Frances Fry

No, indeed it isn't.

I really do think a distortion field, at least that's what helps my brain understand it.

We have a distorted view of reality.

And I think by the end of this session today, we're going to be able to help loads of people overcome their distortion field.

But I think it would help to go back to the origin of the word.

So it was more than 50 years ago that two amazing psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imez, they wrote a paper called The Imposter Phenomenon in High-Achieving Women.

And that later got shortened to the catchy imposter syndrome.

So these two women found it.

Well, they didn't call it the Clance-Imez phenomenon.

Right.

Which we're going to later see is was much more common at the time to name it after people.

Instead, they just identified the thing and then people started referring to the thing in a catchy way.

So I think that that's the first thing is that this has been around for more than 50 years.

It started with women in academia who were really high achieving, but they thought they weren't.

Yeah, if you're in the majority or in the center of power, while you can have imposter syndrome, probabilistically you're less likely to than if you're the less powerful or the more underrepresented.

Yeah.

So I find that the first step that's helpful is to know that we are not the only distortion field in town and that there is another distortion field, which is actually quite a bit more vibrant than ours.

And that is where we overestimate our abilities vis-a-vis reality.

So if we're underappreciating ourselves, there's another syndrome, another distortion that

that's over-appreciating themselves.