Fake It Till You Make It: Good Advice or a Setup for Failure?

Imitating confidence, competency, and drive may work for some, but what are the long-term professional implications?

“Fake it till you make it” — we’ve all likely heard the phrase muttered a time or two when it comes to getting through a tough personal or professional moment. We’ve maybe even used it with ourselves as a form of reassurance when we aren’t feeling confident in our abilities. In any case, the phrase is often used to convey acting as if you have more to offer than you do.

When used literally, the term can obviously become problematic, especially if you’re biting off way more than you can chew professionally, but doubly so if someone is a total impostor trying to lie or cheat their way to success, like, say, Anna Delvey, who defrauded countless victims out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to pose as a German heiress infiltrating the New York City elite. Perhaps that’s why Alan Ibbotson, a leadership coach, founder of the Trampoline Group, and host of the YouTube video series “Wisdom You Didn’t Ask For,” would love nothing more than to bury the phrase completely. “It literally means you can’t do it or be it, and you are pretending,” he puts it plainly. “For some, they are signing up to be a fake and a phony, a liar and a cheat, someone who isn’t concerned with what others think or even with being authentic in their success — they just want to get away with it, operating on the hope that eventually they’ll make it.”

But not everyone is out there trying to get ahead by nefarious means. Many of us have found ourselves in new roles and lacking certain experience that can only come with doing the job, like launching a new business or suddenly becoming the manager of 25 people. Sure, some expertise is required, but in such instances, there will always be a learning curve that can only come with throwing oneself into the deep end, figuring some of it out along the way, and going through the necessary motions to build confidence in a new position.

And then there’s a third category of faking it till you make it: the dreaded impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is loosely defined as the internal experience some, especially at high levels, have of believing that they are not as competent as others perceive them to be. Ibbotson refers to the “fake it till you make it” narrative as “literally the birthplace of impostor syndrome.” He does, however, offer this distinction: “I think someone suffering from impostor syndrome is someone who ultimately wants to succeed and has anxiety about whether they are good enough. They care about authentic success and will likely be doing what they can to learn and grow into the challenge until they feel comfortable.”

Rheeda Walker, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, researcher, professor at the University of Houston, and the author of The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, says competent people can develop impostor syndrome by internalizing societal messages of “less than,” which only compounds impostor syndrome further. “With women and people who are members of certain racial-ethnic minority groups, we see it more often because society says, ‘We really don’t expect much from you. We don’t even think you have the capacity.’ My parents always said I was going to have to work twice as hard to get half as far — and I wasn’t the only Black girl who was told this. It was just part of the cultural narrative of what we have to do in order to achieve success,” she says.

Ibbotson refers to the “fake it till you make it” narrative as “literally the birthplace of impostor syndrome.”

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No matter how you’re faking it to make it, though, what “make it” actually means is ultimately highly subjective. “Very few of us actually stop to identify exactly how we’ll know when we’ve made it,” says Barbara Barna Abel, the multimedia coach and adviser of Abel Intermedia and the host of the Camera Ready & Abel podcast. “It’s a vague idea in the future, and our brains have no idea where we’re actually going, so we’re on a ‘faking it’ hamster wheel going as fast as we can to avoid being found out.”

Even without swindling others out of hundreds of thousands of dollars like Anna Delvey, many of us, when trapped in the cycle of trying to prove ourselves to ourselves, might start to feel like a fraud for no good reason. In fact, the phrase “fake it till you make it” itself harkens back to the term “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which was coined in 1948 by social psychologist Robert Merton to describe “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true,” according to The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. In other words, if you say you’re faking it often enough, part of you holds the belief that you are indeed a fake, someone not fit for the opportunity you’re about to step into.

Perhaps, then, faking it till we make it needs a bit of reframing. Here’s how to keep pushing forward — for real — when it feels like faking it may be the only way to win.

Don’t expect too much of yourself from the start

Imagine you’ve just been hired at a new organization in a higher position than you’ve ever held before. Regardless of how prepared you are to step into that boardroom, there’s a first time for everything, and it’s rare for someone to approach their first time at anything exuding total confidence. Give yourself the grace of building up the confidence you need in the role, and allow yourself to sit back and learn from those around you. In this circumstance, though telling yourself you’ll “fake it till you make it” may seem like a means to come out of the gate strong — and indeed there are times when you have to relent to already established processes in order to reach a goal — starting out with the mindset of being fake is still a form of negative self-speak that could potentially be limiting and damaging to confidence and competence in the long run, says Ibbotson.

Shift the narrative

To break the negative self-speak cycle that can hold you hostage, it helps to shift your own narrative, says Walker. “From a psychological perspective, there’s a tremendous amount of empirical support with regard to how people think about things and how that impacts what they do and how they feel,” she explains. “If you’re telling yourself secretly, ‘I don’t deserve to be here. I’m not capable or competent,’ that’s going to affect behaviors. People are going to be anxious and worn out and sometimes depressed because they don’t think the reward that they’re getting matches the behavior and work they’re putting in. We have to interrupt the cycle and replace those maladaptive thoughts with adaptive thoughts and positive messages that make sense for us. Say things like ‘I’m confident. I’m doing the best that I can. I deserve to be here,’ because if you don’t, you’re kind of setting yourself up to miss out on the success that you actually deserve.”

