How Do I Battle Imposter Syndrome?
00:00:00.000 | Hi, my name is Angie. I am a wife and a mother of four here in Dallas, Texas. I've been a
00:00:07.560 | ministry partner with Desiring God for a year and a half. You are listening to the Ask Pastor
00:00:14.060 | John podcast with Jon Piper.
00:00:16.800 | We're going to talk more with Angie in a moment, but first up, today's episode. Today's question
00:00:25.220 | comes to us from an anonymous young woman. Pastor John, I thoroughly enjoy listening
00:00:29.660 | to these podcasts and find them exceptionally helpful for dealing with life's challenges.
00:00:33.920 | My challenge is anxiety at work. I work in medicine. For some time, from school until
00:00:39.200 | now early in my career, I think I suffer from imposter syndrome, a phenomenon that commonly
00:00:45.260 | affects professionals, often females, with tendencies to be perfectionists, leading them
00:00:50.260 | to think they're a fraud at their job, not good enough, and any success is theirs by
00:00:55.160 | chance.
00:00:57.280 | I don't trust my own talents and skills. Because of this, I experience significant
00:01:01.680 | anxiety before and during work to the extent that I feel like I need to quit. This is really
00:01:06.920 | affecting my mental health, not because I don't enjoy my job. I do. I pray to overcome
00:01:11.960 | this, asking for help and for healing. Do you have any thoughts? Also, I recently came
00:01:17.160 | across a coach who specializes in imposter syndrome, and she overcame it herself. Would
00:01:22.440 | it be wrong for me to seek help from a non-Christian coach?
00:01:27.760 | I'm going to save that last part of the question for another time, because the more I thought
00:01:33.240 | about what she's dealing with, that's what I feel like I need to address here. We can
00:01:38.320 | take up the issue of the proper or not proper use of secular counseling later. So here's
00:01:45.240 | the four traits that I see in her life that need a biblical perspective. Perfectionistic
00:01:53.440 | tendencies, a sense that really when she's competent at work, she's a fraud, she's an
00:02:02.320 | imposter. Third, her successes and competencies really are just owing to luck. And fourth,
00:02:12.760 | anxiety that comes from all of this. So let me give what I see as a biblical perspective
00:02:19.480 | on those four traits of her experience and hope that this biblical perspective on each
00:02:26.360 | of these will bring some measure of liberation from a life of illusion.
00:02:32.320 | I would call the imposter syndrome a kind of professional anorexia. In other words,
00:02:39.160 | what anorexia is to the body, the imposter syndrome is to your competence. With anorexia,
00:02:47.040 | a 90-pound, 80-pound, 25-year-old woman, might be a man, but it's almost always women, stands
00:02:53.920 | in front of a mirror and sees an overweight woman. With the imposter syndrome, a competent,
00:03:01.160 | successful, responsible, helpful person stands in front of the mirror and sees an incompetent,
00:03:07.400 | irresponsible, unhelpful, fraudulent employee. The challenge in both cases is to overcome
00:03:13.360 | the illusions and live in reality with Jesus Christ at the center.
00:03:19.240 | So first, perfectionistic tendencies. Very often at the root of the felt need to always
00:03:28.440 | do better and to do more is the deep uncertainty of being loved and accepted and approved most
00:03:38.320 | deeply by God, but also by other significant people in our lives, like parents or friends
00:03:44.280 | or supervisors. Now, the biblical response to such drive toward doing more, doing better,
00:03:51.680 | being perfect is not to discourage people from the pursuit of excellence, but to turn
00:03:58.040 | everything upside down. In other words, apart from Christ and his salvation and grace and
00:04:05.000 | friendship and forgiveness and acceptance, apart from Christ, we are constantly striving
00:04:11.240 | toward love, toward acceptance, toward forgiveness. The gospel turns that upside down and puts
00:04:18.600 | acceptance and love at the bottom, from which we can then strive for excellence without
00:04:27.320 | the burden of "I've got to prove myself in order to get myself loved." By grace
00:04:33.400 | alone, through faith alone, on the basis of the work of Christ alone, we stand on the
00:04:40.280 | glorious rock of the forgiveness of our sins, our acceptance with God, the removal of our
00:04:47.000 | guilt, the canceling of our debts, all of it rooted in the love of God who chose us
00:04:54.740 | for himself before the foundation of the world. That's where life and every day starts.
