A sense of anxiety/dread/fear that you’re not as good at something as you are, and that any moment it’s all going to come crashing down. For example fear your boss will see you’re a moron and your work sucks, even though there’s no evidence that’s the case. And in fact there’s evidence to the contrary; you’ve been at your job for years, you have good reviews, you’ve been promoted. Fear that everyone in the conference room will see through you and know that you’re a fraud, that you don’t really know what you’re talking about, that you don’t deserve to be there. Even though you’ve given successful presentations dozens of times.

Also it should be noted that occasionally feeling this way is perfectly normal.

Imposter syndrome is the feeling that you’re not qualified to do something, or that you haven’t earned your success and have just gotten lucky.

It’s when you feel like you aren’t good enough - you are a fraud and just faking being competent and own day everyone will find out. Usually it’s in the context of a job. For example, if you’re a business executive in a big meeting with company bigwigs giving a presentation - you feel like you actually have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m a teacher and because of all the responsibility and many expectations of being a teacher - it’s very common for teachers to feel like they aren’t really doing a good job. Like when I write report cards, I will say to myself ‘who am I to say if this kid is meeting or not meeting expectations?!’ And I have to keep reminding myself that I am a trained and experienced educator.

Imposter syndrome is a persistent and powerful feeling or impression that you are weaker, less intelligent, less virtuous, or just in general worth less than others see you or than your status and accomplishments indicate, regardless of whether it's accurate or not.

It's an involuntary feeling, so it is very difficult to shake, even by recounting all your accomplishments and skills or people reassuring you.

Why is it that in many cases, people who really ARE in that situation can’t see it (expert syndrome) while many people who are competent cannot recognize it?

We’re veering off into my opinion, but I think it has to do with self-awareness and a general correlation between self-awareness and general or above average competence.

You feel like maybe you don't have the skills for the job (or task) you've been given.

E.g. You can write software. You get a job. You google a lot. You worry that the other programmers probably don't google so much. You feel insecure.

It sucks ass is what it is. You'll get a nice job with good pay and all of a sudden you could be at your desk or in your bed or wherever and think "I don't think I deserve this, I barely did anything right? Somsone else probably deserves this more than me." Despite knowing full damn well you worked your ass off to be there.

It can be any of your accomplishments in life ruined by the thought of "I don't belong here" or "I didn't do enough to earn this" when the opposite is usually true.

You worked for what you have and you 100% deserve it.

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When you’re being someone else, like playing a part in a play, rather than being your genuine self

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It’s call the Dunning Kruger effect. Essentially it says that those who are not competent in a skill will overestimate their ability because they literally don’t know what they don’t know. While people who are competent know how much they don’t know because of their proficiency.

It’s for this reason that it’s important to know that if you sometimes struggle with imposter syndrome you’re not an imposter. If you were, you wouldn’t care or know enough to experience it.

This is called the 'Dunning-Kruger Effect,' and while I'm not an expert on it, my understanding is that people experiencing it just do not have an awareness of what they don't know. They know enough of a thing to get by, and they have no cognition that there's more to know, and they use the power of rationalization to turn evidence of what they don't know into some other explanation. They're not wrong, someone else was, and so they were operating on faulty information, but this time they'll get it right.

I think Impostor Syndrome is a combination of things (again, these are just my understandings). One, just a general lack of personal security. There's a lot about the world that is designed to make us feel insecure so that we'll work hard to be able to buy things. There are literally whole industries built around it. Being insecure makes it very hard to feel like whatever knowledge you do possess is good enough because you're not doing good enough to get the thing.

Then you add an awareness that I think most people eventually have that you do not and cannot know everything, even for just one specific, non-personal subject. When that interacts with insecurity, it leads to devaluing the knowledge you do have because clearly there's so much more knowledge out there, so it gets really easy to say to yourself that you don't have the specific knowledge you need to do the thing in order to get the thing.

So in effect what you have is two people who are just kinda half-competently managing to get through life (which is the best any of us can really hope for), but one believes that their success is entirely of their own making because they lack external awareness, and the other believes they've gotten by entirely by chance because they have perhaps too much external awareness.

EDIT: I typed this too fast and there were a bunch of typos that I went back and fixed.

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