The Five Flavours Of Impostor Syndrome

 A lot of us have probably experienced feeling like a fraud or that you lack the skills or abilities to do something at one point or another. What you might not have realised is this feeling, when it’s relentless, has a name, the imposter syndrome. Well, there’s more. There’s five main flavours of impostor syndrome that can manifest, and I’ll show how each impostor syndrome undermines your quality of life.

The Five Flavours Of Impostor Syndrome

 

Being a perfectionist

Growing up, I had problems with this when it came to drawing. Every line had to be exact, and I couldn’t move on until it was. This resulted in me drawing the same line over and over again, but never being happy with it. I stopped drawing all together because of it.

 

A perfectionist will set themselves extremely difficult goals. But when you do that, you’re setting yourself up to fail, and when the inevitable failure occurs, the perfectionist will experience overwhelming self-doubt. This primes the perfectionist to worry that they’ve never been good enough. Some perfectionist will realise that they have a need for excessive control, that if something needs to be done right, then they will have to do it themselves. However, some will also be unaware of this tendency.

 

A red flag for being a perfectionist is being a micromanager. Not only does micromanaging not bring the hoped-for results, but it’ll also quickly get on the nerves of everyone being micromanaged, causing work to suffer across the board.

 

This flavour of impostor syndrome undermines your quality of life because of the inevitable problem with being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist means that you’re never satisfied with the outcome because you always think you can do better. Sometimes, that might be true. But the real question is, does it matter? Not everything requires 100% perfection, if it did, life would be a nightmare. Could you imagine trying to be perfect in every single thing you do? I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

 

Being superhuman

Simply put, this flavour of impostor syndrome means that you think you’re Hawkeye in the Avengers. Everyone else has some kind of power or special ability, and all you can do is shoot arrows. Accept it’s worse than that, Hawkeye may be human, but his ability to hit the target is second to none, whereas you fill like the janitor working at the Avengers tower.

 

Colourful descriptions aside, your insecurities about being the only person in a group who shouldn’t be there can cause you to overcompensate. To earn your place. This is your classic representation of impostor syndrome. With this version of impostor syndrome, you may display people-pleasing tendencies, whereby you feel you can’t say no to anything asked of you at work. You can find yourself in a position with more work than any reasonable or superhuman person can complete.

 

Not being superhuman undermines your quality of life because the reason you can’t say no is that you don’t want people to think less of you or realise you’re not good enough to be there. Plus, you need other people to validate you so you can feel like you belong, although you never will feel like you belong, no matter how long you’ve been there. Not if you don’t tackle your impostor syndrome. Needing that constant source of validation means your sense of self is dependent entirely on others, which isn’t healthy.

 

Furthermore, you take everything personally, even when it’s constructive criticism, and for some, even when it’s not criticism or even about you. I’ve come across people who have taken it personally just because I had a different opinion to them over something that wasn’t even about people. It was so trivial, it may have well been about what sauce you like on your chips (fries for the Americans).

 Being an Einstien

For some reason, some people think natural geniuses exist when they don’t. Everyone needs to work hard to become competent. No one is born knowing astrophysics. This flavour of impostor syndrome is about believing that you’re so good at something that it comes with ease and requires little effort. In short, you should be able to master something in no time at all.

 More often than not, this means you should get everything right on the first try. But when you can’t get something right the first time, or don’t master something as quickly as your personally set high bar says you should, self-doubts will take over.

 

The cause of this version of impostor syndrome can come from being told all the time that you’re the smart one in the family. Although such comments come from a good place, they can place a lot of pressure on an individual to live up to the label.

 

This impostor syndrome undermines your quality of life because you’ll avoid doing certain things because you’re concerned you won’t be a master at it right out of the gate. Instead of taking on a new challenge, experiencing something new, and learning something, you’ll keep yourself locked up in your safe little bubble.

Being a lone wolf

Aka, the soloist. There is nothing wrong with being independent, but being a soloist isn’t about being independent. To avoid feeling like you might exposure yourself as not being worthy of being there, you’ll instead do everything on your own, and avoid asking for help, even when you know you need it.

 

This impostor syndrome undermines your quality of life because going it alone all the time is lonely. But not only that, there isn’t a person alive who’s never needed help at one time or another. Remember, a wolf doesn’t choose to be alone, they’re a pack animal.

 

Being the expert

To be an expert is to be someone that knows everything about a particular field, or that’s what people believe at least. This impostor syndrome undermines your quality of life because you won’t put yourself forward for chances, like a new job or a promotion. The belief that you’re not an expert because you can’t quote everything about the field you’re in off the top of your head is not only wrong, but unless you’ve got an eiditic memory, impossible to do.