Just curious how many others have a “Cinderella” complex, I think it’s called? How can I get past it?
I got this new job (starting in a week) and it pays SO much more than I’ve ever made before, and has so much responsibility. And I can’t help but feel that I’ve somehow achieved this through tricking the company? Even though I know I haven’t …
It’s like I have a hard time believing in myself, or believing that I deserve this opportunity. I’ve had this feeling throughout my life. It’s frustrating!!!
I know what you mean. I’ve worked my ass of for essentially scraps. Then when you are somewhere where you can make more money (and I’ve never even made that much, but I have seen a significant increase in income from one job to another) for what feels like the same or less exertion on your part, you feel like you’re getting away with something.
That might not be exactly your case since you say there is a great deal of responsibility in this job, but I still understand what you’re getting at. You get used to believing you have a certain level of self-worth and all of a sudden that appraisal has changed (for the better) but you don’t feel like a different person, so you feel almost guilty about it. All I can say is… don’t. Take as much as you can get and remember all you’ve been through to get where you are now and you’ll soon start feeling like you deserve it after all.
I guess responsibility is relative … and I probably should’ve said “accountability”, because in most of my previous positions I’ve been able to get away with doing the tasks that I like or enjoy or find challenging, and letting the boring ones slide … and then quickly doing the boring ones if someone notices that the work has fallen behind.
In this job I won’t be able to do that - which is a good thing. But overall I feel like somewhere in my first week (I start in 12 days) they’re going to decide they’ve made a HUGE mistake …
Right there with you, pal. I think I’m reasonably good at what I do, but I still have the persistent fear that some day my boss will go, “Hey, wait a minute…” and that will be that.
When I was a kid, I went to a very small grade school, where I was probably the best student in all my classes. But for most of my childhood, I had the fear that I was really a dunce and that my parents had concocted this elaborate hoax to hide my stupidity from me. I dreaded the day they would finally tell me the truth, that I was really just the best student at the School for the Not Very Bright. I just knew that everyone who told me I was smart was in on the scam. To this day, when people tell me I’ve done a good job on something, I instinctively think they’re lying to me.
You’re definitely not alone. I’ve had the same feeling ever since I was a kid and it stuck with me all throughout college and even now it feels like I’m just waiting for someone to say “Caught you!” This was a really big thing in my college and they even held seminars on it to tell the kids that it was okay to feel that way and no, we’re not impostors.
I wonder if this is a phenomenon particular to developed countries? It can’t help knowing most of the world is still living in malaria-infested mud huts with their greatest capital assets being chickens and maybe a goat while you’re getting paid major bank to sit in a cushioned chair in a climate controlled environment surfing an internet message board. I could see that lending itself to a feeling of not deserving one’s position.
I think I might have this, too. Makes performance review time at work hell, too- I keep thinking, this is the year they’re going to figure out how really unqualified I am.
ETA: I can remember having this as far back as second or third grade. I was always nervous at report card time, just in case I wasn’t doing as well as I thought I had been.
I think confessing to some self-doubt is a good thing – it’s the overly sensitive, defensive assholes who turn their insecurities outwards, blaming everyone else for their own incompetence, who ought to feel like impostors.
I’ve felt this way before, but knowing plenty of people I respect have felt it, too, has helped a bit.
Oh god, I feel the same way. Every time someone tells me I’m a good writer I don’t believe them. I think they are just being nice. Except in my situation they probably are just being nice. I have no strategy for writing at all. I write based on instinct and just leave in sentences that sound nice. I have no clue why anyone would trust my opinions on writing and yet a lot of people do. They even ask me to proof read stuff. Sooner or later someone who can actually write will expose me as a fraud and no one will take me seriously anymore.
I felt that for about my first 3 months on my current job, until it dawned on me that I really wasn’t a fake. I knew what I knew, and I knew that there was no one looking over my shoulder to correct me or fix things if I couldn’t, and I git comfortable with that.
Especially when I realized that if there were issues over my head, I could hire a consultant.
Oh yeah? Well, they made me take the SAT’s for the Not Terribly Bright. At least that’s the only way I can reconcile my score (high 1300s in early 1990s) with the fact that I know damn well I am not smarter than 99% of other people. I must have actually taken the special SAT for the Not Terribly Bright.
I had this problem with a new job a few years ago. My Dad said the greatest thing ever: “Don’t worry, by the time they figure out that you don’t know how to do it, you will have figured out how it’s done.”
It’s only natural to feel that way before you start. You are not, after all, DOING the job yet, right? the danger I see is in letting that fear prevent you from asking important questions once you get there. Just be willing to learn wht you don’t know, and work hard, and you’ll be miles ahead of all us jerks sitting on SD when we should be working!
On the first day of my new corporate job, my boss sits me down in his office and asks me, “What kind of computer do you want?”
Apparently, he became quite amused at my expression, and offered some suggestions. (This job was in the Sales division, and I was a techie.) Just to see how far I could push this open check, I designed a kick-tushie system.
That was 20 years ago, and they still treat me to whatever I want. Most of the stuff I ‘play’ with eventually becomes corporate standard.
That study gets cited over and over here, but keep in mind the subjects for every one of the experiments were Cornell undergraduate students. In other words, they’re already expected to have an over-inflated sense of their abilities. I don’t doubt that there’s something there but I’m still waiting to see it replicated across cultures, ages, income brackets, etc.