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Consider why you feel like you’re faking it — then recognize when you’re not

Barna Abel says developing an awareness and consciousness of why you feel like you’re faking it is a great first step. “As soon as you give it a name and acknowledge it, it loses its power,” she says. “Next, knowing that these feelings are universal helps you to understand you’re not alone. Then you set the intention of challenging yourself to move through it, sit with your fear, and do the thing anyway. People will come to me when they’re asked to do something outside of their comfort zone. Confidence is an inside job, right? It comes from within. There are a lot of exercises where you can explore tapping into this. You just have to tell your brain where it’s going.” Once you get there, the next step is recognizing that you’re no longer in the perfunctory learning stage; now you can own the expertise you’ve picked up and lead with it on future goals and projects.

Before you can make it, you have to believe it

When trying to build and maintain the conviction you need to succeed, instead of faking it till you make it, Barna Abel says she prefers social psychologist Amy Cuddy’s concept: “Fake it till you believe it,” which speaks to how our neuropathways adapt to certain concepts over time through repetition. “In my opinion, this outlook is a more positive, productive, and beneficial version of ‘fake it till you make it,’” she explains. “It takes a long time — months or years — for us to believe in ourselves. The message has to become internalized and felt in your subconscious.”

Rather than faking it, try winging it

Ibbotson extols the virtues of winging it over faking it. “There’s only so much preparation that you can do for anything. Winging it is a skill set that refers to the ability to assess your situation and judge it accurately,” he says. “It’s about what it means to be open to learning how instead of pretending to be. It’s about how creatively, on the fly, you’re able to pull your resources together to find a solution to something or improvise. It’s about developing the level of confidence you need to trust the culmination of all you’ve learned over the years, step into the unknown, and trust that it will work out. You’ve got to have faith in yourself.”

There’s only so much preparation that you can do for anything. Winging it is a skill set that refers to the ability to assess your situation and judge it accurately.

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Separate your thoughts from your feelings

Building faith in oneself can come with an understandable amount of anxiety, so Ibbotson advises his coaching clients to grab a pen and paper, draw a line down the middle, and jot down their thoughts on one side and their feelings on the other. “The idea is to cultivate emotional self-awareness and understand why you’re feeling the way you are and how it affects you so you can better act on the fly,” he advises. “It helps you to get out of the emotional tsunami that is your fear, accept it as a normal part of what’s happening to you at the time, and detach a little from your expectations of the end result. If you’re open-minded about what an end result looks like, you’ll be able to roll with things more nimbly.”

In the end, avoid “compare and despair”

Comparing yourself with others, especially via social media, is another unnecessary distraction from embracing your own capabilities on your way to success, says Walker. “We have to first accept that everyone feels like they don’t belong or they’re a fraud sometimes, and then focus on the fact that we have worked hard, regardless of what people say,” Walker says in regard to establishing your motivations for getting ahead. “It’s the hero’s journey from every popular narrative: They figure out who they are, tap into what makes them special, unique, and capable, then they are able to move on with whatever the mountain of the task is.”

Tracy Tutor Shares How to Sell Yourself

The star of “Million Dollar Listing” explains her full-circle journey and how we can get better at selling ourselves.

Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles (MDLLA) powerhouse broker Tracy Tutor is a boss who gets the deal done, but it’s the human being we relate to and who makes us want to have a drink with her when deals go awry, when she’s trying to help a friend, when her male costars get into fruitless pissing contests, when she needs a pep-talk, or when she’s juggling a hugely successful career while raising her two teens. And the title of her book Fear Is Just a Four-Letter Word: How to Develop the Unstoppable Confidence to Own Any Room makes us want to ask her how we can get better at selling ourselves, so we did.

Owning a room comes easily to Tutor because she knows all the world’s a stage — getting into real estate was “a little bit of an accident” after she studied theater at the University of Southern California. “It’s kind of a cliché, but all failed actors become real estate agents,” she tells Shondaland. “Every time you walk into a room, you are on an audition. If you’ve failed enough times in Hollywood, then you figure out how to walk into a room in real estate and own that.”

Weary of her table-waiting/auditioning/human-resources grind at 24, she decided it was time to make money — it was just a matter of how and, more importantly, how much. Her actor friend Sasha Alexander brainstormed that they get into real estate, and Tutor went for it. “I walked into the first office I felt like I could fit into, sat down with the manager, and said, ‘I’m brand-new to this, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I need to make $90K a year to survive.’ He said, ‘Most real estate agents in their first two years make $30K,’ and I was like, ‘Well, that just doesn’t work for me,’ and he said, ‘You’re hired.’ He probably appreciated my level of confidence. Of course, the next two years I made 30K a year, but I started selling in the higher end around year five,” she says.

