Anne Morris

Welcome back.

We have defined imposter syndrome.

We have figured out how to fix it, and we are going to set ourselves up to spot it

more precisely in ourselves and other people.

So we're going to do this by meeting the cousins, the variants of imposter syndrome.

This is some of Dr. Valerie Young's terrific work.

And for instance, I want to just one by one here.

So start us off with the perfectionist.

What I think people get wrong about perfectionism is it is more about escape from failure than pursuit of the perfect.

Because it presents as pursuit of the perfect, but the cognitive distortion is that mistakes and failure are going to reveal that I don't belong here, right?

It's that mistakes are so costly.

That I'm going to avoid them, use all of my energy to avoid them, cover them up, keep other people from them, pretend that gravity doesn't apply to me.

By any means necessary.

There are good fonts and bad fonts, and that is a black and white world that I will live in and die on.

Okay.

No, I know.

I know.

And getting feedback, getting early feedback.

This is a phenomenon back to our women in academia.

This is a phenomenon that you have observed from the beginning of your career that this perfectionist instinct would lead...