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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Feel like a fraud?



Feel like a fraud? At times, maybe you should


Stare into a mirror long enough and it's hard not to wonder whether that's a mask staring back, and if so, who's really behind it.


A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, esp0ecially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee.


Presidents and parents, after all, are expected to make crucial decisions on a dime. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle's conception of virtue differed from Aquinas's conception of - uh-oh.


Who's kidding whom?


Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.


Their findings have veered well away from the original conception of impostorism as a reflection of an anxious personality or a cultural stereotype. Feelings of phoniness appear to alter people's goals in unexpected ways and may also protect them against subconscious self-delusions.


Questionnaires measuring impostor fears ask people how much they agree with statements like these: "At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck." "I can give the impression that I'm more competent than I really am." "If I'm to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it's an accomplished fact."


Researchers have found, as expected, that people who score highly on such scales tend to be less confident, more moody and rattled by performance anxieties than those who score lower.


But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two Purdue psychologists, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder.


By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. "The motivation was to avoid doing poorly, looking weak," Jagacinski said.


Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people.


In a 2000 study at Wake Forest University, psychologists had people who scored highly on an impostor scale predict how they would do on a coming test of intellectual and social skills. An experimenter, they were told, would discuss their answers with them later.


Sure enough, the self-styled impostors predicted that they would do poorly. But when making the same predictions in private - anonymously, they were told - the same people rated their chances on the test as highly as people who scored low on the impostor scale.


In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.


"Particularly when people think that they might not be able to live up to others' views of them, they may maintain that they are not as good as other people think," Mark Leary, the lead author, wrote in an e-mail message. "In this way, they lower others' expectations - and get credit for being humble."


In a study published in September, Rory O'Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.


In an interview, McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person - as long as the self-deprecation doesn't go too far. "It's the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it," she said. "One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive."


In mild doses, feeling like a fraud also tempers the natural instinct to define one's own competence in self-serving ways. Researchers have shown in careful studies that people tend to be poor judges of their own performance and often to overrate their abilities. Their opinions about how well they've done on a test, or at a job, or in a class are often way off others' evaluations. They're confident that they can detect liars (they can't) and forecast grades (not so well).
This native confidence is likely to be functional: in a world of profound uncertainty, self-serving delusion probably helps people to get out of bed and chase their pet projects.


But it can be poison when the job calls for expertise and accountability, and the expertise is wanting. From her study, McElwee concluded that impostor fears most likely came and went in most people, and were most acute when, for example, a teacher first had to stand up in front of a class, or a new mechanic or lawyer took on real liability.


At those times feeling like a fraud amounts to more than the stirrings of an anxious temperament or the desire to project a protective humility. It reflects a respect for the limits of one's own abilities, and an intuition that only a true impostor would be afraid to ask for help.






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Three dancers in red



Three dancers in red - Valentino red - floated like puppets on a string in front of the Colosseum. As their shadows flickered over the ancient stones, a giant balloon, celebrating Valentino's 45 fashion years, drifted by and a golden shower of fireworks exploded.


Let the fantastic festivities begin!


"La Dolce Vita" - with the soundtrack of Fellini's iconic 1960 movie kicking off Valentino's couture show - was the spirit of the Roman weekend. The designer had come back from Paris to his home city and he embraced it with a light spirit and deep opulence.


And did Valentino paint the town red! Vestals in scarlet dresses stretched their golden mannequin arms towards the Ara Pacis, or peace altar - as the dramatic mise-en-scène of a retrospective exhibition. Fresh and spirited, it is viewed in streaming sunlight through the modernist class box of the architect Richard Meier's controversial museum.


"I did all these dresses and they are like children for me," said Valentino, 75, looking at the twin groups of 33 red dresses spanning 40 years.


"I always believed so much in elegance and femininity," he said. "They could all be worn today - and that makes me very proud."


Red was the hue for the celebrity events - and especially for the Saturday night red carpet parade through the soft dusk of the Borghese gardens. Scarlet dresses shone out like beacons on Claudia Schiffer, with Valentino's signature bows pert over her bare navel; or on the Texan supersocialite Lynn Wyatt in a 25-year-old vintage gown.


The boldest colors were eclipsed by the garnet glow of Caravaggio's paintings on the palazzo walls. But once inside the vast chinoiserie dinner tent, Sienna Miller wowed the crowd with scarlet lips to match her dress. She sat on Mario Testino's lap, while the uber-photographer flashed away. Click! Mick Jagger; Click! Eva Mendez; Maggie Cheung; Tom Ford; Rupert Everett. And, this being a "very Valentino" event, the royals: Princess Caroline of Hanover (in her favorite Chanel) and Marie Chantal of Greece, gorgeous as a crimped-hair 1930s vamp - the better to fit with the Shanghai scenario. Like the chalk white Doric columns circling Temple of Venus the previous night, the fantasy palm-tree-and-mirrors set was an installation by the cinéaste Dante Ferretti.


"This kind of moment is so important - for us and for Rome," said Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's rock and alter ego, who worked with Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, and with the Culture Ministry to make the events happen.


The couture show was less theatrical, but, as Elizabeth Hurley put it, "filled with love." Waves of impeccable clothes, the ultimate in couture perfection and grace, broke over the runway. The show, held in the Santo Spirito complex a stone's throw from the Vatican, had a floor-to-ceiling display of framed photographs of the designer's past and present.


