Are You An Impostor?

There is a strange paradox that often accompanies success. 

You finally get the promotion, win the contract, publish the book, step into the executive role or find yourself sitting in a room with people you have admired for years. From the outside, everything suggests that you belong there. 

But inside, a different conversation begins.

“They think I know more than I do. Sooner or later someone is going to realise. Perhaps I was just lucky”.

And the higher the stakes, the louder that voice can become.

In a short Harvard Business Review video, behavioural social scientist Arthur C. Brooks offers an intriguing way of looking at this experience. Rather than treating impostor feelings simply as a confidence problem to be eliminated, Brooks suggests that we should “lean into” them without letting them control us. 

That idea deserves closer examination because impostor feelings occupy an odd place in modern psychology. 

They can become debilitating. They can also, under some circumstances, keep us curious, humble and attentive to other people.

Perhaps the goal should not always be to silence the voice. Sometimes we need to listen more carefully to what it is actually saying.

The Successful Person Who Feels Like a Fraud

Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described the impostor phenomenon in 1978 after working with highly successful women who struggled to internalise their achievements. Despite considerable evidence of their competence, these women continued to believe that they had somehow fooled others into overestimating them.

The phenomenon has since been observed across genders, professions and cultures.

It is worth being careful with language here. 

“Impostor syndrome” has become the popular term, but it is not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. Researchers increasingly use terms such as impostor phenomenon, impostorism or workplace impostor thoughts. 

A 2019 systematic review of measurement scales described the phenomenon as a psychological experience of perceived professional or intellectual fraudulence rather than a clinical disorder. 

The experience can nevertheless be very real. So there is little reason to romanticise chronic self-doubt.

But Brooks raises another question.

What if occasional impostor feelings are sometimes evidence that a reasonably self-aware person has reached the limits of what they know?

Some people appear to experience surprisingly little self-doubt. Among them may be individuals who score highly on the personality traits psychologists call the Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy.

The concept derives from research by Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams, who demonstrated in 2002 that these three characteristics overlap yet remain psychologically distinct. Narcissism involves traits such as grandiosity and an inflated sense of personal importance. Machiavellianism involves manipulation, strategic self-interest and cynicism about others. Psychopathy, particularly in its subclinical personality form, includes callousness, low empathy and reduced remorse.

These traits occur on continua. Someone who displays narcissistic characteristics does not automatically have narcissistic personality disorder, nor does ordinary confidence make someone a narcissist.

We often assume that confidence signals competence. It does not always.

A meta-analysis of leadership research found, for example, that narcissism was associated with leadership emergence. Narcissistic people were somewhat more likely to be seen as leaders. Yet narcissism showed no straightforward positive relationship with actual leadership effectiveness. Interestingly, narcissistic individuals rated their own leadership effectiveness more positively than outside observers did.

Confidence can be persuasive. That does not make it accurate.

Research on the Dark Triad at work reinforces the point. A meta-analysis covering 245 independent samples and more than 43,000 people found that Machiavellianism and psychopathy were associated with poorer job performance, while all three Dark Triad traits were associated with counterproductive workplace behaviour.

The person sitting confidently at the boardroom table may therefore have an accurate assessment of their abilities. They may also possess enormous confidence. Those are different things.

Why Your Weaknesses Feel Bigger To You

Brooks makes another useful observation. Other people usually encounter a limited version of us. We experience the entire thing.

A colleague sees the successful presentation. You remember the slide you nearly forgot. Your manager sees the report delivered on time. You remember spending half the night trying to understand the financial model. The audience hears a polished speech. You know how nervous you were five minutes before walking onto the stage.

It creates an information imbalance. 

You possess intimate knowledge of your uncertainty, mistakes, unfinished thinking and gaps in knowledge. Other people primarily observe your output.

Human psychology can amplify the distortion. Research on what is sometimes called the negativity bias suggests that negative information often receives more attention and carries greater psychological weight than equivalent positive information. 

Baumeister and colleagues found, across a wide range of psychological domains, that negative events, feedback, and emotions frequently exert stronger effects than positive ones.

Imagine receiving ten comments after a presentation. Nine people say it was excellent. One person says your explanation of the financial assumptions was unclear. Which comment are you thinking about while driving home? Most of us know the answer.

Self-Doubt Can Sometimes Make Us Better With People

One of the most interesting developments in impostor research comes from organisational psychologist Basima Tewfik at MIT.

Across four studies involving more than 3,600 participants, Tewfik examined what she calls workplace impostor thoughts, essentially the belief that colleagues overestimate your competence.

Others rated people who experienced these thoughts more frequently as more interpersonally effective. They tended to become more focused on the people around them, listening more carefully and engaging more attentively. Importantly, this interpersonal advantage did not appear to reduce their actual performance or selection outcomes.

Think about two newly appointed managers. The first enters the job convinced that promotion merely confirms what everyone should already have recognised.

The second thinks: “I have a lot to learn here”. That second manager may ask more questions. She may listen more closely to experienced employees. She may prepare more carefully before meeting customers. She may seek feedback rather than assume she already understands the organisation.

