Book club
First rule of book club ....
In this section we will be reviewing all things books, focusing on the burgeoning wellbeing genre. This quarter we have reviewed 'The Imposter Cure' by Dr Jessamy Hibberd
If you’ve ever been given a promotion and you worried that you weren’t up to the job, been asked to head up a project that you didn’t think you were ready for, or worked extra long hours because you wanted things to be perfect in case someone thought you were a fraud, then it’s likely you’ve suffered from imposter syndrome.
Dr Jessamy Hibberd’s book can help you understand the signs, consider why you’ve developed these beliefs about yourself, and give you coping strategies to reframe things you view as failures, teaching you self-compassion.
Imposter syndrome has received increased coverage over the past few years as awareness of the importance of good mental health has grown. While research initially focused on high achieving women, it is now widely understood to affect a range of people at different times in their lives, though it’s believed to be more prevalent in highly competitive industries like finance and law. Typically, the individual develops a belief system that they’re somehow unworthy of their accomplishments and that at some point they will be exposed as a fraud, attributing their successes to things like luck, being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people or working on a successful team. Although imposter syndrome isn’t a mental health condition in its own right, these fraudulent feelings are often associated with anxiety and depression.
‘The Imposter Cure’ is a highly accessible book that draws on Dr Hibberd’s experience as a clinical psychologist and the common concerns that patients presented that frequently aligned with an inability to accept that their achievements were a result of their own talents and hard work. Typical traits include obsessing over minor details, self-criticism and doubt, over preparing, trying to stay in control, and setting impossibly high standards. Equally, the other end of the spectrum can also apply - people can be paralysed by the fear of failure and procrastinate because it’s preferable to the feeling of anxiety they get at potentially not being perfect.
The book describes several ‘competence types’, of which you could have more than one, for example ‘Perfectionist’, ‘Natural Genius’, ‘Superwoman/man’, quickly making you realise why this kind of thinking has been having a negative impact on the harshness with which you treat yourself. All of these types give no room for error and if you were to not meet these exacting standards, Dr Hibberd discusses, you would think negatively of yourself.
As this happens more and more often, you come to believe these to be facts that confirm that you are a failure.
However, the book works to help you reposition these thoughts - if this had happened to someone else, would you consider that they were less successful or a failure? If not, then why would you think this about yourself? Surely if you’ve had promotions or been praised for previous work, this suggests that you are a success. Someone with imposter syndrome would likely believe that they should know everything about the job as soon as they’re promoted into it, but the ‘The Imposter Cure’ helps you to realise that you’ve likely been selected for the role or project because of your attitude that you want to learn and improve, which is what makes you right for the position. People with this kind of personality and diligence will always be this way, helping you understand that there is no need to exhaust yourself with working all hours of the day - it’s about the quality of your work and your dedication to it.
Dr Hibberd challenges you to make changes, practicing personifying the voice that tells you that you’re a fraud, reducing the hours that you’re overworking and seeing if it really does have a detrimental effect on your performance, and replacing negative thinking patterns with realistic phrases that actually reflect your achievements. This book isn’t designed to suddenly make you the most confident person in the world, but to show yourself some compassion and recognition, as you would do to a friend or colleague. The ultimate goal is to help you to accept that there is no such thing as perfection and use things that make you feel uncomfortable for self-growth. In many ways, this can help you be a more well-rounded individual, as you accept in yourself and others that experience is a fluctuating continuum, not a straight line to success.