Looking back, it’s clear to Tutor how every gig she had led up to where she is today. “Everyone should understand what it’s like to be in the service industry because it gives you grit,” she explains. “It teaches you how to connect with people and command respect. I never thought, or planned, or wanted to be in real estate, but I always wanted a job. I worked at a men’s clothing store when I was 15 and a half selling men’s suits. If I sold a certain number of men’s suits, I’d get some sort of commission bonus. I lived for that! It’s a trip! It all aligns to this full-circle moment, selling real estate on a TV show.”

MDLLA came knocking after a chance on-camera showing with her colleague and friend Josh Altman, a series regular since the beginning. “Our chemistry together was great, and I think they saw that. After we shot and my client liked the property, they asked if I’d be interested in shooting the next couple of scenes. I just thought it was a one-off, then Josh called me the day of and asked if I had anyone for another property he was shooting for the show. I was like, ‘Can you give me a little more notice?’ I was wearing jeans and had to run to Intermix and pull together an outfit!”

It wasn’t long before Tutor was asked to be a series regular, but first she had to hash out the details with her then-husband, who seemed uneasy with her inevitable trajectory. “I really struggled, but I knew [instinctively] that [the show] was the right move for me at this point in my career because I’d been working my ass off in this business, and I lost so many,” she says.

By “many,” Tutor means deals. Though real estate seems to be an industry dominated by women, it’s not immune to the ingrained sexism of other industries. “I could not process why I wasn’t having that same success as some of my male counterparts. Is it because I’m a mother? Is it because they think I grew up with money [her father is L.A. construction giant Ron Tutor] and don’t have a work ethic? What the fuck?!” she says. “I think I’ve always struggled with how people perceive me versus what my truth is. I’ve been working since I was 16 years old, and I still have to work three times harder to get that same opportunity. I know it’s because of how I look, because I am a female, because I am a mother of two, and because there is an entitlement that is perceived that I don’t have to work, and therefore I must not have the same desire and grind that someone like Josh Altman has.”

She’s also suffered surprising scrutiny for some of the fierce looks she serves on the show and resents the double standard. “‘If you want to be a boss, you better put on a suit. Don’t be too feminine; be serious; lack humor; don’t make jokes, sit, and talk; and don’t ask questions — wait until you’re spoken to and then respond.’ Fuck that!” says Tutor. “I want to change the narrative and send the message that not only am I smart, very good at my job, a fierce negotiator on behalf of my clients, and very ethical, I’m also sexy, funny, and I curse. Why can’t I encompass all of those things?” Her way of rewriting the rules about these misconceptions is refusing to play the game.

Her book — which reads like a conversation with her — shares some valuable tips about how to read any room we walk into and how we can get better at selling ourselves for whatever reason we need to.

Here are a few tips she shared with us

Get to know your strengths and weaknesses

In helping her interns figure out how to develop business relationships, Tutor encourages them to get to know themselves first. “What are your five strongest attributes, and what are five things that you think you can improve on in your life or in your personality? Knowing your weaknesses and your strengths is a big thing when walking into a room. You can’t be perfect or flawless at everything — you have to be able to poke fun at the things that you’re not good at. It’s another great way to connect with people,” she says.

Raise your (metaphorical) hand

When it comes to selling your talents, Tutor says practice makes perfect: “You don’t just show up in a room, and put on the right outfit, and it happens. You’ve got to raise your hand in a business meeting, or ask a question in front of a hundred people in a class that makes you nervous. It starts there and becomes easier and easier. You begin to trust your own instincts a little bit more. We all have good instincts, but we push them down because we’re so uncomfortable with saying what we really think. You have to continually push yourself out of your comfort zone so that when you get that interview, or you get to be in a room full of incredibly powerful people networking, you have the ability to make a joke, feel comfortable, and step into your own skin,” she says.

Show up authentically

At the end of the day, we all just want to make a connection — no matter how “big” the person is, says Tutor. “You have to authentically be able to connect with people — that is the great equalizer. Not everybody’s going to like you all of the time, but if you can show that you’re vulnerable, show that you’re funny, show that you’re smart, show that you’re sexy, show that you’re completely authentic as a female, people are going to be drawn to that, and they’re going to want to connect with you. That’s how you begin to take the energy in the room and put it toward your life in a positive way. People want to be around people that they aspire to be like or want to be similar to,” she explains.

Find common ground

When dealing with people, common ground is the key to connection. “You have to get past the fear, dig a little bit deeper, and remind yourself that everybody’s just living on the planet together,” Tutor says, sharing what happened the first time she showed property to Steve Levitan, the co-creator of Modern Family. “I’m a fan! I’d been going through a divorce, and he was going through a divorce. We have similar taste in real estate, and he worked with an architect that I absolutely adore. We were able to talk about divorce, and a genuine connection was formed. I was able to push down my anxiety, and we have a relationship to this day because of it,” she says.

Working Mother

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