Impostor syndrome and perfectionism: the circle that closes

Nathan rewrote the presentation for the fifth time. He closed the last version at one in the morning, delivered it before nine, and the director said afterwards it was exactly right. Nathan thanked him, then spent the walk to lunch replaying slide seven, which should have had a different chart.

In the afternoon he put a note in his calendar: next time, leave more room for this. Not because the presentation had gone badly. Because it had gone well, and he had no way of explaining that to himself other than by those five versions.

Two things meet here that almost everybody knows separately: standards that cannot be met, and a quiet suspicion that you are not up to the job. Together they do not add up, they close into a circle. And that circle closes precisely when the work goes well.

The circle that closes itself

The feeling of occupying a place you have no claim to was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. Clance later added the repeating sequence that people with this pattern go through every time. It is not a diagnosis or a disorder, more a worn path that thoughts keep taking because they have taken it so often before.

The strange part is the last row. The circle does not turn because of failures but in spite of successes, because every lap ends in a good result and still proves nothing. In the final phase the credit is transferred elsewhere, so nothing is ever posted to the account marked ability, and the next assignment finds you on the same starting line as the one before.

Who this happens to is the unexpected part. A real fraud has no such circle: that fear of exposure is concrete and practical, not something that arrives at one in the morning over finished work. It shows up instead in people whose results keep piling up, and the more of them there are, the more there is to explain away. A promotion or a compliment therefore rarely softens the doubt; it mostly raises the number of things that need accounting for.

Estimates of how widespread it is vary wildly. A systematic review of 62 studies (Bravata et al., 2020) found figures from nine to eighty-two percent depending on the sample and the measure, so there is no universal number to work with. What can be said safely is that the pattern is common, and that it sticks to people with a track record behind them.

Where perfectionism enters the circle

Perfectionism is not one trait, and psychology stopped measuring it as one quantity long ago. On one side stand high personal standards, the demand for quality in the work you hand over. On the other stand perfectionistic concerns: fear of error, doubt about your own performance and sensitivity to how the result looks in somebody else's eyes. Both components get a broader look in the piece on whether perfectionism is a gift or a curse.

It is mainly that second component that enters the circle, and it enters twice: at the start, where it raises the bar so high that it cannot be cleared even on an excellent day, and at the end, where it decides how the finished thing gets read.

The division of labour between the two is quite precise. Perfectionism sets where the bar is. Self-doubt decides what it means that you cleared it. Without the doubt, a success would stay a success, merely one reached under stricter demands than other people place on themselves.

The end of the circle comes in three different shapes, depending on where the credit gets diverted. One person feels their real ability is smaller than it looks from the outside, and so prepares with a margin in case it shows. Another never gets to keep the success at all, because they shrink it on the spot and move the bar. A third sees favourable circumstances behind the result, good timing or a lenient panel. The technical names for those are feeling like a fraud, discounting success, and luck and circumstance: three sources of the same pattern, taken apart in more detail in the piece on what impostor syndrome actually is.

Grinding, or putting it off

The response to tension in the third phase has two common variants, and from the outside they look like exact opposites. Inside they do the same thing.

Nathan belongs to the first. Extra time gives him a sense of control, so versions accumulate until the deadline runs out. The work he delivers tends to be good, but its price keeps rising, and with it the explanation for why it again proves nothing about ability. Once preparation turns into insurance against exposure, the line is not far off beyond which this stops being tiredness and becomes exhaustion. How that insurance policy becomes a road towards burnout, and where to stop it earlier, has its own piece on impostor syndrome and burnout.

Emily belongs to the second. She opens the brief, reads the first paragraph, thinks she cannot possibly hand this in the way it stands, and closes the file. She starts only when so few hours remain that there is no room to worry about quality and the only question is whether a result will exist at all. Delay incidentally manufactures protection, because an unfinished thing cannot be judged. The link between high demands and putting things off is taken apart in the piece on perfectionism and procrastination.

Nobody belongs to a single variant for life, either. Nathan puts things off too, only with work nobody will see, and Emily prepared for her thesis defence for three weeks solid. What decides is how much is at stake: on a small task delay wins, on a big one preparation without end.

Both roads end at the same explanation. Nathan has his success credited to five versions, Emily hers to the pressure of the final hours. Neither holds anything that could be booked as ability, so the next assignment is as uncertain for both as the last one.

Why ninety-five percent is too little for one person and proof for another

Picture a finished piece of work that would objectively score ninety-five out of a hundred. With perfectionistic concerns, attention goes straight to the five that are missing. This is not modesty and not a wish to improve; it is that the finished thing has a flaw, and the flaw outweighs the rest.

With the impostor pattern something else happens on top. Those five percent are not a shortfall in the work but a statement about you: here is where you can see how things really stand. The remaining ninety-five are no evidence to the contrary, because that part gets explained away by preparation, by time, or by the brief happening to suit you. One part of the result talks about you, the other about circumstances.

That asymmetry keeps the circle running more reliably than any mistake could. A mistake could be fixed. An explanation in which every good result is diverted elsewhere and every bad one stays with you cannot, because it is not about the work but about the way the work gets narrated.

In fairness, high standards on their own are not the problem. The structural engineer who recalculates the load a third time and the copy editor who catches a typo on the last page are doing the job exactly as it should be done. The difference is not the height of the bar but what happens once you clear it: whether you count the result or divert it somewhere.

A blunt question: when did you last hand something over feeling that it was finished? Not relieved that it was too late for further edits, but calmly sure that this is it. If nothing from the past six months comes to mind, that is no cause for alarm, but it is information you can work with.

Where to break the circle

The advice to lower the bar sounds logical and mostly fails, because it takes away something a person is built on. What works better is leaving the standards alone and intervening in the phases where the reading gets decided.

A ceiling on preparation

Decide in advance how much time the task gets and stop when it runs out, regardless of how you feel. Extra work usually no longer raises the quality; it only quiets the tension for a while, which teaches it to speak up again next time. It is uncomfortable roughly twice, then you get used to it. For the delaying variant the same ceiling works in reverse: a fixed start instead of a fixed finish.

Write down "good enough" while you are still calm

Before you start, put down in one sentence what has to be true for the task to be done. Three arguments, one table, ten slides. A criterion written in advance does not stretch during the work, whereas one held in your head stretches almost every time, by exactly as much as the time still left.

Attach the road to the result

To every finished thing add three steps that led to it: how many versions, what you had to solve, what you decided. A finished result looks simple even to its author, because the road to it cannot be seen in it. With the road written down, the sentence "there was nothing hard about it" does not survive in front of your own eyes.

The fourth item is not a technique but a conversation. A doubt spoken out loud shrinks, an unspoken one grows, and it turns out almost every time that the confident one in the room knows the same thing. Approaches aimed directly at the individual sources of doubt are collected in the piece on how to overcome impostor syndrome.

If you want to know which of the three sources speaks loudest in your case, a rough picture comes out of the impostor syndrome test. It has twenty-one questions and takes a few minutes. It is not diagnostics, only material for self-observation. The difference between "I am afraid they will see through me" and "success never registers with me" does change what is worth trying first.

Six months on, Nathan gives a presentation two versions and one evening, not five versions and three nights. Slide seven is still usually a bit different from what he wanted. The difference is that he now says that about the slide, not about himself.