"But Judi, impostor syndrome can also be a good thing", someone says to me as I step off the stage after having given a talk where I opened up about how my own impostor syndrome often almost paralyses me. There's a silver lining in feeling like a fraud, this person claims, it can motivate you to work harder and be more disciplined.

Could a simple reframe be the solution to my problem? But my immediate instinct is: no, impostor syndrome is not a good thing. I tell them how heavy impostor syndrome feels for me, and how feeling like a fraud constantly blocks me, and that I have a hard time seeing how this can be a good thing. But, they say, there's this article in Harvard Business Review that claims impostor syndrome isn't all that bad.

So there I am, riding a rollercoaster of emotions. In the weeks leading up to the conference talk, I had felt like the biggest impostor because I felt like I had nothing valuable to share. But then I do it, I deliver the presentation, I feel good about the message of the talk, I receive positive feedback from the audience. And this conversation now challenges all of this again. Is my framing entirely wrong? Did I leave the audience with an utterly useless conclusion? Straight back to feeling like an impostor I go. Because if Harvard Business Review says there can be a positive side to impostor syndrome, then there must be some truth in it, right?

This situation and the conundrum it created in my head stayed with me for a while, so I decided to dig deeper. I wanted to find out if impostor syndrome can actually be a good thing.

But digging deeper broke the question instead of answering it. We don't need to label impostor syndrome as good or bad. It needs to be neither fixed nor celebrated.

There is real, careful research on impostor syndrome. What the Harvard Business Review article¹ reported: people with impostor thoughts tend to come across as more likeable and attentive to others. What it did not find: that this feeling somehow motivates you or makes you feel better. What people carry with them is the article's rather confident headline: "Impostor Syndrome Has Its Advantages".

I still struggle to see how feeling like your success is undeserved and like you don't belong where you are could be anything but painful. Humility, on the other hand, might be considered impostor syndrome's healthier, less disturbing little sister. Being aware of things you know and don't know, self-reflection, and realising that there is always room to improve and more to learn, that can be quite healthy. But even though humility and impostor syndrome both involve nuances of self-doubt, they are not on the same spectrum. They're not degrees of the same thing, they are different mechanisms. So, humility, yes, absolutely, I think many people could use some more of it. But impostor syndrome, I don't wish that on anyone.

Reframing impostor syndrome didn't work for me but neither did trying to fix it. Following popular advice, I started a brag file at some point. Every time I got nice feedback, I'd screenshot it and save it into a folder. That did exactly nothing for me. I rarely looked back at those screenshotted pleasantries, and even when I did, it did not make me feel better, so I eventually just stopped. Another temptation is trying to fix impostor syndrome by simply getting better at your job. Learn more, gain more experience, work longer hours, get one more certification. This is a treadmill though, since impostor syndrome famously doesn't respond to competence. Quite the opposite: experts often underestimate their own skills, and the more experienced you get, the more painfully aware you might become of everything you don't know.

What both the reframing and the trying-to-fix-it camps have in common is that they see impostor syndrome as a problem that needs to be processed. Neither of them acknowledges the fact that sometimes, the voice telling us that we're not good enough might be right, at least partially.

When I feel nervous before doing a task or unsatisfied after completing one, it is tempting to hide behind my own impostor syndrome, instead of questioning where that doubt even comes from. But when I investigate those feelings a bit, sometimes I discover that what I delivered wasn't exactly exceptional. Sometimes I will have to acknowledge that I could have prevented some of the anxiety before a presentation by starting to prepare earlier, and not leaving everything until the last minute. Sometimes I will have to admit that I might feel slightly unsatisfied with a pull request I submitted for review because the code I wrote is quite simply mediocre at best. The good news: most of the time the doubt turns out to be noise.

But how do we differentiate between honest doubt that might show us where we still have room to improve and sneaky impostor syndrome that's trying to convince us that we don't deserve any success we might have worked hard for? I haven't found a way to reliably tell those two apart upfront. The uncertainty I feel before a task that is well within my expertise and the uncertainty before one I am genuinely ill-prepared for feel remarkably similar.

However, an interesting thing happens once I have completed a task. I will either feel relief and be reasonably proud of what I have accomplished, or I will feel unsatisfied and regret not having put in more work. And that is usually the moment when I can tell whether there might have been some truth in what the impostor syndrome was telling me. The dread before doing a thing, that's often noise, but the feeling afterwards can become useful data.

You might start to notice a certain pattern in how you feel once you have completed certain tasks. For me, things like being a guest on a podcast, giving presentations at work or speaking at conferences tend to give me a lot of anxiety upfront but I often feel quite good about it afterwards. On the other hand, I have lately felt less satisfied after doing technical tasks like scoping out the implementation plan for a feature or submitting some code I wrote for review. Those tasks often leave me feeling like the work I submitted was subpar and that I could have delivered something more valuable had I put in a little bit more work.

The uncomfortable truth I'm facing right now is that even though I am a software engineer with more than a decade of experience, there might be things I'm better at than purely technical tasks. The honest caveat here is that we cannot make those observations about ourselves without bias. Was my work actually subpar or was that again the impostor syndrome knocking on the door? That's where it is helpful to watch for patterns that emerge over time across many different types of work we do, rather than drawing conclusions after a single observation.

Impostor syndrome does not have to be labelled as good or bad. It does not have to be reframed or fixed. Instead, we can treat those feelings as data and observe them analytically. The honest drawback here is that this won't fix the doubt in the moment, but by drawing conclusions from recurring patterns, it might get more manageable over time. The next time I'm about to deliver a presentation, my heart will still be beating like crazy, but I will remember that I have done this before, and that it wasn't terrible. Some days, the doubt is noise and I know it. Some days, the doubt is right and I know that too.

If you fancy it, try to notice how you are feeling after you have completed a task that made you feel incompetent at first. Are you feeling relieved? Proud? Meek? Resigned?

I enjoyed listening to an episode of the Time Sensitive podcast where fashion designer Dries van Noten speaks about the meaning found in making.

low noise dashboard. issue #1. 43 subscribers. finally managed to send out an issue after months of procrastination.
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