Imposter Syndrome: Why You Feel Like A Fraud

You got the role, the promotion or the mark, and the first feeling was not pride. It was the calculation of how long you have before someone works out you should not be there.

We are Richard and Helena Boyd and we have practised in Perth since 2005. This page covers what imposter syndrome is, where the numbers you have read came from, and what actually helps. Some of it will contradict the rest of the internet, starting with the statistic on almost every other page about this.

What Imposter Syndrome Actually Is

Imposter syndrome is the persistent internal experience of believing you are less capable than others think, despite evidence of your own abilities.

The defining feature is not low self esteem generally. It is a specific gap between what you have achieved and what you believe about how you achieved it. Positive feedback gets discounted, success gets attributed to luck, timing or outside factors, and each new accomplishment raises the stakes rather than settling anything. Feeling like an imposter is not the same as knowing you lack skills, which is why the two need different answers.

Two clarifications before anything else. It is not a formal diagnosis and appears in neither the DSM nor the ICD. And the original researchers did not call it a syndrome. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named it the impostor phenomenon in a 1978 paper in the journal Psychotherapy Theory Research and Practice. Clance has since said that if she could do it again she would call it the impostor experience, because it is not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness. That distinction matters, because syndrome implies something is wrong with you rather than something is happening to you.

The Seventy Per Cent Claim, And Where It Came From

You will read that seventy per cent of people experience imposter syndrome at some point, sometimes inflated to eighty. It is on virtually every page about this subject. It has no research behind it.

The figure traces to a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which reported that researchers had found about seventy per cent of people had felt like impostors at some point in their careers. No study was named. In 2011 a review article in the International Journal of Behavioral Science repeated it, and because that was a peer reviewed journal, the number acquired an authority it never earned. Every citation since has been recycling a magazine sentence.

The eighty per cent version has no source at all. We are not being pedantic about this. A page that opens with an invented number and then tells you to trust its advice has a problem, and you deserve better than that.

How Common Is It Really?

The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the reason why is more interesting than a number.

The best systematic review, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2020, pooled 62 studies covering 14,161 people. It found prevalence ranging from 9 per cent to 82 per cent, and stated plainly that the variation depended largely on which screening tool and cutoff was used rather than on real differences between populations.

How large is that measurement problem? In one population, the most common scale produced 53 per cent and a different scale produced 18 per cent. Same people, same time, two instruments, a thirty five point gap. Research suggests they may not be measuring the same construct at all.

For Australian context, there is very little. One pilot study of 72 postgraduate allied health students found 37.5 per cent screened positive. That is a single small student sample, not a national figure, and no Australian population data exists.

The Imposter Cycle

This is the most useful part of the original clinical psychology work, and it explains why success does not fix the feeling.

Clance described a loop. A task arrives. Anxiety and self doubt follow. You respond in one of two ways, either over preparing to an unreasonable degree or procrastinating and then working frantically at the last minute. You succeed. There is brief relief.

Then the discounting, usually powered by negative self talk that would be unthinkable directed at anyone else. If you over prepared, you attribute the success to effort rather than ability. If you procrastinated, you attribute it to luck. Either way you still feel fraudulent, your competence is never credited, and the next task starts from the same place. The attribution is not random. It maps onto how you coped.

That is why repeated success makes it worse rather than better. Each achievement raises expectations without ever supplying evidence you accept.

The Five Types

Valerie Young, in a 2011 book, described five patterns people recognise themselves in. They are useful and worth knowing what they are not.

The perfectionist sets impossible standards and reads anything short of them as failure. The expert cannot act without complete knowledge of a topic and delays until they have all the answers. The soloist believes asking for help proves incompetence and must succeed alone. The natural genius expects to be good immediately and feels shame when something takes effort. The superhuman links competence to succeeding in every role at once.

These came from Young’s work with people in workshops rather than from research. No study has validated them as distinct categories. As a mirror they are excellent. As a taxonomy they are one clinician’s framework, and anyone telling you research has identified five types is overstating it.

Who Gets It

The original 1978 paper studied over 150 high achieving women seen across five years, and its title referred to high achieving women specifically.

Two things about that sample matter. About a third were therapy clients and the rest came from the authors’ own classes and groups, so it was self selected. And the authors describe them as primarily white middle to upper class women aged twenty to forty five. Clance herself later accepted that the original female specific theory was wrong and that men in the same situation report it just as often. High achievers of any gender describe impostor feelings at similar rates.

The current evidence on gender is modest. A meta analysis of 108 studies covering more than 42,000 people found women score higher on average, with a small effect size. In the 2020 systematic review, 16 of 33 studies found women reported higher rates and 17 found no difference. So it is a real average difference with enormous overlap, not a women’s problem. Successful women are simply more likely to have been asked about it.

On socioeconomic status, background and personality traits, the honest position is that findings are mixed rather than settled, and claims that particular groups are at higher risk are not yet established.

The Critique Worth Taking Seriously

In 2021 two writers argued in the Harvard Business Review that we should stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. Their argument has since moved into the peer reviewed literature, including a 2025 umbrella review in Medical Education, and it deserves engaging with rather than ignoring.

