2026-06-11 · 3 min. read

Impostor Syndrome: My 88/100

I’ve been suffering from the impostor syndrome for a long while. I don’t remember when it started interfering with my life.

I used to think that it was procrastination and perfectionism that have blocked me. It turned out, they were not the root cause. I even wrote a blog post about breaking the procrastination loop, but I still suffered.

The podcast

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast in French11 Le syndrome de l’imposteur : pourquoi nous hante-t-il tant ? (Impostor syndrome: why does it haunt us so much?) by Louie Media, where psychologist Dr. Kévin Chassangre revealed the three pillars of the impostor syndrome:

  1. the fear of deceiving your circle — not being competent, not deserving your current situation or place.
  2. bad attribution — explaining your successes by external factors: luck, chance, the ease of a task. Never by your own ability.
  3. the fear of being unmasked — the irrational conviction that one day, someone will discover you’re not as good as they think. Irrational because, objectively, all the evidence of your competence is right there.

I recognized myself in every single one.

The test

The podcast mentioned the Clance IP Scale, a test developed by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance to help individuals determine whether they have impostor characteristics and, if so, to what extent they are suffering.

I took the test and scored 88 out of 100.

According to the scoring guide, a score higher than 80 means the respondent often has intense experiences of the impostor phenomenon. The podcast also mentioned that this can be linked to stress, anxiety, and depression.

The mechanism

Dr. Chassangre explained something that clicked: impostor syndrome involves a double process. You externalize your successes (“I got lucky”) and internalize your failures (“I failed because I’m not competent”).

This creates a vicious circle. Anxiety leads to either procrastination or frantic overwork. Both reinforce the belief that you’re not good enough.

What I took from the podcast

The podcast featured Nassria, a 28-year-old engineer who grew up in a working-class neighborhood near Paris. She was always top of her class, but refused to aim for grandes écoles22 Specialized top-level educational institutions in France — “that’s not for people like me.” Eventually, a dean convinced her to apply. She got in, graduated, and is now a project manager in the pharmaceutical industry.

Her turning point came when she started seeing concrete results — not grades, but real impact on her company. She began to list her accomplishments factually, to be objective about her successes. The potential she couldn’t see in herself, others saw.

That clicked for me. I tend to tick off achievements and move on, never pausing to register them. Maybe I should start noting them down.

Dr. Tara Swart, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who teaches at King’s College London and MIT, suggests something similar: make a list of what you’ve accomplished, and note down compliments people give you. Reread them when the impostor creeps in.

Another thing that resonated: talking about it. Dr. Chassangre says the impostor syndrome lives in secrecy. Talking about it is already lifting the mask.

The impostor phenomenon is not a pathology. It’s a barrier to expressing your true potential.

The real impostors don’t ask themselves if they’re impostors.

See also