00:05:02.640 | And then there is, of course, varying degrees of passion for achievement and excellence,
00:05:09.400 | but we don't pursue it in order to get accepted or in order to get forgiven or in order to
00:05:15.800 | get love. So I would encourage and urge our friend to step back and make sure that she
00:05:26.140 | has a true and real and wonderful and restful and sweet grasp of the gospel of Jesus, what
00:05:37.420 | he did for her on the cross, what her salvation is by grace through faith. Oh, it's a very,
00:05:45.380 | very liberating thing to realize I can still pursue excellence and yet not be strangled
00:05:53.380 | and anxious because of all the insecurity and fear that I can't do enough to be loved.
00:06:02.200 | Life has been turned upside down. It's been turned on its head. I'm free. So that's the
00:06:07.940 | biblical perspective on perfectionism. Second, she refers to a sense that she may be a fraud,
00:06:15.340 | a fraud at work rather than truly competent, truly responsible and helpful. Well, here's
00:06:22.060 | what fraud means. Fraud is an intention to deceive a person or a group, usually for personal
00:06:31.420 | gain, which puts the other person at significant risk. We don't call it fraud. When somebody
00:06:39.640 | thinks we have more competencies than we think we do, if we have no intention to deceive
00:06:48.220 | them and if there is no evidence that we lack competencies that they think we have. If you
00:06:55.700 | come into work every day with a goodwill, not a deceptive will, and at the end of the
00:07:01.980 | day you are perceived as competent, responsible and helpful because there's been no evidence
00:07:06.740 | to the contrary, you're not a fraud, no matter what your feelings are. Number three, she
00:07:12.940 | says that people with this imposter syndrome are prone to chalk up their competencies and
00:07:20.820 | responsibility and helpfulness to luck. Now, the most natural response to this is to call
00:07:27.960 | it irrational, which it is. You go to work every day, week after week, month after month,
00:07:34.820 | year after year, and always perform at a level of competence and responsibility that causes
00:07:39.100 | your supervisors to approve. And your mind says that those several thousand moments of
00:07:45.740 | competency were strokes of luck. You never had a bad hand in 3000 games of poker. That's
00:07:53.460 | irrational. But all destructive syndromes are irrational. So what good does it do to
00:07:59.180 | say that? She knows it's irrational. So here's an alternative to that response to this imposter
00:08:06.740 | syndrome and thinking, "Well, it's luck. It's luck." I would suggest that you embrace
00:08:12.740 | this, think hard and long about it, and preach it to yourself. There is no such thing as
00:08:19.340 | luck, period. There is no such thing as luck. What the world calls luck is God's providence.
00:08:26.860 | So what you're dealing with is not several thousand professional instances of luck in
00:08:32.820 | which you lucked out and proved competent and responsible and helpful by accident. That's
00:08:39.140 | not what's happening. There's no such thing as an accident or luck. God, not luck, brought
00:08:44.940 | about those thousands of moments of competency and responsibility and helpfulness. This is
00:08:50.460 | a pattern of divine sustaining, divine support, divine help, divine guidance, which bears
00:09:01.300 | all the marks of a calling, a vocation from God. Therefore, when you wake up in the morning
00:09:09.300 | and you feel anxiety that your luck might run out today, one of the answers is to preach
00:09:15.700 | to yourself, "There's no such thing as luck. Stop thinking that way. It doesn't exist.
00:09:22.060 | God has sustained me in all these thousands of moments of competency that I've been calling
00:09:27.860 | luck. God has sustained me, even if I am truly incompetent." I mean, imagine it. "Even if
00:09:33.740 | I am truly incompetent, truly irresponsible, truly unhelpful, God has chosen for thousands
00:09:41.400 | of opportunities to cause me to act as if I were competent and were helpful and were
00:09:46.740 | responsible, and he intends for me to see in this pattern a calling, a purpose, a design,
00:09:55.940 | because he's faithful. It's not luck. It's God." So get up in the morning and say, "I
00:10:04.140 | will walk into this day not crossing my fingers that luck is going to run out or won't run
00:10:09.260 | out, but rejoicing, rejoicing in faith that my God is with me. He's faithful. He'll keep
00:10:17.600 | up his end of the calling." Which leads just to a brief statement about
00:10:23.300 | anxiety. You can see the answer to anxiety is already built into the other three. Jesus
00:10:29.880 | said, "Do not be anxious," and then he gave eight reasons in Matthew 6, 25 to 34 for why
00:10:38.300 | not to be anxious. All of those reasons are rooted in this. Not that you are really competent.
