At some point, you've probably doubted yourself, like if you had a hard exam or important presentation coming up.
And that's normal.
But sometimes, self-doubt can get so intense that it's actually harmful.
You convince yourself that you're not really good at anything and have just been fooling everyone this entire time.
And this behavior has a name.
It's called the impostor phenomenon or impostor syndrome.
It was first described in the late 1970s by two clinical psychologists, Dr. Pauline Rose Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes.
They noticed a pattern in over 150 highly successful women they interacted with, from college students and faculty to working professionals.
These women often describe feeling like a fraud, and attributed their success to things like luck or a mistake.
Clance and Imes wrote a paper to document this psychological pattern, naming it the impostor phenomenon, and in the mid-1980s, Clance broke down some of its key characteristics.
