The True Nature of the Curse of 'I Should Be Able to Do More'

There are people for whom the voice saying 'it's still not enough' never fades, no matter how much they achieve. No matter how much they are praised by those around them, the feeling that 'I'm actually incompetent and just happened to succeed by luck' persists.
This is neither humility nor a personality issue.
It is a well-documented psychological phenomenon with a name.

In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes reported on a phenomenon where, despite achieving high levels of success, individuals are unable to properly evaluate their own abilities and continue to feel that their success is due to 'luck' or 'the result of deceiving others,' and they named this the 'Impostor Phenomenon'.
What is interesting is that this phenomenon was originally discovered through clinical observations of women.
Many of the 150 highly educated and high-achieving women that Clance and her colleagues studied at the time shared the fear that 'eventually, it will be revealed that I am incompetent,' even while holding PhDs and working on the front lines of their professions.

What we must understand here is that this is not merely a distortion of self-evaluation, but rather a reflection of a distortion in the evaluation structure itself.
Subsequent research by psychologists Rosie Clance and Stephanie Jones cites the 'absence of role models' and the 'double standard of criteria' as the background for why impostor feelings appear strongly in women and minorities.
When there are few models of successful people in a field who share your attributes, people tend to treat their own success as an 'exception'.
In addition, multiple empirical studies have confirmed a social bias where women's achievements are more easily subjected to double doubt: 'Is it really talent, or is it due to luck or favorable evaluation?'

In other words, the impostor syndrome is, before it is a weakness of an individual's heart, the result of the individual internalizing the gaze of those around them that says, 'Your success is suspicious.'

What is even more ironic is that this feeling is converted into fuel for excessive effort, the 'I must work harder' mentality.
People who cannot believe in their own abilities try to endlessly accumulate achievements to prove their competence. However, because the fear that 'I've just become better at faking it' grows in proportion to the achievements accumulated, this effort never lands on satisfaction.
In occupational psychology, this is explained as a paradoxical structure where 'anxiety does not decrease even after achieving.' The harder you work, the more the risk of burnout piles up.

So, what should you do?
The coping method consistently shown in research on impostor syndrome is not the mental argument of 'have confidence'.
What has been confirmed to be effective is to name this feeling not as an individual defect, but as a phenomenon that is structurally prone to occur, and to share it with others.
Just knowing that there are many people around you who have the same feeling significantly reduces the sense of isolation that 'only I am strange.' This is closer to a cognitive reconfiguration than a treatment.
By simply replacing the conclusion 'I am incompetent' with the fact that 'this feeling occurs in many people within this kind of structure,' even if the feeling itself does not disappear, the degree to which you are swayed by that feeling clearly decreases.

The feeling of doubting your own competence may never disappear in your lifetime.
However, that is not evidence of a lack of ability, but rather evidence that you do not take your work lightly.

Incompetent people usually do not doubt that they are incompetent.
That very anxiety is proof that you are still serious.

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