Amantha Imber* relates how she has always struggled with the confidence to believe her achievements are worthy of being recognised.
In the summer of 1999, when I was 21, I received a phone call that would change the course of my career.
It was Professor Sally Carless from the Monash University Psychology Department.
She was calling with the news that I had been offered a place in the Doctorate of Organisational Psychology Program.
Rather than jump for joy, my very first thought was that there had been an administrative error.
For the first few months of my study, I half expected someone to email me about the mistake that had been made.
I learnt that there is a term for this type of thinking: Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome is a way of thinking where you doubt or fail to acknowledge your accomplishments and worry that you will be exposed as a fraud.
The syndrome has periodically reared its ugly head at many pivotal points in my life.
Several years after the ‘administrative error’ incident, when I was 26, I was headhunted by Leo Burnett to move to Sydney and work as a senior strategist.
I remember landing in Sydney and worrying that once I started my new job, my boss would realise that he hadn’t read my resume properly and I would be returned to Melbourne.
This never happened and I stayed in the role for three years.
With every year that has passed in my adult life, I feel like I have ever so slowly removed myself from the shackles of Imposter Syndrome.
Every once in a while, I’ll achieve something and rather than attributing it to luck or other people’s doing, I’ll actually attribute it to me.
At other times, I’ll be pulled back to my 21-year-old self. It happened recently.
It was Tuesday late morning, and I had just logged on to check my emails for the day.
There was an email that had ‘Congratulations’ in the title.
Naturally, I assumed it was someone congratulating me for inheriting two million pounds from my distant Nigerian relative.
No, I wasn’t about to get rich quick.
It was the Australian Financial Review informing me I had been named one of this year’s 100 Women of Influence — a list that aims to identify women who are championing change in business and society.
I read the email, then read it a couple more times.
Just like when I was 21, I assumed that I had ended up on the wrong distribution list and this news was meant for someone else.
Turns out I was wrong. It was actually meant for me.
As I began to reflect on my reaction in the days that followed, I realised that all my life I had been waiting for confidence to embody me.
I was waiting for the day that my achievements would somehow warrant feeling unequivocally confident.
This day will never come.
Instead, I realised that confidence is a choice, not a symptom, and it is up to me to choose confidence.
*Amantha Imber is the founder of innovation consultancy Inventium and host of How I Work, a podcast about the habits and rituals of the world’s most successful innovators. She can be contacted at https://www.inventium.com.au
This article first appeared on the Inventium website.