The case is this. The construct locates the problem inside the individual when a great deal of it sits in the environment. If you are the only person like you in the room, if you receive repeated rejection that colleagues do not, or if your competence is questioned in ways others never experience, then doubting your belonging is an accurate reading of a situation rather than a distortion in you. Calling that a syndrome asks you to fix your perception of a real problem.

We think both things are true at once. Plenty of what we see in our rooms is internal, formed early, and responds well to therapeutic intervention. And some of what people bring is a workplace problem being carried as a personal defect. Part of the work is telling those apart, and a good mental health professional should be willing to say when the issue is not you.

What It Actually Costs You

Here the research is genuinely surprising, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

Imposter feelings do not appear to damage job performance. A 2022 study in the Academy of Management Journal found employees with imposter thoughts produced work of the same standard as colleagues without them, and were rated as more interpersonally effective by independent observers. Physicians in the study reached the same diagnoses and treatment plans. They listened more and asked more questions.

So the cost sits elsewhere, and it is real. The reliable harms are to wellbeing, job satisfaction, and whether you put yourself forward. One study of 238 professionals found imposter feelings correlated with lower job satisfaction and less willingness to take on more. It is associated with anxiety, depression, burnout and other mental health issues, though all of that evidence is cross sectional, so we would not say it causes them. Imposter syndrome often shows up alongside them rather than instead of them.

The practical version. The problem is rarely that you are underperforming. It is that you are working far harder than the job requires to reach the same place, declining things you could do, and enjoying none of it.

What Helps

Be sceptical of anyone promising a cure. As of the 2020 systematic review, not one of 62 studies had evaluated any treatment for imposter feelings. Since then a handful of small trials exist, mostly with medical students.

What does have evidence is the material underneath it. Cognitive behavioural work on perfectionism has good trial support across 15 randomised studies, and that research has been led in part from Curtin University here in Perth. Self compassion interventions have solid meta analytic evidence for reducing self criticism, which is the engine room of the whole pattern. Both target what is actually driving the feeling rather than the feeling itself.

Things worth doing yourself. Keep a written record of positive feedback and specific accomplishments, since the discounting happens in memory and a written note is harder to argue with. Name the pattern out loud to one person you trust, because most people find the same secret thoughts come straight back at them, and they will usually offer support rather than agreement. Do a reality check on the standard you are holding yourself to, and whether you apply it to anyone else. Practise self compassion, which is a skill rather than a mood. And when anxiety arrives before something that matters, reframing it as excitement works better than trying to calm down, which has decent experimental support.

One more. Notice whether you are avoiding taking risks. Fear of exposure quietly shrinks a career through the opportunities never pursued, and over years that can lead somewhere very different from where your ability would have taken you.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.

A woman in her thirties had been promoted three times in four years and could explain each one as a fluke. What shifted was not confidence. It was noticing she applied a completely different standard to everyone else.

A man in his forties had never applied for the role he wanted because he did not meet one of eight criteria. He had also been quietly doing most of that job for two years.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions people ask us most often about this.

Is Imposter Syndrome A Mental Illness?

No. It is not in the DSM or the ICD, and the researcher who named it has said it is not a syndrome or a mental illness. It is a common internal experience. That said, it frequently travels with anxiety, depression and low self esteem, and those are treatable in their own right, so persistent distress is worth taking to a health professional.

What Causes Imposter Syndrome?

Several factors, and no single one. Family dynamics where achievement was the currency, or where a sibling held the clever role. Being the first in a family or a workplace to do something. New responsibilities that outpace your sense of yourself. High standards learned early. And environments that genuinely do treat you as though you do not belong. Internal beliefs and external factors both feed it.

Does Imposter Syndrome Ever Go Away?

The feeling tends to recur at transitions, because it is triggered by the gap between a new role and an old self perception. What changes with work is the response. People who experience impostor syndrome tend to describe the same shift, which is that the thought still arrives and no longer decides anything.

Should You Get Therapy For Imposter Syndrome?

Worth considering if it is stopping you doing things, if it is costing you sleep, or if it comes with anxiety or low mood. There is no evidence for a specific imposter syndrome treatment, and there is good evidence for treating perfectionism, self criticism and anxiety, which is what most of the work involves anyway.

Getting Support In Perth

If you take one thing from this page, make it this. The feeling of being a fraud is not evidence that you are one, and the fact that it has survived every piece of contrary evidence so far tells you it is not responsive to evidence.

That is why collecting more achievements does not work. The pattern is not an information problem, so more information does not solve it. What shifts it is changing how you relate to the doubt, which means the standard you hold yourself to, the way you speak to yourself when you fall short, and your willingness to be seen without having all the answers first. That is what it takes to overcome impostor phenomenon patterns, and it is a change in relationship rather than a fight you win.

We work with this often, usually with people whose careers look enviable from outside. If any of this is familiar and it is shaping what you attempt in your working life, that is worth a conversation. You do not have to fight imposter syndrome alone, and most people find naming it accurately is where the change starts.

We see people at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, evenings and Saturday mornings included, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session, or read more about our anxiety counselling.