Impostor Phenomenon: Coaching Questions to Challenge Impostor Feelings

Over the past couple of decades, the original term Impostor Phenomenon has mutated into being a syndrome. It feels very different to be told you have a syndrome than to learn you are experiencing a phenomenon. At Barefoot, we’ve been guilty of adopting the ‘S word’—but we’re now keen to resist the pathologisation of this all-too-human experience: the self-doubt and minimising of our own achievements that many of us encounter at different points in our lives. Clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first formulated the concept of Impostor Phenomenon in 1978 to describe the set of feelings and responses they found—at that time, in their research—to be particularly common in successful women. 

As coaches, we rarely meet a client who doesn’t question their competence at some point. The classic signs of Impostor Phenomenon include: an inability to internalise your accomplishments; a sense that others have an overinflated view of you; attributing success to luck or being in the right place at the right time; fear of being ‘found out’; feeling like a fraud; believing that the very fact you got the job must mean it isn’t that difficult to do; and focusing on what you can’t do, rather than valuing what you can do.