This Is How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome: 4 Secrets From Research - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

When work is a blur it's easy to think you just got lucky. But I'm guessing you've noticed that people who are very confident about their abilities can often explain them to you. They're aware of their system. Step outside yourself and notice what you do that gets the results. As the great Carl Jung once said: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

But here's the upside : you can now use your knowledge of this emotional blurriness to your advantage. Since the cause and meaning of feelings is all about interpretation, you can choose to interpret them differently . The court of emotions has an appeals process.

If you can reframe the feelings into something transient or unrelated to the task at hand then your self-efficacy doesn't plummet.

...if the meaning of an affective state is altered by attributing it to a nonemotional or transient irrelevant source, the state does not affect evaluative judgment because it is considered uninformative for the judgment at hand. For example, interviewers who attribute their accelerated heart rate to having rushed up a set of stairs are less likely to wonder about their capabilities to manage the interview situation than interviewers who read their pounding heart as a sign of distress.

• Enactive mastery experience: Recognize your system. Tennis lessons don't increase tennis luck.
• Vicarious experience: If they can do it, you can do it.
• Social persuasion: I, for one, happen to think The Force is very strong with you. So there.
• Emotional/physiological states: Reframe feelings. You're not antsy because you want this blog post to end, you're just so very very excited to be reading it.

People are afraid that even if they develop self-efficacy they'll backslide into impostor feelings. Don't worry. If you really go out of your way to push hard on the 4 principles above, self-efficacy can become as stubbornly lodged in your brain as the feeling that you're a fraud is now.