Every time she stands up to speak in front of a group of people, mindset and behaviour change expert Dr Bex Bell feels a little prickle of anxiety. She’s no stranger to public speaking and she knows her subject matter inside out, but that makes little difference to the voice in her head that likes to tell her otherwise. Will today be the day she gets found out?
Feeling like an imposter, despite all the evidence in your CV and life experience proving otherwise, isn’t uncommon. In fact, nearly 50 years after these feelings were first identified and named as “imposter syndrome” by a pair of US psychologists, it now seems endemic.
Living with imposter syndrome is like having a waking anxiety dream in which you never quite live up to your own or other people’s standards. Bex describes it as “a niggling sense of ‘not-enough-ness’”.
Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Serena Williams and Meryl Streep are among those who have confessed to being plagued by fears of inadequacy.
‘Our naturally grumpy brains are fixated on negatives and how we aren’t measuring up, because it feels relatively better for us
