Content area
Full Text
Valerie Ashby suffered from impostor syndrome until she identified the phenomenon and spent a year practicing 10 steps to overcome it.
A lmost anyone would say that Valerie Sheares Ashby is in the midst of a successful academic career. After more than a decade on the chemistry faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and three years as chair, she became dean of Duke University’s college of arts and sciences in 2015. She’s won many accolades, including awards from the National Science Foundation and the companies 3M and DuPont, as well as several teaching prizes from UNC.
But for most of her professional life, Ms. Ashby experienced impostor syndrome, a phenomenon first described by psychologists in the 1970s. It’s not an official diagnosis but "a very real and specific form of intellectual self-doubt," according to the American Psychological Association. It’s common among high achievers who may consider their accomplishments flukes, or attribute them to luck rather than to their own merit.
Over time, by practicing 10 strategies, Ms. Ashby learned to overcome her impostor syndrome. She now gives talks at colleges to help students and professors identify and resist the strong tendency to discount their own skills and talent. She spoke with The Chronicle about her experience with academic and professional self-doubt and what hope there is for others who may feel like frauds about to be found out.
•
What was your experience with impostor syndrome?
Until I was 43 — I’m 51 now — I pretty much carried impostor syndrome throughout my career. It is painful. At the time, I didn’t really know what it was. If you had asked me, I would have told you, This is just who I am. I didn’t know it was a thing that probably every person sitting in the room with me was carrying.
"Carrying" it — what does that mean?
Whenever I run a workshop, I ask people, How many of you know what impostor syndrome is? A few of them do. I say, OK, well, I’m going to describe some things, and you put your hand up if you think I’ve called your name. I say things like, How many of you are coming into work every day thinking, I don’t...