Snapshots: Confidence is bold and feminine
On impostor syndrome and low expectations set for women
Snapshots is my occasional off-the-cuff response to newsworthy items related to travel, feminism, and little treats.
Olympian Ilona Maher responded beautifully to an interview question about her experience with impostor syndrome: she doesn't experience it.
Don't we all? you might wonder.
Truthfully, no. I've felt confident in the decisions I’ve made throughout my education and career, and even when things haven’t been straightforward, I have found reassurance in my decisiveness. So why does the world keep expecting women to feel insecure?
Impostor syndrome makes women feel less capable than they truly are, whether consciously or not. If women are not expected to be experts at anything - whether at work, at home, or just existing - then we are naturally relegated to being subservient to the purported experts: men. Impostor syndrome serves the patriarchy.
Something that’s helped me avoid impostor syndrome is to drown out other voices and rely on my own beliefs and intuition to make decisions. While it might feel helpful to solicit outside opinions, I often find that their real value is confirming my gut instinct. If you’re someone who often defers to outside opinions, try this instead: pretend that someone just gave you a piece of advice related to the decision you’re trying to make. How does that make you feel? What is your immediate, instinctual reaction? Let that guide what you do.
This works on small decisions as well as the big ones. Small decisions are a great way to practice this exercise. For example, what do you want for dinner tonight? If you’re unsure, think about what your reaction would be if you mentioned this to a friend and they invited you to join them for pizza. Or pancakes. Or pad thai. Does one of those make your stomach turn? Does something sound delicious? There’s your answer! (For the record, this is why I added frozen French bread pizzas to my Instacart order yesterday after I couldn’t stomach the meatloaf I initially prepared.)
And while what to eat for dinner may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, it’s these little decisions that build confidence for larger ones: like deciding where to attend grad school (which I knew for certain the moment I first visited Pittsburgh, despite being adamant I wasn’t going there), quitting my first job (a decision that took me almost 6 months of therapy to realize) and moving to Paris (a gut feeling that this was right the moment the opportunity was presented to me).
Confidence is a skill that you can build with practice to counter the external noise. And when women have confidence in themselves, we make decisions that challenge cultural norms. Impostor syndrome wants us to think that’s too much for us to handle. But the more we can build trust in ourselves, the less hold the patriarchy has on keeping us in line.
Instacart link is a referral URL - if you sign up using my link, we’ll each get a $10 Instacart credit!