Her uncertainty creates discomfort. It may also create curiosity.

More recent research by Tewfik adds another twist. When employees experienced role overload, those with stronger workplace impostor thoughts sometimes responded with greater effort because they interpreted the demands as a challenge. Under those conditions, their additional effort improved subsequent performance. 

That hardly means we should cultivate insecurity. It does, however, suggest that self-doubt has more than one possible destination.

Lean In Without Giving In

Leaning in means examining the feeling. Giving in means accepting its verdict.

Suppose you have just been appointed CFO and suddenly feel completely out of your depth. The impostor voice says, “You have no idea what you’re doing”. Rather than replying with empty reassurance such as I’m brilliant and deserve to be here, try something more useful: “What specifically am I worried about”?

Perhaps you understand financial reporting extremely well but have limited experience presenting to institutional investors. Good. Now the anxiety has produced information.

You do not need a new personality. You need practice presenting to investors.

Perhaps you have moved into an international role and realise that you understand the South African business deeply but know relatively little about operations in Southeast Asia.

Again, useful information. Book the conversations. Visit the operations. Find someone who understands the region.

“I have something to learn” describes a gap. “I am a fraud” describes an identity.

Only the first statement helps you improve.

A Practical Way to Interrogate Impostor Feelings

When that familiar sense of fraudulence appears, five questions can help.

What exactly do I think I cannot do?

Force yourself to move from vague inadequacy to a specific capability.

What evidence suggests that I can do this?

Look at actual performance, not mood. What have you delivered? What have other credible people trusted you to do?

Where is the genuine gap?

There may be one. Competent people have weaknesses too.

Can I close it?

Perhaps you need knowledge, coaching, experience, preparation or simply repetition.

What would I advise someone else in exactly my position?

We often apply a far harsher standard to ourselves than we would to another capable person.

Not every feeling of not belonging originates inside the individual. Organisations sometimes create environments in which particular employees repeatedly receive signals that they are outsiders. 

Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey have argued in Harvard Business Review that organisations should examine bias, exclusion and workplace culture rather than automatically telling employees to fix their supposed “impostor syndrome.”

If you doubt yourself because you have entered genuinely unfamiliar territory, learning may be the answer. If you doubt yourself because colleagues routinely dismiss your ideas, exclude you from networks or apply different standards to your performance, another confidence workshop may achieve very little.

Sometimes the person needs development. Sometimes the workplace does.

Often both deserve attention.

Perhaps a Little Uncertainty is Healthy

The strongest lesson from Brooks’s argument is not that impostor feelings prove that you are secretly brilliant. Psychology cannot support that conclusion. Nor should anyone diagnose Dark Triad personalities simply because they appear unusually confident.

A more modest approach is often appropriate.

The capacity to wonder whether we might be wrong can protect us from one of success’s great dangers: believing our own publicity.

The experienced surgeon should still check. The successful CEO should still listen.

The expert should still occasionally say, “I don’t know.” And the newly promoted manager who feels slightly uncomfortable may simply be experiencing what growth feels like when responsibility expands faster than certainty.

Persistent impostor feelings that cause serious distress deserve attention. They can drain confidence, restrict careers and accompany anxiety or depression.

Occasional self-doubt, however, is different.

Used intelligently, it can prompt preparation, curiosity, empathy and learning.

So the next time that irritating voice whispers, Maybe you aren’t as good as everyone thinks you are, resist the temptation either to believe it completely or silence it immediately.

Until next time, dare to ask that voice a better question. What, exactly, do I still need to learn?

Then get to work.

Dion Le Roux

References

1. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C. & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. (Frank Baumgartner⁠)

2. Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., Nelson, R. S., Cokley, K. O. & Hagg, H. K. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: A systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35, 1252–1275. (Springer⁠)

3. Clance, P. R. & Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high-achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247. (Bishtref⁠)

4. Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H. & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1–47. (DOI⁠)

5. Harvard Business Review. (2025). Lean into Your Imposter Syndrome, Don’t Give into It, featuring Arthur C. Brooks, 19 August 2025. (Apple Podcasts⁠)

6. Mak, K. K. L., Kleitman, S. & Abbott, M. J. (2019). Impostor phenomenon measurement scales: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 671. (PubMed⁠)

7. O’Boyle, E. H., Forsyth, D. R., Banks, G. C. & McDaniel, M. A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the Dark Triad and work behaviour: A social exchange perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(3), 557–579. (PubMed⁠)

8. Paulhus, D. L. & Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556–563. (ScienceDirect⁠)

9. Tewfik, B. A. (2022). The impostor phenomenon revisited: Examining the relationship between workplace impostor thoughts and interpersonal effectiveness at work. Academy of Management Journal, 65(3), 988–1018. (DOI⁠)

10. Tewfik, B. A. (2026). Rising to the challenge: The interactive effect of role overload and workplace impostor thoughts on effort and subsequent job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 111(4), 419–441. (PubMed⁠)

11. Tulshyan, R. T. & Burey, J.-A. (2021). End imposter syndrome in your workplace. Harvard Business Review, 14 July 2021. (Harvard Business Review⁠)