As Karl—Homer Simpson’s assistant—said to him, “You don’t belong here. You’re a fraud and a phony, and it’s only a matter of time before they find you out.” And Homer gasps and says, “Who told you?”—his worst fears realized.
We the viewers are privy to the truth—Homer is indeed a fraud and a phoney, an absolute incompetent—and his promotion came about because of his new head of hair. Nothing else.
This episode brings up an issue that many of us, both in teaching and ministry professions, struggle with mightily: the impostor syndrome. Not the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, it is what adult educator Stephen Brookfield writes about in his work Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Jossey-Bass 1995, pp. 229-235).
What is “the impostor syndrome?” Brookfield explains that it is the fear that we have, deep down inside, that at some point—like Homer—we are going to be unmasked for the frauds that we truly are. Whether it is a teacher in front of a class, a preacher in the pulpit, or a youth leader addressing a group of teens, the dynamics are the same.
We feel like impostors. We feel that we don’t really deserve to be taken seriously; that if the people we’re about to address knew the truth of the matter we’d be finished. What is that “truth”? The truth is that we feel as if we really don’t know what we are doing. We feel as if our teaching or preaching is being done under false pretenses, and at some point the ugly truth will finally come out.
Brookfield says, “We wear an external mask of control, but beneath it we know that really we are frail figures, struggling to make it through to the end of each day. There is the sense that a
around the corner is an unforeseen but cataclysmic event that will reveal us as frauds” (p. 230).
Following our public and humiliating unveiling, our colleagues and employers, he states, will shake their heads and wonder how they could have ever been so stupid as to hire such an obvious incompetent in the first place. Is it any wonder that we as teachers and church leaders have to spend so much energy desperately avoiding the certain humiliation of being found out for the frauds we truly are?
The reality is that the impostor syndrome takes on many forms. One may manifest itself in an academic context: As a teacher I worry that I have to know everything there is to know about a subject before I teach it, otherwise that one troublesome student in the class who happens to know more about it than I do will unmask me—in front of everyone—for the fraud that I truly am.
Within the classroom setting, the impostor syndrome affects students as well. A student may think, “I don’t belong in this class. Clearly I don’t know as much as some of these other, smarter students. So I will sit in the back row and say nothing, for fear of being unmasked for a fraud.”
And we are all familiar with the student who thinks, “The teacher doesn’t belong here. She is a fraud and a phony, and it is my job to unmask her for the fake that she is.” In my experience there always seems to be one or two of these types of students in every Bible college or seminary classroom. These students make the teachers’ jobs a living nightmare, especially when the dynamic of arguing theological minutiae comes into play.
The impostor syndrome affects those involved in church leadership as well. I spent seven years as an elder and a pastor working myself into the ground to try and prove that I was not an impostor. I reasoned that if I kept all the plates spinning, made sure that all the ministries hummed along nicely, and never made a single mistake, there would be no grounds for criticism. The truth is I was desperately avoiding being found out. No one could be allowed to see through my façade. Even the slightest criticism could be devastating.
How can we deal with the impostor syndrome? Brookfield argues that the essential ingredient is to make it public. “Once impostorship is named as an everyday experience,” he points out, “it loses much of its power” (p. 233). When we hear others—particularly those whom we admire—admit that they struggle with the same issues many of the effects of the syndrome are defused.
A second, equally important factor is to address the culture within which we are working. Unless it is a safe place for teachers and church leaders to disclose their struggles, no one will admit their deepest apprehensions for fear of being eaten alive or worse, being fired when the truth comes out. It is the job of leadership to create and maintain a safe and healthy culture so that issues like impostorship can be discussed without fear of reprisal.
Surprisingly, however, if properly controlled impostorship can actually be productively troubling, says Brookfield. Somehow there needs to be a balance: on the one hand, there can be an arrogant sense of overdeveloped overconfidence. On the other hand if taken to an extreme, impostorship can be crippling. Identifying and challenging the feelings of impostorship with which we struggle is precisely what opens up possibilities for us to realign our ways of thinking and practice.
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