This is an idea I’ve seen circulating recently often disguised as the positives that come with Imposter Syndrome. That maybe a little bit of self doubt is good for helping us sense check our ego, that it motivates us to perform and keep striving to get better. It’s often termed ‘balanced self doubt’.
Obviously we know that too much self doubt is detrimental, in the same way that too much stress is detrimental. We also know that a little bit of stress can be a motivating factor to achieve a deadline or help spur us into action. Is it the same with self-doubt though?
Adam Grant talks about it in his book, Think Again, that perhaps it’s a good thing that stops us getting complacent and makes us work harder. That doubting ourselves helps us sense check ideas and ask better questions.
The first thing to note is that a lot of this comes out of the US where there is perhaps more of a cultural requirement towards ego checking! What I mean by that is a culture that’s much better at backing themselves and less plagued by self-doubt. We live in quite a humble, modest society in Aotearoa, as a result I think we have more of an issue with self-doubt.
I also think we can achieve all of this without having to doubt our abilities or suffer from Imposterism - in fact it’s a must.
If we look at stress and self doubt on a continuum we know that the detrimental areas of each exist at both ends of the scale (too much and too little) and that what we’re aiming for is the middle ground, the happy medium.
Too little stress is boredom and too much is burnout - we need the middle ground. The true can be said of self doubt. But is Imposter Syndrome really the middle ground here - I don’t think it is and have outlined this continuum in more detail below to show you what I mean.
I don’t believe we can look at imposter syndrome as ‘balanced self doubt’. What we’re actually talking about here is balanced ego. It’s not about having more or less self-doubt it’s about aligning our confidence with our capabilities so that it reflects reality.
When we talk about balanced self-doubt what we’re talking about is someone who does not experience imposterism and has an alignment of their skills and capabilities.
This added humility means we ask the right questions, motivate ourselves to succeed and do all this without having to have ‘a healthy amount of self-doubt’. I think the healthiest view on this is where our skillset and confidence align (the middle ground).
It means we’re not undone by self doubt, we’re not suffering from imposter experience and we’ve also not gone too far the other way and let our ego get the better of us, either through Dunning Kruger (a cognitive bias where people greatly overestimate their competence despite limited competence in said domain) or worse!
So I don’t believe a little bit of imposter syndrome is healthy, I think managing it is healthy and when our belief in our capabilities matches reality what we find is we don’t have imposter syndrome. A healthy amount of self-doubt is actually humility, without self-doubt. Someone free of imposterism, who is self aware and can embrace both their strengths and weaknesses in line with reality and perform at their peak.
This is something I’ve invested years of my life training others and forms the subject of three books I’ve written, if you’re keen to find out more, head to the resources page of the website
