A recent conversation with a young friend, who was wondering whether she was any good as a lawyer, as she lacked (unwarranted) confidence in her legal skills, led me to share one of my most important life lessons.

Many years ago, while still in therapy, I brought up a situation with my psychiatrist that was of real concern. Telling her I was worried about disappointing a new client, “What if I couldn’t deliver?”, I lamented about my lack of confidence in my abilities and asked if I would ever stop feeling like an imposter?

I’ve never forgotten her response:

“This is a strength, not a weakness”, she replied, “and it’s called humility. It will hold you in great stead, not just in your career, but throughout your entire life.”

I was lucky. My doctor was so ahead of the times, telling me to stop interpreting a very universal feeling of second-guessing and mild anxiety in the workplace as a feeling of being an imposter and something that should be fixed.

Sadly, the narrative of Imposter Syndrome being an actual weakness still persists. A Google search today yields more than 5 million results showing solutions ranging from attending conferences to reading books to reciting one’s accomplishments in front of a mirror.

I blame it on psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes who developed the concept, originally termed “imposter phenomenon,” in their 1978 founding study, which focused only on high-achieving women.

They posited that “despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the imposter phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.” Their findings spurred decades of thought leadership, programs, and initiatives to address Imposter Syndrome in women.

Finally, twenty years after my therapy session, organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, one of the world’s most-cited, most prolific, and most influential researchers in business and economics, as well as Wharton’s top-rated professor, in his most recent book, 'Think Again', is questioning if we’ve been misjudging Imposter Syndrome by seeing it as a disorder and maybe it really should be re-defined as Confident Humility.

In a recent interview with Grant, the podcast host shared a personal observation- that the most successful people he had interviewed over the years seem to all share a bit of the imposter syndrome.

"It’s such a paradox that the high achievers you know seem to be the biggest imposters”, Grant replied. “A couple of years ago, I started wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence. That maybe feeling like an imposter is not a byproduct of achieving some stratospheric level of success that just a mere mortal would say, “That couldn’t be me how could this happen!” But that actually feeling like an imposter could fuel your success”.

Grant ended up having a doctoral student, Basima Twefik, now a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, study investment professionals and late-stage medical students to see how often they had these negative thoughts and how it impacted their performance.

The imposter thinking investment professionals actually did better than their non-negative thinker colleagues; and even more importantly, they were rated to be more interpersonally effective than their non-imposter peers.

The late-stage medical imposter students, who were about to enter their clinical rotation, received higher ratings on their bedside manner from the patients. They were found to be more empathetic, better listeners, asked better questions and were observed to hold more frequent eye contact, lean forward more, and better affirm the symptoms their patients described.

Adam Grant sees advantages to feelings of self-doubt:

“One, you work harder – you’re not complacent; two, you work smarter- you realize how much you can learn from others; and, three, you don’t stand on a pedestal – you do a lot of questioning and rethinking of your positions and assumptions and strategies that others are taking for granted.”

I circle back to the ever-so-important word humility. The opposite, being arrogant, can leave us blind to our weaknesses. As Grant writes, humility is a reflective lens to help us see them clearly.

We often confuse confidence and arrogance. I like what Tim Urban (who’s famous blog, Wait But Why is a favourite of Grant’s and Elon Musk) posits –

Arrogance = Ignorance + Conviction

Grant says that confident humility is a belief in one’s self, alongside an awareness of what is missing.

Long ago, my doctor made me realize that those moments of thinking that ‘I’m not good enough' or ‘I don’t belong here' were exactly what made me curious, hardworking, and successful.

It was re-affirming to have Adam Grant confirm the world needs more imposters and less armchair quarterbacks.

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom”

Mahatma Gandhi