Michelle Obama Nails It: Women Suffer Needlessly from Impostor Syndrome

 “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of. I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the U.N.:

(The people who preside) are not that smart.”

Michelle Obama

 

Recently I edited an article for a client. They liked what I did with the piece, so they came back and asked me to write a “leadership thought article” (from scratch) and asked if I could do that. I said yes: please have their leader create an outline with a bullet list of talking points and I’d be happy to create a piece from it.

 

Uh… but … no…

 

She wanted me to write it myself, without her leader’s input (based solely on a report someone else had written!) on a topic I had only a handshake knowledge of!

 

To be fair, she did send me a report with relevant statistics, but she wanted me to write a piece — a thought leadership piece — on why more companies should be doing something different than many are doing right now.  The piece was going to be an introductory, informational piece with the objective of having companies hire them to help them do this thing that should be done differently.  (I’m being deliberately obscure here, to protect the client and company in question.)

 

I declined.

 

Why?

 

Because–silly me!–I think thought leaders should be thinking and leading, not outsourcing their “wisdom” to copywriters.

 

It seemed to me too much like cheating, like paying someone else to take your “thought leadership” test and get an A on it, leading readers to think what a smart guy or gal you are… you know?

 

They wanted me to think up the best way to pose as a thought guru in a field I know very little about!

 

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve edited and enhanced plenty of thought leaders’ musings, but they were their musings! I’ve never been asked to ghostwrite a thought leadership piece from scratch, without any input from the leader!!! I don’t have any idea what he or she thinks or how he or she communicates.

 

Now, when I was writing for DeForest Kelley (which I did just a time or two when he was dying), I was able to sound just like him because I knew him, his turns of phrase, and his mind and heart. Of what I wrote for him, he said, “My God! You sound just like me!”

 

Well, yeah! I’d received enough notes and letters from him and visited with him enough to know how he sounded, how he communicated.  I dare say I could even have written a thought leadership piece for him  without missing a beat. But I wouldn’t have, even so.  I would have finessed what he wrote, if asked, but I wouldn’t have been so presumptuous as to think I could  discern what he thought about leadership!

 

So, this recent happening put me in mind of Michelle Obama’s quote about people in positions of leadership. I know most of them have ghost writers/script writers to help them hone their messages about various topics, but it never occurred to me (except in the ludicrous case of Donald Trump) that they might be willing to take total credit for someone else’s “thought leadership” by 100% outsourcing it!

 

Now I wonder how much of it is… Hopefully, not all that much!  But there’s Michelle’s quote leading me to think it over again and again!

 

Mrs. Obama tells it like it is. Behind every great man is a great woman (and/or other men) making sure he doesn’t come across as simple (except Trump and a few other politicians, most of them unmarried and flailing forward on their own).

 

Impostor Syndrome is far more common among women than it is men, because men are led to believe in their superior, high-ranking, privileged existence at a very young age (unless they’re brow-beaten as kids). Whether they actually earn what they achieve or not, they claim it as if they earned it, and they rarely admit to suffering from Impostor Syndrome…

 

The rest of us, no matter how good we are, have the humility to know we’re not all that and that there is someone better than us somewhere else in the world at what we do than we are.  So when we succeed, we think, “Okay, that was partly luck. They just haven’t found anyone better than I am at what I do … yet!”

 

Impostor Syndrome only happens to decent people. To honest people. To people who don’t believe their own press.

 

Those of us with Impostor Syndrome need to stop letting it stop us. The people on top sure aren’t letting it stop them!