We’re All Impostors

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9dSYgd5Elk.

Thanks go to my brother Rich for sending this Guardian article to me, allowing me to share a final thought for this very long year:

Some pretty smart women claim to be racked by impostor syndrome. Do men just not get it?

The headline asks an interesting question, and I have an educated, but admittedly unscientific, answer: yes, men “get” impostor syndrome. All the time.

What Catherine Bennett describes as “the association of authority with traditionally male exhibitions of extreme assurance” is, from my perspective, the defining mark of a deeply-buried case of male impostor syndrome.

What does true self-confidence look like?

Is it the way that Donald Trump or Boris Johnson or David Cameron or Vladimir Putin behave?

Conversely, what about when Ronald Reagan admitted his mistakes in the Iran-Contra scandal? Or when George H. W. Bush apologized for raising taxes? Or when John F. Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs invasion?

Are those illustrations of weakness, or of strength?

Friends, true self-confidence is marked by the ability to openly admit mistakes or lack of knowledge…true self-confidence is all about vulnerability and humility.

Why might you not want to admit mistakes? Do you feel that it might amplify a certain lack of ability, and that others might think less of you? Both of these are strong indicators of personal insecurity. If you are afraid to admit mistakes, you are, by definition, afraid of people knowing your weaknesses. All signs point to some amount of impostor syndrome at this point.

The difference between female and male instances of impostor syndrome, I think, is that women seem to feel more comfortable exploring their weaknesses at a liminal level than men do. Men instead tend to pelt their insecurities down into subliminal territory, creating strong compensating facades of synthesized self-confidence, perhaps powered through the unique delusion of testosterone.

What man (or woman) who cannot admit mistakes and take corrective actions does so for any reason other than fear?

And what could that man or woman be afraid of, other than people beginning to see chinks in their armor?

As I have gotten older, I have developed a belief that most people lack self-confidence for some portion — maybe even a large portion — of their lives. Most people (including yours truly!) become aware of their relative lack of significance in the universe through some lonely moments of self-reflection, and they build up ugly behaviors in order to compensate for this. Ironically, it is the very ability for so many people around us to successfully fake self-confidence through “brio,” to borrow Boris Johnson’s term, that we find the seedlings of self-doubt so deeply sown in ourselves.

If our default human tendency was to openly embrace and exhibit our faults — with confidence! — the world might be a very different place, don’t you think?

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