Some Rooms Make the Doubt Louder

If you live with imposter feelings, I want you to hear this from someone who still does: your feelings are real.

The doubt. The fear of being "found out." The exhaustion of holding it all together in corporate America. None of it is a weakness. It's real, and it makes sense.

I still feel it. Some days it sounds like the Perfectionist, some days the Expert, the Soloist, the Superperson. Dr. Valerie Young named five types. I recognize myself in more than one.

From the outside it usually looks fine. As I wrote in Grounded in How I'm Wired: "The effectiveness of the mask tells us nothing about its cost."

And there's something else I've learned to notice. These are real feelings, AND some rooms make them louder.

"The meetings you are no longer invited to. The feedback that becomes vague. The pauses where conversation used to be." When I wrote that in The Breaking Point, I also wrote: "silence is not neutral. It is information."

"You can fit perfectly into a room where you don't belong."

That's the space my sixth book, You're Not Imagining It, holds: honoring what you feel while also paying attention to what the environment is doing to it.

I don't have this solved. What I keep returning to, on the hard days, is a line from The Breaking Point:

To stop proving.

To stop performing.

To start choosing with intention.

Still practicing. Right alongside you.

Which room makes your doubt louder, and which one lets it quiet down?

#impostersyndrome #leadership #womeninleadership #belonging #toxicworkplace #musingsofarecoveringexecutive