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

Let's start with the one that is, in general, most powerful...

When most people perform well they attribute it to skill on their part. (Maybe they are too inclined to attribute it to personal skill, but that's a topic for a different, much more cynical post.)

But if you're dealing with impostor syndrome, this natural tendency to assume you're a virtuoso is on the fritz. You do a great job and the default attribution bucket isn't skill - it's luck, overwork or invisible elves that accomplished everything while you were napping.

Many interpret enactive mastery experience as "keep working hard and you'll see it's your natural ability that's causing the results." If that was true, impostor syndrome wouldn't exist. In fact, if you don't actively change your default attributions, merely seeing yourself succeed isn't going to fix impostor syndrome - it's going to make it worse.

• 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.