Have you ever had that nightmare where you’re sitting in an examination room in front of a panel of experts watching a timer count down to zero?
You’re being asked a series of critical, complex questions, and you’re running out of time to answer.
In fact, you haven’t answered one correctly, or at all, and as the examiners prepare to make their final assessment of your work, you realize that you haven’t understood any of their questions.
Your career depends on this test.
They’ll find out. They’ll think you’re a fraud.
As the panel of experts eye you suspiciously, and time runs out, you wake up in a cold sweat, thankful that the examination wasn’t real.
Strangely enough, many of us experience this feeling in our waking lives. It’s something commonly known as “impostor syndrome,” but it’s recently been dubbed the impostor experience by psychologists.
This experience has been recognized in as much as 70 percent of the population and across all demographics. Though not considered a clinical psychological syndrome, it still has a harmful effect on many people.
The experience often leaves individuals feeling isolated, like they can’t talk to anyone about it for fear of being “exposed”
These feelings tend to snowball if not addressed, and they can leave you with a sense of depression, crushing self-doubt, and a feeling of dread at taking on new or challenging tasks.
Everyone from genius-level scientists (Einstein suffered from it late in his career), academy-award winning actors (Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman, and Denzel Washington), and famous authors (Neil Gaiman), have all admitted to feeling this very thing.
But it’s not limited to high-achievers; it’s also been studied in a wide range of groups, including those about to start a new endeavor or career, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, people who have recently had a failure, and even those who have had recent success. In fact, success tends to spawn even deeper feelings of the impostor experience in some.
Do any of those groups sound familiar to you?
It seems to me that online content creators and digital entrepreneurs both sit squarely in the cross-hairs for the impostor experience.
What can you do if it’s happening to you?
Enter the power of interactional expertise (aka authority) for vanquishing impostor syndrome.
In 1950, the genius mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (of Imitation Game fame — think Sherlock but a real person), created what would become known as the Turing Test for testing intelligence in robots and AI…