00:10:46.740 | That's not where they're rooted. They're rooted in this. You are of more value than the birds,
00:10:53.240 | and you are of more value than the lilies, and God is sovereign, and God is faithful.
00:10:59.480 | So good. Thank you, Pastor John. If you have an immediate question about Christians benefiting
00:11:04.200 | from non-Christian counselors and programs, we address that in episode 1435 of this podcast,
00:11:10.880 | talking there about AA in particular, but with relevance for many other areas. Check
00:11:15.580 | out episode 1435 for more. Before we go, we're joined on the phone by
00:11:20.540 | my friend Angie, who lives in Dallas. You heard Angie's voice at the very beginning
00:11:24.680 | of this episode. Angie, thank you for your time. You're one of the precious saints who
00:11:29.300 | make this podcast possible, and it's an incredible honor for me to do this work, and I only get
00:11:35.060 | to do it because we have donors like you, Angie. So thank you for making this podcast
00:11:40.120 | possible. Talk to us for a minute. What does this podcast in particular represent to you
00:11:45.160 | as a listener? The Ask Pastor John podcast, I think for me,
00:11:49.680 | has been an incredible daily opportunity to hear from Pastor John, literally, audibly,
00:11:56.960 | daily, however often, with moments of gospel-centered encouragement. It's almost like a quick coffee
00:12:02.480 | with a dear friend that provides an opportunity to stir affections for Christ. And so in ten
00:12:10.720 | minutes, an opportunity to grow together and to grow in that affection for Christ.
00:12:16.520 | As a mom and a wife in the place that I'm at, and knowing how people listen to these
00:12:20.560 | podcasts and just in their car, in their carpool line, and just even as they're cleaning dishes
00:12:25.160 | in my sake, I respect that people listen, especially during these crazy days right now
00:12:31.280 | on so many levels. I think it is just a constant encouragement to realize we have brothers
00:12:37.160 | and sisters who are helping to stir affections for Christ. So I just commend you guys on
00:12:42.640 | how steadfast and faithful and diligent you all are. I mean, every writer, every writer
00:12:49.000 | of articles, writer of books, we adore you all. We are mutually thankful for each and
00:12:54.720 | every one of you.
00:12:55.720 | That's super encouraging. Thank you, Angie. Tell us a little bit more about your story
00:12:59.760 | and how you eventually became a ministry partner with us.
00:13:04.120 | Brad and I have been consumers, if you will, of Desiring God for about 20 years, meaning
00:13:10.320 | we first heard of Pastor John 20 years ago, the book Desiring God. All that we learned
00:13:16.480 | about Pastor John kind of led us to the ministry of Desiring God. And with that, we consumed
00:13:23.560 | and were spectators and learners and listeners for years and years and years. And then about
00:13:27.920 | a year and a half ago, it dawned on us that we could take a next level step of becoming
00:13:34.720 | partners and really joining in, kind of taking more of a family ownership, if you will, of
00:13:40.360 | our relationship with the ministry and with everybody on staff with Desiring God. And
00:13:46.000 | we really wanted that. Now that we had been partakers in so many ways for years, it felt
00:13:50.920 | like there was a missing step for us that just to complete that relationship and that
00:13:56.240 | partnership. And so it was a real natural desire of just wanting to jump in deeper in
00:14:01.120 | whatever capacity that we could. And at that moment, it was to partner financially. But
00:14:07.240 | what it became more of for us was partnering relationally to journey together in a deeper
00:14:12.840 | way with Desiring God.
00:14:14.520 | Wow. We're so grateful to God for you and your husband. Thank you, Angie, for helping
00:14:18.640 | to make this podcast happen. And if you're listening right now and you want to join Angie
00:14:23.280 | and become a ministry partner so we can make more DG resources and spread them all around
00:14:28.000 | the world, you can join us right now. Go to DesiringGod.org/donate. That's DesiringGod.org/donate.
00:14:37.440 | As we near the end of the year, we especially appreciate it if you want to join us, especially
00:14:42.480 | those of you who have never joined before. I'm Tony Reinke. We will see you back here
00:14:46.720 | on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.
00:14:48.960 | [END]
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