Oprah Winfrey Said She Had Never Even Heard of the Term Imposter Syndrome—Let Alone Felt It

Oprah Winfrey, in her 35-plus years in the public eye, has been quite candid about her insecurities. But one she never felt? Imposter syndrome, aka “that feeling of self-doubt that perhaps you don’t belong in that good job or good school,” People reports. Imposter syndrome became a part of the lexicon in the late 1970s in an academic article about high-achieving women who felt dogged by the fear that someone would expose them as a person who doesn’t deserve the life she’s leading, the outlet reports.

Well, consider Winfrey unfamiliar, both with the term and with the notion, which she said was alien to her. “I don’t have any of that imposter feelings that so many have,” she told People. “I didn’t even understand it. I had to look it up.”

Winfrey said her upbringing—particularly her father’s influence—is to thank for that. “I remember as a young girl being a strong orator in the national competition for speaking and winning the local championships, then the state championships,” she said. “And then placing, I think it was No. 3 or something, in the nationals. And I remember after every contest, the families whose kids were just in the contest were going to celebrate, and their families were all excited. My father’s thing was, ‘Get your coat.’” She added “I learned, in all these years, every exciting thing that would happen to me, it was always, that’s good, get your coat. Get your coat. I don’t know if that was ingrained in my personality or I just learned that nobody’s going to be excited about it, so you might as well just get your coat and go. I don’t have high highs and I don’t have low lows. Which is a good thing, because no matter what I’m going through, I know I’m going to come out of it and be okay.”

She now said she values “the ability to live in the space of true appreciation for a life not just well-lived, but well-earned.” She’s courageous enough to say that she is “proud of myself,” telling People “I look around at the space that I’ve created for myself, and I recognize that I came from a great-grandfather who was a slave, and who for 10 years after slavery could not read, but 10 years after slavery could read. And who negotiated with a local farmer to pick 2,000 bales of cotton in exchange for 80 acres of land. And so, now that I sit on land that I own, land that I worked for, land that I earned, I feel the essence and presence of all that has come before me to allow me to be in this space.”

And none of it was given to her, she said. “I didn’t have a grandfather, a great-grandfather, who could give me land,” Winfrey said. “But now…I am able to have my own and to know that I work for it. And it wasn’t a husband that did it. It wasn’t a brother or an uncle, or whatever did it, but I did it.”

It is actually others’ low expectations of her that she credits for part of her success, including expectations surrounding The Oprah Winfrey Show—which helped make her a billionaire. (Yes, with a B.) “The real reason I was able to own that show and have the percentages of that show,” she told People, is because nobody expected it to become the success that it did. “They would’ve never agreed to it if they had thought that it would,” Winfrey said. “Never.”