The Crippling Isolation Caused by the Self-Doubt of the Imposter Syndrome

In “The Impostor Syndrome“, the School of Life offers thoughtful insight into the self-sabotaging phenomenon that causes a person to feel lesser than everyone else, causing them to feel like an imposter to cover up what they believe are their many flaws and live in fear of being exposed as a fraud.

We are held back by the crippling thought that people like us couldn’t possibly triumph, given what we know of ourselves how reliably stupid anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lorded around us, faced with responsibility or prestige. We quickly become convinced that we are simply imposters like an actor in the role of a pilot wearing the uniform and making sunny cabin announcements while utterly incapable of even starting the engines. …We know ourselves from the inside but we know others only from the outside so we’re constantly aware of all our anxieties doubts and idiocies yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us which is a fun narrower and more edited source of information