The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

that, as one executive reported, “Eighty percent of my day is spent fighting my inner critic.”
    Self-Doubt
    Self-doubt, simply put, is lack of confidence in our own ability to achieve something: we doubt our capacity to do it or our capacity to learn how to do it. Worse, it is the fear that there is something essential that we lack, something necessary but unattainable, and that
we are just not good enough
. In one of the manifestations of self-doubt, known as the
impostor syndrome,
competent people feel they don’t really know what they’re doing and are just waiting for someone to expose them as a fraud. Since the impostor syndrome was first identified by Georgia State University professors in 1978, we’ve learned that more than 70 percent of the population has experienced this feeling at one time or another. 8 Today, we finally have effective tools to handle it (see chapter 4 ). But already, just knowing the universality of such feelings can help us neutralize their effect and reduce their power.
    Interestingly, the impostor syndrome is worst among high performers. When I speak about it at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT, the room goes so silent you could hear a pin drop. And I see the students breathe a sigh of relief as they realize this feeling has a name and they are not alone in experiencing it.
    Every year, the incoming class at Stanford Business School is asked: “How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake that the admissions committee made?” Every year, two-thirds of the class immediately raises their hands. When I mention this in speeches, people express astonishment. How could Stanford students, some of the best and brightest in the country, who’ve succeeded through an exhaustive admissions process and have a long track record of solid accomplishments behind them, feel that somehow they don’t belong?
    And yet this feeling is one you’ll hear echoed at every stage of success. Michael Uslan, producer of every modern
Batman
movie, still gets that feeling occasionally when he’s in the studio. “I still have this background feeling that one of the security guards might come in and throw me out,” he told me.
    For some, it has been a direct corollary of career progression—with greater responsibility comes greater internal doubt as the cost of failure gets higher and higher. Bob Lurie, managing partner for the Monitor Group, told me that he, too, knows what this feels like. “For the first six or seven years of my career, I was the poster child for the impostor syndrome. I was convinced that if I got into a room with senior executives, they would immediately figure out I was a fraud.”
    We’ve seen the effects of anxiety, dissatisfaction, self-criticism, and self-doubt. Where does all this negativity come from? The difficult feelings we experience are a natural by-product of one of our most useful survival mechanisms. Negativity exists to spur you to action, to either resolve the problem or get out of the situation. Feelings like fear or anxiety are designed to get you to do something. They’re uncomfortable because they’re “designed” to be uncomfortable.
    There are times when the discomfort of full-blown fear is highly appropriate. If we were in life-threatening physical danger, then wewould surely appreciate our body focusing all of its resources toward ensuring our short-term survival. However, in today’s world, few situations merit a full fight-or-flight response. In these cases, our instinctive reactions actually work against us.
    Have you ever become paralyzed in the middle of an exam or had the experience of stage fright? Like a deer in headlights, you freeze, your heart races, your palms get sweaty. You’re desperately trying to remember what you’d planned to say or do, but your mind is blank. Your higher cognitive functions have shut down.
    Sometimes, under the effect of stress, the mind thinks we’re in a fight-or-flight situation, declares a state of