What if Impostor Syndrome Isn’t All Bad?

The Anxious Achiever

It turns out, a lot of our beliefs about how we are performing at work - and how we choose to label that performance - can negatively impact our jobs and our mental health. Basima Tewfik is an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who looks deeply at our social behaviors and psychology at work. And she’s found that labels like anxious, neurotic, and imposter syndrome can actually be really detrimental to our success. Even impostor feelings, in her research, can lead to positive outcomes at work. Tewfik thinks of each like a double edged sword and explains how her research focuses on the positive side of phenomena like these.