Get “those demons out of your head,” Obama advised young women.
Michelle Obama told an audience in London Monday that she has long felt “impostor syndrome” over her status as a “symbol of hope.”
The former first lady was speaking with author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at a sell-out event to promote her autobiography, Becoming, the BBC reported.
“I still have a little impostor syndrome, it never goes away, that you’re actually listening to me,” she told the audience at the Southbank Centre.
“It doesn’t go away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know? I share that with you because we all have doubts in our abilities, about our power and what that power is. “If I’m giving people hope then that is a responsibility, so I have to make sure that I am accountable.”
The term “impostor phenomenon” was coined in a 1978 paper by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who noticed that successful women sometimes expressed fears that their achievements were down to luck .
