Eleanor says: Maya Angelou had dreadful impostor syndrome: “I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find out.” Someone at the very top of their game, 11 books in, can still have that critical inner voice asking, “Do you really deserve this?”.
You could try to answer yours by noting that even if luck played a role in your success, that doesn’t mean talent didn’t – connections help, but people don’t tend to stick their necks out for someone they don’t think is deserving.
Those are great ways to answer the inner critic when it asks, “Do you really deserve this?” But you can also look for ways to refuse that question instead of trying to answer it.
It might sound strange, but one strategy might be to nod a little thanks to this critical perfectionist tendency.
You could also point out that skill takes time to acquire: you’d never say a cellist isn’t really virtuosic if they only got good by practising.
