Column: The potential of doubt

At the end of last year, I received a request from the Federal Center for Cultural and Creative Industries. As part of a congress, a panel was to be held with the title "Future entrepreneurship - creative tech as the key to change and growth". The Minister of State for Culture and the Media would be present and they would be very happy to have me as a panelist. My first reaction to this request was a feeling that I had actually thought I had overcome after many years as a speaker, panelist and moderator. Instead of reading the invitation as a confirmation of my expertise, I began to look for the error in the system. Was there a mix-up here? Were the people in charge really aware that I was the owner of an advertising agency? Of course there was no confusion. The panel talk went extremely well and I was able to talk to many guests afterwards who, inspired by what I had to say, wanted to talk to me.

For the first time in many years, I had simply been confronted with a phenomenon known as imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, or impostor syndrome, describes the conviction that one has not earned one's own success. Those affected do not attribute their achievements to their own competence, but to external factors such as chance, luck or sympathy. The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who observed that highly qualified women in particular tended to attribute their successes to external circumstances instead of internalizing them as their own competence. Language creates reality. The coining of the term "Imposter Syndrome" was an important step in feminist research, as it turned a supposedly personal feeling into a collective reality. But as valuable as the research on this topic was, the choice of words was misleading. The term "syndrome" implies a clinical disorder that does not exist. The message: the problem lies with you. You are not self-confident enough. You need to work on yourself.

Current sociological research is shifting the perspective from the individual to the system. For women and marginalized groups in particular, the feeling of being an impostor is often a reaction to a lack of belonging and the lack of a welcoming culture in a system that clings to old structures. When people move in spaces that were not historically designed for them, they feel the resistance of the structure. When role models are absent or one's own competence is constantly and subtly questioned in everyday life, the resulting doubts are not a "syndrome" but the result of a centuries-old narrative. Defining this reaction as "insecurity" is a form of structural gaslighting. It individualizes a problem that is actually inherent in the nature of our society. I would therefore like to suggest another perspective: perhaps the absence of absolute self-confidence is not a deficit at all, but precisely what modern role models need.

While unquestioned self-evidence often leads to a loss of reality, doubt leads to reflection, which in turn leads to empathy. Those who question themselves develop a finer sense of the barriers that others also face and, at best, ask themselves why it should actually be desirable to fit perfectly into an outdated grid.

So instead of pathologizing the feeling of imposter as a weakness, we should interpret it as a sign of active change. It is a signal that we are initiating change, challenging the status quo and thus taking the first, important step towards making spaces more inclusive.