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Does your success belong to you? Plenty of people do good work while quietly waiting for the day it turns out they never had it in them. The test measures how strong that doubt is for you, and above all where it comes from - whether from the sense that you are mostly playing your role, from the habit of playing down everything that goes well, or from the conviction that your results came down to luck.
The test does not only measure whether you doubt yourself, but above all where that doubt springs from.
Your overall score places you in one of four bands, from minimal to strong self-doubt, so you see straight away how big an issue this is for you.
You get a separate score for all three sources and find out which one feeds your doubt the most - and which one barely plays a part.
Doubt cannot be switched off, but it can be unlearned. You get five concrete techniques aimed exactly at your main source.
For each statement you say on a 1-5 scale how well it describes you. Do not think about it too long, the first answer is usually the most accurate.
From your answers we immediately calculate your overall score and the score of all three sources, and work out which one leads for you.
The extended version gives you the whole profile, a description of your main source of doubt and the techniques that work on exactly that one.
The feeling of not belonging where you are does not have a single cause. These three sources are behind it most often and each one needs a different answer. All three are in every one of us; what matters is the ratio.
Impostor syndrome is the feeling that your success is not quite yours - that you ended up in your role more or less by mistake and sooner or later it will come out. It is not a disorder and not a diagnosis: it is a pattern of experience that most people know at some point, and it speaks up most often in exactly the people who have results behind them. Our test has 21 original items, seven for each source of doubt, and it works out your overall score, your band and where your doubt actually comes from.
Doubt about your own ability has three different sources. Feeling like a fraud is the quiet assumption that your seat belongs to someone more capable - so you prepare more than you need to and would rather not ask. Discounting success is the habit that takes the weight out of every good result: it was easy, the team earned it, and the bar moves up straight away anyway. Luck and circumstance describes a lopsided way of explaining things, in which a failure is down to you but a success is down to timing and a favorable run of events. Your band and your strongest source place you in one of 10 profiles - and that matters, because a technique that works on the sense of playing a role is useless against playing your wins down.
The concept was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes at the end of the 1970s, but the items and the scoring of our test are our own. So take it as self-knowledge for orientation, not as diagnostics: it is not an illness or a disorder, it does not appear in the classification of mental disorders, and the feeling of not belonging where you are is familiar to people you would never suspect of it. Self-doubt also does not stand on its own - it is tied to neuroticism, one of the five dimensions of the Big Five test, and to perseverance, which the grit test maps. Add those two and you see the whole picture.
Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you have not really earned your success and that sooner or later it will come out. The test measures how strong that doubt is for you and distinguishes three sources: feeling like a fraud, discounting success, and putting results down to luck and circumstance. All three are in you - only the ratio differs, and the ratio is what decides what will work for you.
No. You would look for it in vain in the DSM, the classification of mental disorders - it is not a disorder or an illness, but a way of experiencing yourself that is entirely common. It shows up in people with a long line of finished work behind them; it is just rarely said out loud, so everyone feels like the only one. The test result is therefore self-knowledge for orientation, nothing more and nothing less. But if the doubt keeps taking the joy out of your work, or anxiety comes with it, it is worth talking it through with a professional.
Yes. Doubt is a habit of mind, not a fact about your ability, and a habit can be unlearned - you only have to aim at the right source. For the sense of playing a role, what works is saying the doubt out loud and writing down what is actually finished; for playing down your wins, praise accepted without a follow-up clause and a folder of evidence; for the "it was luck" explanation, breaking a success down into the steps you took yourself. The extended version gives you five such techniques picked precisely for your source.
About 3 minutes. There are 21 short statements, and for each one you choose how well it describes you.
Your overall score and band, the score of all three sources, your profile out of 10 combinations of band and source, a description of how your main source works and what sets it off, a note on where you stand firm instead, and five concrete "What to do" techniques picked for your source.
21 questions. 3 minutes. Results instantly.
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