You did the work. You trained, you qualified, and by any reasonable measure you are good at what you do. And yet there’s a voice that keeps telling you that you’re about to be found out – that the one critical comment from last week was actually the truth everyone else is just too polite to say. That voice has a name: imposter syndrome. And almost everything we’ve been told about how to fix it is wrong.
In this Quick Dip episode, Rachel shares a piece of feedback she received years ago from a colleague she’d never quite trusted. It was scathing, it was personal, and despite overwhelmingly positive responses from others who’d been in the same training, it was the only feedback she believed. She still feels it now.
And in working out why, she’s landed on something that changes the whole conversation: imposter syndrome, most of the time, isn’t really about confidence or competence. It’s about shame. Shame that says ‘I am something wrong’, not ‘I did something wrong’ – and that’s a fundamentally different problem requiring a fundamentally different response.
As Brené Brown’s research shows, shame cannot survive being spoken. This episode is Rachel saying it first. Because if it frees up even one person to stop performing confidence they don’t feel and start doing the work they’re here to do, it’s worth it.
