Hi, my name is Angie. I am a wife and a mother of four here in Dallas, Texas. I've been a minister

partner with Desiring God for a year and a half. You are listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast

with John Piper. We're going to talk more with Angie in a moment, but first up today's episode.

Today's question comes to us from an anonymous young woman. Pastor John, I thoroughly enjoy listening

to these podcasts and find them exceptionally helpful for dealing with life's challenges.

My challenge is anxiety at work. I work in medicine. For some time from school until now early in my

career, I think I suffer from imposter syndrome, a phenomenon that commonly affects professionals

often females with tendencies to be perfectionists, leading them to think they're a fraud at their

job, not good enough and any success is theirs by chance. I don't trust my own talents and skills

because of this. I experience significant anxiety before and during work to the extent that I

feel like I need to quit. This is really affecting my mental health. Not because I don't enjoy my job,

I do. I prayed to overcome this, asking for help and for healing. Do you have any thoughts? Also,

I recently came across a coach who specializes in imposter syndrome and she overcame it herself.

Would it be wrong for me to seek help from a non-Christian coach?

I'm going to save that last part of the question for another time because the more I thought about

what she's dealing with, that's what I feel like I need to address here. We can take up the issue

of the proper or not proper use of secular counseling later. Here's the four traits that I see in

her life that need a biblical perspective. Perfectionistic tendencies, a sense that really

when she's competent at work, she's a fraud, she's an imposter. Third, her successes and competencies

really are just owing to luck and forth anxiety that comes from all of this. Let me give what I see

as a biblical perspective on those four traits of her experience and hope that this biblical

perspective on each of these will bring some measure of liberation from a life of illusion.

...