Do you feel like you’re alone in feeling like an impostor? Does it prevent you from making bold decisions? Speaking up? Pivoting? Admitting mistakes and, in turn, preventing you from learning from them?
Impostor syndrome refers to the experience of believing you’re a fraud. That you aren’t competent to tackle the task at hand, to rise to the challenge before you. That you feel less qualified than others perceive you to be. People experiencing impostor syndrome can feel like they’re “faking it,” which contributes to a fear of being “found out” or rejected. They can overextend themselves and become hyperfixated on making everything perfect. Or they can spiral into analysis paralysis. Moreover, when things do go well, they often attribute that to chance or luck rather than their own skill or effort.
Impostor syndrome is one of the most prevailing fears in the workplace. Unexplored, it can lead to misrepresenting, micromanaging and misalignment — focusing more on appearance than results. Perhaps you have an important board meeting coming up, and there are unpleasant concerns to discuss. Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed at work but are hesitant to ask for help. Or, maybe you’re just not sure about your product market fit strategy, but are anguishing from impostor syndrome and feel too afraid to say anything.
The truth is, impostor syndrome in the workplace is a lot more common than people realize — probably because we’re too scared to talk about it. In fact, one 2025 study found that:
71% of North American workers reported suffering from impostor syndrome.
More than half of women (54%) feel they have experienced impostor syndrome, compared with just 38% of men.
The older you are, the more likely you are to have strong self-belief. Gen Z (66%) and millennials (58%) were much more likely to have experienced impostor syndrome than Gen X (41%) and people in their sixties (25%).
And impostor syndrome comes at a big cost:
Of those to have experienced impostor syndrome, 72% feel it has held them back at work, and 43% have experienced it at least once a week.
Feelings of impostor syndrome manifest in several ways: 30% of people often doubt themselves and their contributions at work, while 61% are concerned about making a mistake.
And people think they’re alone:
Despite the high prevalence of people experiencing impostor syndrome, individuals feel isolated and are unlikely to believe their managers and colleagues would suffer from it.
More than a third (36%) assumed their manager rarely or never experienced impostor syndrome.
Sound familiar?
And yet, to advance, change and negotiate with the numerous doubts facing business leaders, you must take risks, ask the hard questions and be willing to learn from your mistakes — your growth depends on it.
This highlights the need for more conversations around impostor syndrome — and a new perspective.
Can impostor syndrome play a valuable role in our work environments?
It absolutely can. Impostor syndrome is a fear-based perspective that is trying to “protect us.” But we may be misinterpreting what its presence actually means. Without understanding why it’s really showing up, we can make the assumption that it’s about being found out, exposed or discovered, that we are less than what we presented ourselves to be or what we are capable of.
What if there’s a different reason impostor syndrome is showing up? What if fear is actually showing up to guide us in the right direction and to look at things we aren’t currently looking at? To pose questions we’re too scared to ask because we’re scared we don’t already have it figured out (with the assumption we should).
What if fear isn’t to be feared at all? What if it’s actually pointing us towards exactly where we would benefit from looking at? Fear holds more information for us than anything, and if we can begin to understand the insights it connects us to, we can use fear to our advantage rather than allowing it to stifle our success.
Fear is trying to protect us
We avoid things that we’re afraid of — so naturally, we haven’t spent much time talking about fear. It’s curious — something that has so much power over us, and we haven’t spent much time thinking about how it could be useful. We merely give our power over to it and let it “control” us.
If we look at fear through an ironic lens, our fear is literally showing us what is asking for our attention. Rational fear is trying to protect our survival. Irrational fear is trying to protect us from growing, because fear knows how to protect us in our current form. As soon as we grow, fear has to adapt to learn how to protect our newest version — and fear doesn’t like extra work!
Irrational fears, left unaddressed, can be destructive to all aspects of our lives — professional and personal. And when we examine fear’s gifts, we can see that it’s not about overcoming fear at all. We actually can’t overcome it. Fear is literally wired into our brains — specifically, our fear center, the amygdala. Whether we accept it or not, it impacts our decisions and judgments.
A client of mine recently came to me, experiencing impostor syndrome about project direction for their team:
What if it doesn’t go well?
What if this is the wrong problem?
What if there’s a new paradigm that’s coming that will make this irrelevant anyway
I have a hard time advocating for pivoting, and I don’t want to look bad to my team (and my company, too)
So rather than letting the impostor syndrome be the endpoint, we made it the throughway. We turned towards the fear to see what information it had for them. What was needed? Adaptability. A learning environment. The ability to involve the team in the process and enlist their investment in the very change this manager feared not handling well on their own.
Turn towards fear → Build in adaptability to the project road map
Set expectations with the team (upfront): Frame less as “let’s get this to work” → to “Is this approach promising?”
Fail fast. What is the experiment that would convince us this is a promising/not promising direction?
Create a playground for exploration
Invite people to flag/challenge/question — fostering an environment of curiosity, adaptability and empowerment
Conduct weekly inquiries
What is the main blocker to improving performance (towards the benchmark)?
Are there delays? If so, what do we think is causing them?
What surprised us?
What didn’t we see that we thought we would?
Action: How should we adjust our plans accordingly
Impostor syndrome was pointing them in the direction they needed to navigate this challenging time.
The goal is to understand the influence that fear has on us, stay intentional with how we engage it and listen to what fear is trying to show us. When we open to the gifts of fear, we can see it’s actually far from our enemy; It’s our ally in growth. That’s the key to not letting fear lead to self-doubt, such as being fearful of making mistakes or not speaking up.
In short, impostor syndrome is not intended to break us down. It’s actually asking for our consideration — to orient us to the most important thing we can look at — in service of our (or perhaps our teams’) growth. And the leaders who thrive are the ones who turn towards the impostor syndrome to see what information it has for them, rather than avoiding it.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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