these thoughts more often were rated by patients as more empathetic and as better listeners. Across her studies, this did not come at the cost of performance. The same thoughts lowered self-esteem, and she says there are better ways to become good with people. For the bookkeeper, though, her finding matters: in her samples, the people who felt like frauds did not perform worse than everyone else.
The feeling is a poor measuring instrument.
Where the feeling ends and something else begins
The label now gets stuck on almost any discomfort. The Melbourne clinical psychologist Bianca Denny, writing in the Guardian, separates ordinary nerves (a new job, a first date) from impostor feelings. She keeps the term for doubt about your ability and about whether you deserve your success, built on a comparison that is unfair. An amateur footballer who feels outclassed next to professionals is reading reality correctly.
The room you work in counts too. If you are the first in your family to reach a job like this, or the only woman at the table, the doubt may be fed by real signals: who gets interrupted, whose mistakes are remembered for years. Checking your own books helps. It is also fair to notice when someone else is adding entries to the Proof column, and to talk about it with people you trust.
How to audit the books
You cannot fire the bookkeeper. You can start checking the entries. Impostor syndrome is not a clinical diagnosis, and as Denny notes there is no standardised treatment for it. The Bravata review found no published study that tested one. The moves below come from clinical writing on the subject. They are reasonable habits, with no trial behind them.
Write the entry yourself, the same day. When something goes well, put two lines in a note on your phone: what happened, and what you did that made a difference. Leave out what others did, since the bookkeeper has that covered. “The client signed. I rebuilt the pricing slide after their question on Monday.” Months later, that note is evidence the bookkeeper did not get to rewrite.
Say thank you, and stop. Clance and Imes noticed how skilled their clients were at cancelling positive feedback. They suggested practising the opposite: listening, taking the praise in, and getting as much nourishment out of it as possible. In practice that means “Thank you, I'm glad it worked,” with no list of helpers attached. If a colleague deserves credit, tell them directly in a separate message.
Tell one person the secret. In the groups Clance and Imes ran, once one woman admitted she felt like a phony, others admitted it too, and they were relieved to find they were not alone. One friend or one trusted colleague is enough. Ask “Do you ever feel you got here by mistake?” instead of “Was my presentation really good?” The first question opens the books. The second asks for reassurance, which Denny says brings temporary relief and does little for the underlying causes. Needing others to confirm your value again and again is the pattern we described when we wrote about self-worth that needs an audience.
Run one small experiment with the overtime. Pick one task this month and prepare it to a normal standard, without the extra hour at midnight. Then look at what happened. If it went fine, that entry belongs to you, because the usual excuse is missing.
When to ask for more help
A wave of doubt in a new role is the kind of ordinary discomfort Denny describes. Talk to a doctor or a psychologist if the feeling has started making decisions for you: you keep turning down promotions or projects, or for months you have worked evenings and weekends so that nobody finds you out. The same applies if you notice low mood that will not lift, constant anxiety, or the exhaustion we describe in the five stages of burnout. Bravata's review found impostor feelings often travel with depression and anxiety, and both can be treated. If everything looks fine from the outside and feels hollow inside, read about high-functioning depression. If you have thoughts of hurting yourself, contact local emergency or crisis services now.
It can be easier to say the secret for the first time to someone who has never seen your CV and does not know your manager. NoOneToTalk offers anonymous listening from peers, a place to say “everyone thinks I'm good at this and I think I fooled them” without being assessed. It is a place to talk. It is not therapy, and it is not medical treatment.
Back on the bus, the email is still open. Before you reply, write the two lines: the client signed, and you rebuilt the pricing slide after Monday's question. Then answer your manager in a few words. “Thank you, Marta. Glad it worked.”
That entry is yours.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please seek help. International directory: findahelpline.com.
