I once sat down at a boardroom table wondering whether they were going to fire me for saying the wrong thing.

I had been hired, specifically, because I knew the answer to the question they were about to ask. That was the arrangement. I was the reason the meeting was on the calendar.

None of it helped. It was my first board meeting, and somewhere between walking through the door and sitting down I had made up a story that I didn’t belong in the room.

The scoreboard theory of self-belief

We tend to treat self-belief like a scoreboard. Do good work, the number goes up, and eventually it’s high enough that your self-doubt ebbs away like a low tide. The majority of advice on this subject leans heavily on that assumption. Keep a list of your wins. Reread your old performance reviews. Put all your positive feedback emails in that special folder. Remember how far you’ve come.

What the original impostor syndrome research actually found

The two psychologists who named the impostor phenomenon in 1978 found the opposite. Working with women who had, by any external measure, done the work, they noticed that their achievements never ultimately seemed fulfilling. Their subjects had earned degrees, high test scores, professional recognition from colleagues, and still “did not experience an internal sense of success.” (Just a heads up, it seems her website doesn’t have https set up so you might get a warning. It’s ok, and the PDF is behind it.)

They had all the evidence they needed. It just didn’t register.

Your standards and your fear of missing them are not the same thing

I’ve written about this lovely feeling (that’s sarcasm, if you can’t tell) twice before. Each time I called it a clarity problem rather than a skills problem, and I still think that’s right. Both times I couldn’t tell you what was actually going on underneath.

I’ve only managed to work it out recently. Here’s what I think is going on.

We use the word perfectionism for two things that have almost nothing to do with each other.

One is the bar we set for ourselves. If you’re a high achiever, this is what you think good looks like, the level you set for your work, and ultimately what you’ll accept from yourself.

The second is what you believe it costs you if you miss that bar.

Both travel together, like Hansel and Gretel walking into the forest. They feel so natural that we treat them as inseparable siblings. But the researchers who pulled them apart found that nearly all the damage sits with the second one. What you believe. The bar (our standards) barely registers for us.

How one missed serve becomes “I’m no good”

W. Timothy Gallwey, who wrote the best selling book, The Inner Game of Tennis, describes this better than anyone in a book about, you guessed it — tennis. A player misses a serve. Then things escalate quickly. First it’s “what a lousy serve.” Then, “I’m serving badly today.” A few more and it’s “I have a terrible serve.” Then “I’m a lousy tennis player.” Then, finally, “I’m no good.”

Five quick steps from a ball hitting the net to the judgment of a human being.

The same thing happens at the office or in your business. A good presentation that lands flatter than you expected becomes I’m bad at this. A lost pitch becomes I’m not senior enough. A question you can’t answer becomes they’ve finally figured out that I don’t belong here.

It’s all smoke and mirrors. That serve that hits the net is reality. Everything after it is a story that gets added.

Nobody’s asking you to do worse work. Set your standard high and keep it there. It’s the additional story that’s completely optional.

What over-preparing actually costs you

I over-prepared for years. I’d build an extra deck. Write out answers to questions nobody ended up asking. Then I’d sit in a meeting, shaking my head afterwards at all the prep work that no one asked about. I’d defend that to an extent. I still believe it’s better to be over-prepared than caught with your pants down.

Years later, I remember walking into a meeting with a CEO, and he threw a question at me out of the blue.

“How much business do you think our new podcast is going to drive us?” he asked.

“I have no clue,” I replied without a beat. “That’s not the point of the podcast.”

I’ll spare you the details, but the point is that I didn’t hesitate and nothing bad happened afterward.

My bar hadn’t moved. I gave the kind of direct answer you’d expect from the person you hired. What was gone was the anxiety I used to pay to avoid saying I don’t know, and the assumption that I needed to have all the answers.

Why impostor syndrome gets worse as you get more senior

We assume this feeling goes away with more work. More experience. All part of a formula where you get good enough and those feelings go away. But Korn Ferry surveyed leaders in 2024 and found that 71% of U.S. CEOs reported it, versus 33% of people early in their careers. That’s not what we had in mind.

I’ve started thinking of this as a ratio. Evidence over exposure.

After ten years in a job you know well, you’ve built up an enormous amount of evidence, and your exposure is relatively low. Your boss sees you, you get a promotion, and the one or two people who need to know that you do good work know it.

You feel good.

Then something changes the bottom half. You get a bigger title. You start publishing under your own name. You start a business.

Your evidence didn’t shrink. Your exposure jumped past it, and the ratio tipped over fast.

That’s why a promotion can feel worse than the job you left, or why twenty years of work can evaporate between walking through a door and sitting down. It’s not like filling a glass with sand. It’s more like that game you played as a kid, where you turn your back and count, then spin around to catch your friends moving, and somehow they’re ten yards further away than they should be. The line keeps moving every time you take a step toward it.

The two sentences that separate the standard from the fear

Here’s what I’d suggest. Before the next thing you catch yourself over-preparing for, write two sentences.

What does good look like here?

And: what do I believe will happen if I’m not good enough?

One of those describes the work you’re doing. The other describes essentially the worst thing that could happen. Mine, that day, was they’ll fire me if I say something wrong.

Put those sentences side by side and you realize they couldn’t be more different. That’s the whole exercise. Gallwey says that letting go of judgment doesn’t mean ignoring errors. It means seeing what happened and not adding anything to it.

The feeling doesn’t leave. It stops mattering.

I still get butterflies before big events. Don’t think that it’s supposed to go away. Bruce Springsteen still gets them at 74. He calls it anticipatory anxiety, and he says that “there’s always some anticipation before I go out on stage, which pretty much disappears the minute I count in the band.”

It doesn’t leave. It stops mattering once you start the work.

Nothing changes about the work you do. My bar, my standard, has never dropped off. I still want to do amazing work and give good answers at the table. The only thing I’ve changed is that I stopped believing the B.S. story that pops into my head, the one where a wrong answer ends me. I walk in now knowing I’m there for the expertise. Being sure of that turns out to be most of the job. The rest is delivering the craft.

You can’t get better without messing shit up from time to time. Not because the work doesn’t have to be good. Because you have to be able to afford a mistake.

Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m feeling as new and as exposed as it gets, so the ratio ain’t in my favor. But I suppose that’s the point. The feeling shows up when you’re doing something that hasn’t earned its evidence yet, which is a reasonable description of anything worth doing.

It’s been something like 48 years since they worked out that proof wasn’t the answer. It’s time we believe their work.

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