Who Is Saying You're Not Supposed to Be Here?

Something has come up on a lot of calls I've had lately, and I can't say I've figured out a cookie cutter way to address it.

People call it imposter syndrome. On a call it never sounds like that. It sounds like a new director who got promoted over two people with more experience, and thinks they're being judged for it. It sounds like someone who moved countries for a job and feels left out whenever they don't get a joke or a phrase being used. It sounds like a new manager who was great at their old job but can't tell if they're any good at leading a team.

Underneath, it's the same sentiment. "I don't belong here."

Where does the idea come from?

The term is older than most of the people who use it. Two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, wrote it up in 1978 after working with high-achieving women who were convinced, against all the evidence, that they'd fooled everyone. They called it the impostor phenomenon.

In 2020 a group of researchers led by Dena Bravata reviewed every study they could find on it. Sixty-two studies, more than fourteen thousand people. Depending on how you ask, somewhere between nine and eighty-two percent of people report it. Half the studies found no difference between men and women. It runs alongside burnout, lower job satisfaction, worse performance.

And one more finding that's equally discouraging. Not a single published study had tested a way to treat it.

So when I say I haven't figured out the best way to work with this, I'm in good company. Nobody has.

How does imposter syndrome turn into perfectionism?

Here's what I've noticed, though. The belief itself almost never does the damage. What does the damage is the rule the belief writes.

If I'm not supposed to be here, then I have to earn it every day. I can't say I don't know. I can't ask the obvious question in the weekly meeting. I can't be the one who looks dumb in front of the new team. So I need to be perfect.

That rule is perfectionism, and I think the two are hand in hand. A person I worked with this summer named her own version of it in one breath, a perfectionist streak and a people-pleaser streak running at the same time, and the only thing I could say back was: that sounds like two beasts.

The research echoes that thought. Bravata's review found imposter feelings running alongside perfectionistic traits. And in 2019, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill looked at 27 years of data on more than forty thousand college students and found perfectionism rising in every form. The form rising fastest was the belief that other people demand perfection of you.

That's the imposter's rule, measured across a generation.

Here's the trap to watch out for. You set a bar you can't quite meet, so whatever you do, it feels like a failure. Perfect is the standard, so every ordinary day at work makes a stronger case that you don't belong. The rule that was supposed to protect you from being found out is what produces the feeling.

What do I actually ask on a call?

I don't just tell people they belong. I do sometimes, but often it falls on deaf ears. I've watched reassurance bounce off someone for forty minutes. What I do is ask.

Who is saying that you're not supposed to be there? Someone at a conference, your boss, or is it you?

There's usually a pause. Then, most of the time: it's me.

Nobody who hired you is keeping score the way you are. The people with twenty more years of experience aren't sitting in the meeting waiting for you to slip. Most of them are thinking about what they're going to eat for lunch.

The second question I ask: do you feel like there's an expectation that you should already be great at your job? And whose expectation is it? Most companies do a poor job preparing you for a new role or transition.

And the third, when someone is working themselves to the bone to look like they have it handled: are you doing this to prove yourself, to prove that you're knowledgeable? Or are you doing it for yourself and what you actually want?

Three questions. I can't answer for anyone. It might take some reflection, but the truth is buried somewhere in there.

You can't know something until you learn it

I say this more than anything else talking to clients. You can't know something until you learn it, until you experience it.

It sounds obvious. Nobody applies it to themselves in the first year of anything.

Getting good at something takes time. You can acknowledge that. It's not a weakness to say out loud that you're three months into a role you've never done before and there are things you don't know yet. That's just what three months in looks like. Confidence before the reps is acting. I'm not going to fault you for faking it till you make it, though.

If a friend texted me at nine on a Tuesday, six months into a promotion, talking about quitting because they feel like a fraud, this is close to what I'd send:

First off, hush, and think about anything else you've done where you became an expert in six months. There might be a lot of stuff you don't know, but you're in the process of finding out, of getting better and growing. Don't get caught up in trying to be perfect in the first couple of months or the first year. Stay curious. Keep learning. I don't wanna hear that.

That's all of it, really. Accept that you don't know everything today, especially if it's your first time doing it. That's the only honest place to start from, and it's the only place confidence has ever come from. The people who feel like they belong are the ones who did the job badly enough times to get okay at it, and then good.

The first time I was responsible for a team, I found myself in a role that had a lot of manual processes I wasn't used to. After years of claiming to be proficient at Excel on my resume, I almost gave my manager at the time a migraine watching me stumble through a VLOOKUP live on a call. As embarrassing as it was, I learned from it and it helped me in the long run. I still hate Excel, but I was willing to look dumb in front of someone and it wasn't nearly as bad as it felt in the moment. I've learned to laugh off the embarrassing moments and be okay making fun of myself.

One thing I've seen help, if you want something to do with this. Practice being seen not knowing somewhere it doesn't cost anything. Walk into a coffee shop where nobody knows you and ask a question you could have looked up. Go one town over if you need to. Ask the expert on your team to run through the presentation with you before the real one. Small, a little embarrassing, nothing on the line. The bounce-back gets shorter every time.

Where it lands

I still don't have the best way to work with this. What I have is a question, and I've watched it do more in ten seconds than an hour of reassurance ever did.

Who is saying you're not supposed to be here?

Most of the time the answer is you. And you're the one person in the meeting who can change their mind. If you want to see where the pattern lives for you, Presence is the pillar it sits under.