Impostor Syndrome at Work: Why Capable People Doubt Themselves

You are offered a promotion and your first thought is that the panel must have misread something. A client thanks you warmly for a piece of work and you assume they are being polite. A colleague asks for your advice, you answer it well, and then you spend the evening reviewing the conversation for the moment you were found out.

Impostor syndrome — more precisely described as the impostor phenomenon — was first written about in the late 1970s by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who noticed that a great many capable, well-qualified people privately attributed their success to luck, timing, hard work or personal charm rather than to ability. It is not a diagnosis and it is not a character flaw. It is a pattern of thinking, and patterns can be looked at honestly.

The gap between competence and conviction

What makes the experience so persistent is that it rarely shows up as underperformance. It tends to show up instead as over-preparation for meetings that require very little preparation; reluctance to apply for roles until every criterion is met several times over; difficulty delegating, because handing work over means someone might see how it is really done; discomfort with praise, which is absorbed briefly and then discounted; a habit of explaining success by circumstance and failure by character; and a quiet, cumulative tiredness that colleagues almost never see.

“They will realise eventually.”

It is important to distinguish ordinary professional humility from the impostor pattern. Humility is accurate — it knows the limits of its own knowledge and is comfortable saying so. The impostor pattern is inaccurate in a specific direction: it consistently reads evidence of competence as evidence of successful concealment.

The difficulty is not a lack of achievement; it is an inability to let achievement count.

At Trio Well-Being, impostor syndrome is something I support people with regularly through online therapy, and it arrives most often not in a crisis but at a promotion, a career change, or the first month of running something of one’s own.

How workplaces feed the pattern without meaning to

From my experience, people sometimes assume these feelings are entirely internal — a matter of confidence to be sorted out privately. Working environments, however, shape them considerably. Feedback that appears only when something has gone wrong teaches staff that silence is provisional rather than reassuring. Promotion without a proper handover asks people to perform a role they have not yet been shown. Unclear expectations leave everyone guessing at a standard nobody has stated aloud.

Remote and hybrid working can sharpen this further, not because distance is harmful in itself, but because the incidental evidence of belonging — the small nod after a meeting, the passing thanks in a corridor — largely disappears. In small businesses, where one person may hold several roles at once, it is genuinely common to feel under-qualified in each of them simultaneously.

It is also worth noting that being the only person of one’s background, age or route into the profession in a given room makes the question “do I belong here?” a reasonable one to ask, rather than a distortion to be corrected.

What actually helps

Reassurance alone has a short half-life. Praise is metabolised in minutes by someone convinced it was extracted under false pretences, which is why “but you are very good at your job” rarely resolves anything for long.

What tends to help more is specificity. Naming the pattern out loud removes much of its authority. Separating observable evidence from interpretation — what happened, and what you concluded about yourself from it — slows the automatic leap between the two. Managers who are willing to describe their own uncertainty in a measured way give their teams permission to be learning rather than pretending. And organisations that offer feedback routinely, rather than only correctively, remove a good deal of the guesswork.

For the underlying material — early messages that approval was conditional on achievement, or that being found lacking would be catastrophic — online therapy at Trio Well-Being offers a non-judgemental space in which those origins can be explored at a sensible pace, alongside the practical demands of a current role.

For businesses, the takeaway is straightforward enough. The people most affected are frequently among the most conscientious you employ, and the cost appears as unclaimed promotions, unshared workloads and avoidable burnout rather than as poor performance. Addressing it is not a wellbeing gesture; it is retention.

And if any of this sounds familiar to you, the feeling is far more widely shared than your colleagues let on. You have earned your place.