Neurodivergent and feeling like an imposter?
You ever feel like you’re about to be found out? Like you have no idea what you’re doing and some day people are going to see through you and realise the truth? Up to 82% of people have suffered from these feelings of self-doubt at some point in their life and I personally think that if you’re neurodivergent, it’s probably even higher.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
There’s a sentence that hits my email inbox more often than any other when it comes to my coaching work, and that is: “Do you help with self-doubt and impostor syndrome?”. I hear it from leaders in the technology industry, to artists who have their work shown on our very screens. I’ve even had CEOs express doubt in their decision making.
The short answer is, yes! I’ve spent many hours working with people with all kinds of backgrounds to find a way forward that works for them and so I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about that experience now as well as giving you a strategy that works for my special evidence-needing brand of neurodivergence as well.
I want to start by talking a little bit about terminology, mostly recognising that the term “impostor syndrome” for some people feels really heavy. It might feel clinical or like something that can’t be overcome. That is definitely not true - it’s absolutely something we can overcome, but I wanted to acknowledge that the term can feel more scary and if you’d rather talk about it from a perspective of self-doubt then that’s absolutely okay.
I also think there will be people who don’t identify with the impostor syndrome name because they don’t think they’re an impostor, they just straight up doubt that they can even do the thing that they’re trying to do. They’re not an imposter, but they do doubt themselves.
Struggling with these feelings of self-doubt makes everything harder at work. We expel so much extra energy trying to compensate for these feelings and can never catch a break from them.
As I mentioned in the intro, it’s incredibly common. A 2020 review of studies by Bravata et al. found that between 56% and 82% of the population have experienced these feelings of self-doubt. It was initially thought to be more common in women than men but more recent studies have found the incidence to be about the same.
Though I couldn’t find any stats confirming the prevalence of impostor syndrome among us neurodivergents, I have suspicions that that rate might be even higher and there are a number of reasons why.
Those of us born neurodivergent have grown up in a neurotypical world, a world that wasn’t designed or built for us. A world where we receive a lot of negative feedback as a result. That feedback we received, especially growing up or at vulnerable times in our lives, shapes our self-image and can affect us as adults.
Many ADHDers have grown up being called lazy for executive function deficits. This can follow them into their working lives and cause them to work extra hard and burn themselves out for fear of people finding out how “lazy” they actually are.
There are leaders out there who are autistic and spend their days navigating complex interpersonal relationships who are scared they will be found out due to their “inability to socialise properly”.
It doesn’t help that when we are neurodivergent we are keenly aware of what we’re not so good at and so constantly feel the need to be making up for those deficits.
Something I’ve particularly noticed with my fellow ADHDers is that we are often plagued by black and white thinking. Things like: “If we can’t finish the whole project, what’s the point in starting?”, or on the more extreme end: “Either I stay at my job that I hate or I have no way to make an income and will starve”.
With a tendency towards black and white thinking, sometimes we miss that the true solution is in the grey.
We often miss the shades of grey: What would tackling part one of the project look like? What is an alternative that is in the middle? This black and white thinking means sometimes we miss the nuance: if we’re bad at these aspects of our job then we must be bad at the whole job. When in reality, there’s probably a whole host of reasons we’re great at it that are far more important than the smaller things we struggle with.
There’s also this thing called masking. For the uninitiated, masking is the process by which a neurodivergent person covers up their neurodivergence by behaving in a way that is neurotypical. “Masking” their neurodivergent behaviours to appear neurotypical.
I can totally see how this can exacerbate feeling like a fraud; we’re already behaving in a way that is inauthentic to us by masking; we’re already fooling other people into believing we’re something we’re not (that is, neurotypical). What else are we fooling people with?
Impostor Syndrome is also exacerbated by comparisons with others and in order to mask successfully we are comparing our behaviour to others to find the appropriate way to act neurotypical. You see how this can make these feelings worse for us?
And one more point I’d like to make is that often we don’t stop and celebrate the achievements along the way. This particularly applies to the ADHDers again but I find we tend to set unrealistic expectations of ourselves. We often have big goals and big ideas and that means that we can set our standards really high and have perfectionist tendencies.
Like many of us, I often forget to celebrate the wins along the way.
Therefore, the standards we sometimes feel ourselves not living up to, and the ones that create those feelings of self-doubt, are often standards that aren’t really expected of us by anyone else. We are measuring ourselves the wrong way.
So what can we do about this? One place I constantly find myself butting heads with people in the neurodivergent community is when talking about strengths. I’m neurodivergent neutral, my ADHD is neither good nor bad, it just is and it’s important that I understand it. But the overwhelming majority of the discourse in the neurodivergent community is negative, and so I find myself balancing it out with positivity as much as I can.
But I do think it’s extremely important for us to spend time thinking about our strengths, both the ones related to our neurodivergence and our individual strengths. By spending time investing in exploring and acknowledging our strengths we can start to rewrite the story in our heads.
It’s not an immediate fix, we can’t just flip the switch and suddenly have our imposter syndrome cured, but I recently read a quote in James Clear’s Atomic Habits that stopped me in my tracks and I had to share this here. He says:
“You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behaviour or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time”
By switching our thinking to focus on our strengths, we start to build a habit of acknowledging what we’re good at that starts to replace the old habits of focusing on our weaknesses. We don’t have to get it right all the time, but 51% of the time is all we need to start replacing the old way of thinking with a newer, much more powerful one.
I have a whole post around changing the way we think about ourselves but the part I wanted to emphasize here is that we’re not perfect, it’s not all or nothing and we can gradually make the change one step at a time.
When I was first starting my coaching business I had a lot of impostor syndrome about whether I could successfully run a business. I knew I was an amazing coach, I had had a fantastic corporate career but I just wasn’t sure if I could run a business and was very insecure about it.
I was working with a coach of my own at the time and I remember her telling me that she believed in me. And she wasn’t the first person that told me about this. I remember one day deciding I wanted to make a poster of people who believed in me so that I could look at it every moment that I doubted myself.
So there it was, in big letters “People who believe in me” with the people underneath: “Helen believes in me”, “Steph believes in me”, “Rhiannon believes in me”, all written in a variety of colours and in my neatest handwriting.
I’ll admit I had to re-write it because the page was crinkled but this is my list for real
I had it on my desk for a while but as a typical ADHDer my desk is a mess and soon things piled on top of it and I wasn’t using it like I planned to. One day I got the urge to do the tidy up and so I did. And then I saw it.
Scrawled with a blue pen in a hand writing that wasn’t mine, my partner had written “I believe in you” on there without me having any idea. I felt a swell of emotion at first because it was incredibly sweet of him to do that. But then I had a moment of realisation:
Here is a man I have loved deeply for over a decade, telling me that he believes in me. He’s also someone who is very intelligent, someone who is successful, and someone I believe to have amazing judgment. He’s someone that I turn to in moments when I feel lost because I respect and value his opinion.
And I realised that was true of every name on that list. All of them were people I admired, I respected. All of them were people who I truly believed to have good judgment. And they believed in me.
That also meant that I had to question my lack of belief in myself too. Because if I didn’t then I was questioning their judgment. I wasn’t ready to believe in myself yet, but I did believe that they believed in me. And I believed them. And that was enough.
So this could be something to try, a list of people who believe in you. People that you respect, love and admire and people whose judgment you would trust without doubt. Because you might still doubt yourself, but you don’t doubt them.
As with everything, our brains all work in different ways so we have to find the strategies that work with our own unique brand of neurodivergence. So try things on, keep the things that fit and it’s okay to throw out anything that doesn’t fit!
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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