Valentino wiped away tears when the audience - including the fellow designers Giorgio Armani, Diane Von Furstenberg, Carolina Herrera, Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace and Zac Posen - gave him a standing ovation. Then he embraced Giammetti, whom he first met in 1960 in a café on Rome's Via Veneto.


"It was very emotional," said Princess Firyal of Jordan, picking out a gold "princess" dress - a gleaming column - while Schiffer admitted that it was "hard not to cry."


Valentino's best beloved clients have become his extended family with new generations of Brandolinis and both the princesses Marie Chantal and Caroline bringing along their daughters. There were also poignant memories.


"I guess it was my sister's wedding dress, when I first knew Valentino" said Lee Radziwill, referring to the girlish gown made for Jacqueline Kennedy's Greek island marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968.


Farah Dibah, remembering the beige wool Valentino coat with sable collar in which, as wife of the former Shah of Iran, she had fled her country in 1979, said, "It was the most terrible day of my life - but I try to look forward."


That coat is in the exhibition among a line-up of celebrity outfits on canvas dressmaker's dummies, each identified by an embroidered name as "Jennifer Lopez," "Gwyneth Paltrow" or "Julia Roberts." while a miniscreen shows virtual images of them picking up or attending an Oscar in a Val gown.


The real live celebrities (even if Paltrow's broken knee kept her at home) included Uma Thurman, slender as a lily in her white dress; Sarah Jessica Parker, sweet in silver, embracing her haute cobbler hero Manolo Blahnik; the incorrigible Joan Collins, bosoms ahoy! in scarlet; and the movie legend Gina Lollobrigida, who turned 80 on the Fourth of July, with lollipops of emeralds dangling over a red lace dress designed for last year's aborted wedding to a man half her age.




"I very wisely got rid of the future husband and kept the dress," she said.


Many of Valentino's staff members were in tears at the idea that this could be . . . might be . . . the maestro's last couture show. Backstage, the seamstresses, chorusing their 27, 31 or 40 years service, claimed that "if you join Valentino, you never leave


" - and that their master surely would carry on.


"Only Valentino's workers can take 40 meters of chiffon and make that look like thistledown," said Hamish Bowles, who helped select the exhibition dresses. Technical marvels from the new collection included a sugar pink gown with organza unfolding like the pages of a book.


There were many reminiscences, publicly from Giammetti, as he and Valentino clinked champagne glasses on stage before the surprise performer Annie Lennox sang "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and guests invaded the dance floor.


Naty Abascal, who met Valentino as a 17-year-old Spanish model, recalled wild days in New York in the 1970s and Valentino's first, tiny red and white speed boat before his current floating palace. Jacqueline de Ribes remembered Valentino as the talented Italian sketcher at Jean Desses in Paris who helped her design, when they were both 22 years old, a collection for the American designer Oleg Cassini.


In the exhibition, conceived by Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, are Valentino's sketches from the 1950s. He drew elongated silver screen beauties, with precise lines for the atelier, while now, half a century on, there are just a few brief squiggles on a sketch pad.


A wall of chronological dresses in the excellently conceived exhibit defines Valentino's fashion codes: one-shoulder drapes, bows, lace, beautiful backs. They were developed so early that black roses caged under a tulle skirt in the new collection can be traced back to 1959.


The first evening's alfresco elegance above the Colosseum was the most exquisite experience for its ethereal magic. But the seated dinner summed up Valentino's quest for perfection in the exact shade of pale green plates; in the food served in puff pastry pots with 'V' worked into the lid; and in the pink orchids and purple bougainvillea spilling with the abundance of a Roman garden.


Yet there was a frisson of melancholy, as though this might be the last sweet draught of La Dolce Vita - the final party on a princely scale done with absolute taste and a passion for beauty.


Viva Valentino! Or as Firyal said at the Sunday brunch in the Villa Medici, looking out over the domed cupolas and rosy rooftops of the eternal city: "We'll all be back for the 50th. This can't be the end!"





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Valentine's breakfast recipe to impress your other half on the big day and get them in the mood for romance.



Taste Of Valentine's Day Romance




Use this Valentine's breakfast recipe to impress your other half on the big day and get them in the mood for romance.

We've just used salmon eggs here, but you could just as easily go all out and use Beluga, sevruga or osietra caviar. For a cheaper alternative, you can use faux caviar.

INGREDIENTS

4 Clarence Court Gladys May's ducks eggs

A couple of good knobs of butter

2-3 tablespoons of double cream

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

4-6 teaspoons salmon eggs or caviar

Toast to serve


Over a bowl carefully cut the top of the shells off each of the four eggs with a pair of sharp scissors.

Empty the egg into the bowl, ensuring there is no shell and give the shells a rinse. Whisk the eggs and then season well. Heat the butter in a thick bottomed pan, add the eggs and stir over a low heat until they begin to set. Pour in the cream, continue cooking and stirring, ensuring the eggs are kept nice and soft.

Spoon the scrambled egg back into the shell and either spoon the salmon eggs on top or spoon them into the top of the shell and serve with hot toast.

This recipe isn't as much hassle as it sounds and guarantees brownie points from your partner!