We are not imposters!

We all feel out of our depth sometimes. It is normal to experience imposter feelings in these moments, but by managing these feelings better, could we reduce the risk of slipping into the far more damaging  ‘imposter syndrome’?
 
Imposter syndrome shows up in diverse and often damaging ways, including many we don't normally think of this way. These include unhealthy levels of procrastination, overworking, perfectionism and unconscious avoidance, not just a lack of confidence. Which of us doesn’t experience at least one of these sometimes? Imposter feelings, in contrast, could be seen as a ‘growth moment’, a healthy driver of personal development that helps us perform at our best.

​Staying on the right side of this fine line is a challenge. If we had a better understanding of what drives imposter feelings in research, could we learn how to harness their stimulus for growth instead of damaging our wellbeing and productivity?

​Feelings are not facts
Feeling anxious when we are outside our comfort zone is completely normal and healthy. Like all uncomfortable emotions, this anxiety is a message, prompting us to take an action to remove it. One possible action is to make a plan to learn and grow into the role so we feel more relaxed doing it in future. Another is to consciously choose to avoid it. Each option will have some consequences, but the important point is to consider all the pros and cons and make this choice rationally.
 
This can go wrong if we confuse feelings with facts. Our emotions are always stronger than our rational mind but as long as we are rested and relaxed we can usually deal with them. When we are tired or stressed, however, we lack the capacity to challenge our feelings of anxiety with factual evidence to the contrary. Crucially, we may lose perspective about our ability to grow. If this goes unchecked, we begin to interpret this uncomfortable feeling as an objective and unchangeable fact about ourselves. 

Sources of imposter feelings in research

Comparison
It is natural to compare the inside our ourselves with the outside of others. We simply interpret the information we have available about ourselves and others but forget that the comparison is unequal.
 
For example, we could have an identical experience to another scientist such as two rejections of our paper before acceptance in a third journal. Each of us sees only the success of the other, while remaining scarred by our own rejections.
 
Similarly, I have often congratulated a young scientist on an excellent oral presentation at a conference and been told: “But I was dying inside!”. But only they knew - everyone else just saw the excellent presentation!

Specialisation
Like the cells in our bodies, we all become more specialised. We wouldn't consider a neuron somehow ‘inferior’ to a B-lymphocyte because it can’t secrete antibodies. It can do other things of course! Equally then, it makes no sense for a neuroscientist to feel inferior if they can’t understand every detail of an immunology seminar, or vice versa, but somehow this can happen! Or we may feel deficient if we struggle to review a paper at the edge of our expertise. Sometimes these ‘imposter feelings’ give us the useful message that it would help to learn more. But other times they just reflect different areas of expertise. 

​Negativity bias
Humans have an inbuilt negativity bias. We often focus more on how far we have ‘left to go’ (to whatever our goal may be) than on how far we have come. This leads to a feeling of never being ‘good enough’, no matter what we might have already achieved. For example, we may publish a nice paper but then focus more on its caveats than its findings, forgetting that all papers have caveats. Or if our experiment fails, we focus on that more than the exciting result we got a few weeks earlier.
 
Poorly worded feedback
Peer review plays a crucial role in upholding objectivity in science. We may scrutinise our own results to the best of our ability but since they are linked to our careers, full objectivity is impossible. That is why review by others is needed. However, careless wording in a peer review does sometimes occur and this is fuel to the fire of imposter syndrome. “I knew I wasn’t good enough”, we might tell ourselves, “and now this reviewer has confirmed it: they said my work is just preliminary!”.
 
Moving up
Any promotion or award can trigger imposter syndrome, even in Nobel Prize winners. However, the move from postdoc to PI is a particularly common trigger. The learning curve is steep, especially around managing people rather than experiments, dealing with administration, and the many new responsibilities from health and safety to keeping your group funded. Meanwhile, your own lab skills gradually erode, until your postdocs and students are actually better in the lab than you are. This is a tough transition. It is easy to get trapped into focussing on what you are losing and overlook what you are gaining.
 
Other people’s imposter feelings
A small minority of people artificially boost their ego by denying their own imposter feelings. The result is often to project their anxiety onto others, provoking more imposter feelings in them due to the apparently unfavourable comparison. This the approach of a real imposter, who feels better (at someone else’s expense) but learns nothing.

Solutions
What then can keep us on the right side of the divide between healthy imposter feelings (or ‘growth moments’) and imposter syndrome?
 
Talk about it!
It is astonishing how many scientists suffer in silence about the same problems! Imposter syndrome is one of the most common in my experience. The number of rejected papers, job applications and grants we all get is a good example. I’ve lost track of all my own failures, but I have definitely notched over 50 grant rejections, and I know this is not unusual. Some people have gone further and published their CV of failures. Sharing such information can be surprisingly therapeutic both to the person sharing and the reader. It  destroys damaging myths about other people and stops us feeling we need to pretend to be something we are not.
 
Dismiss the dismissive
Some people in research life can be unhelpfully dismissive of others. Perhaps it helps them feel better about themselves through unnecessary comparison, but we do not have to accept their view. This can range from a reviewer who calls a PhD student's three years of sound but not yet groundbreaking research in a manuscript 'speculative', ‘incremental’ or ‘preliminary’ to the person who once  - and this really is a true story - told me: “But there are lots of professors in Cambridge!”. We always need see these comments for what they are: one person’s carelessly worded opinion that tells us more about them than us.

Celebrate!
We need to remember our successes, not just our failures. We need to work particularly hard at this because evolution wired us up to focus on negatives. Each week we can take the time to review what we have done, not just what remains to be done. It is important to celebrate major wins with colleagues too, and reciprocate in celebrating theirs – our papers, qualifications, new jobs, even nice results in the lab. This is because sharing experiences with others deepens the emotional impact, making it more memorable.
 
We need to appreciate what we do know, and how far we have come, not just focus on what we don't yet know - the gain, not the gap! Everyone has gaps: we each have our different patch of knowledge. Appreciating this also helps us communicate more effectively across the divide to other disciplines, while making sure we do not confuse specialisation with lack of expertise when we listen to others.
 
Communicate clearly
Emotions are contagious so one of the best ways to avoid imposter syndrome in ourselves is to avoid provoking it in someone else. We can do this by explaining our own work clearly and without jargon so that people specialised in other topics can understand it quickly and easily. Most people will then reciprocate so everyone benefits. Communicating as clearly as possible, whether in writing or verbally also helps us figure out for ourselves what we truly understand and what needs a little more work. To do this well, we need to be aware of the ‘curse of knowledge’, which is closely linked to being highly specialised. This is where we think we have explained something well but have missed crucial basic explanations that people with other specialities need to understand us. Inviting, and listening to honest feedback helps here.
 
Don’t accept anyone else’s imposter feelings
If you compare yourself with someone who projects confidence while lacking substance, it is natural to feel inferior. We don’t have to do this to ourselves! The key is to avoid blaming our own apparent lack of knowledge while overlooking theirs.

​You’re normal!
Imposter feelings then are near universal and helpful as long as we manage them well. Research life has many challenges that evoke them. Imposter syndrome is more harmful. We slip into it when tired or under stress, but we can learn to manage how we respond to our emotions to minimise its effect.  
 
The best way to stop imposter feelings slipping into imposter syndrome is to realise how universal they are!