Why Do I Feel Like a Fraud When I’m Actually Good at What I Do? Understanding Imposter Feelings at Work

You get the job. The promotion. The qualification. Someone tells you that you did something brilliantly.

For about twelve seconds, you feel pleased.

Then another voice appears.

They’ve overestimated me.I got lucky.Someone else would have done this better.Eventually they’re going to realise I’m not actually as good as they think I am.

Meanwhile, there may be quite a lot of evidence suggesting that you do, in fact, know what you’re doing. Qualifications. Experience. Positive feedback. Perhaps an entire career.

Your brain has reviewed this evidence and decided it would prefer to proceed with its original theory.

We commonly call this imposter syndrome, although technically it isn’t a syndrome at all. The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes originally described it as the impostor phenomenon, and it isn’t a mental-health diagnosis. It describes the experience of feeling fraudulent or undeserving of your achievements despite evidence of competence.

I think the terminology matters, because calling it a syndrome can make it sound as though there is something defective inside the individual that needs fixing.

Sometimes there is something else going on entirely.

Evidence doesn’t always change an old story

One of the frustrating things about self-doubt is how resistant it can be to evidence.

You can receive ten pieces of positive feedback and become completely preoccupied with the one slightly ambiguous comment at the bottom. You can be promoted and decide they must have been short of candidates. You can complete years of training and still feel that everybody else somehow knows the secret version of the profession that you’ve failed to discover.

This is partly why simply telling somebody to “believe in yourself” rarely transforms anything.

Our beliefs about ourselves have histories.

If you grew up being criticised, compared with other people or feeling that achievement was what made you valuable, success may come with enormous pressure to maintain it. If you learnt that mistakes resulted in humiliation, getting something wrong at work might feel like far more than simply getting something wrong. It can feel exposing.

Perfectionism can add another layer. If your internal standard for being competent is never making a mistake, never needing help and always knowing what to do, then almost everyone is going to feel fraudulent eventually.

Because real competence doesn’t look like that.

Competent people ask questions. They get things wrong. They change their minds. They occasionally open an email they sent three minutes earlier and discover a typo that apparently survived seventeen rounds of proofreading.

Expertise doesn’t make you omniscient. Unfortunately.

Sometimes the doubt did not originate entirely inside you

This is the part of the imposter conversation that I think deserves much more attention.

We can be very quick to locate the problem inside the person experiencing it.

You need more confidence. You need to own your achievements. You need to recognise your worth.

But what if you have repeatedly been given messages suggesting that you don’t quite belong?

Research increasingly questions approaches that treat imposter feelings purely as an individual problem, particularly for people from marginalised groups. Experiences of racism, discrimination, underrepresentation and being one of very few people like yourself in an environment can all form part of the context in which these feelings develop.

If you are continually mistaken for someone more junior, talked over in meetings, questioned more heavily than colleagues, or find yourself entering spaces in which very few people share your background, “Do I really belong here?”may not have appeared out of thin air.

I think disability can create something similar.

From lived experience, I know there can be a strange tension between knowing your own capabilities and being aware that other people may make assumptions about them before you’ve said a word. When you’ve repeatedly had to demonstrate that you are capable, independent or professionally credible, proving yourself can quietly become part of how you operate.

And proving yourself is exhausting, because the finish line has an annoying habit of moving.

Neurodivergent professionals can encounter another version of this. Someone may be exceptional at complex strategic thinking, incredibly creative or highly knowledgeable in their field, yet struggle with admin, time management, remembering small tasks or initiating something apparently straightforward.

That unevenness can be confusing.

How can I be genuinely good at my job if I can’t even remember to reply to that email?

Quite easily, actually. Human ability is not distributed in one convenient straight line.

But if you’ve spent years being told that your inconsistencies mean you are lazy, careless or “not reaching your potential”, achievement may never feel completely safe.

Confidence isn’t the absence of doubt

This is where I think counselling and coaching can meet quite nicely.

Counselling might be interested in the history of the voice saying “you’re not good enough”. Whose voice does it sound like? What experiences strengthened it? What happens emotionally when you make a mistake? Why does being competent feel so important?

Coaching may ask a slightly different question: What are you not doing because you’re waiting to feel confident enough first?

Because there is a trap here.

We can decide that once we finally feel sufficiently confident, then we’ll apply for the promotion, speak in the meeting, increase our prices, lead the project, start the business or put ourselves forward.

But confidence often arrives after doing things rather than before them.

You act while uncertain. You survive it. Your brain acquires new evidence. You do it again.

This doesn’t mean forcing yourself relentlessly outside your comfort zone or pretending fear isn’t there. Sometimes self-doubt contains useful information. Perhaps you genuinely need more experience or preparation. Good coaching shouldn’t simply shout “Believe in yourself!” over legitimate developmental needs.

The skill is becoming better at distinguishing “I’m not ready” from “I don’t feel ready.”

Those statements sound remarkably similar but can lead to very different careers.

Perhaps you don’t need to get rid of the voice

There is an idea I particularly like from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: we don’t necessarily have to eliminate an unhelpful thought before we can stop organising our behaviour around it.

That changes the goal.

Instead of spending years attempting to silence the voice saying “Who do you think you are?”, you might become more interested in whether you have to obey it.

You can notice that you feel like a fraud and still look at the evidence.

You can feel nervous in a room full of senior people and still contribute.

You can be newly promoted and not know everything yet.

You can accept praise without immediately explaining why the person giving it is mistaken.

And perhaps you can stop using every mistake as proof that the entire career was fraudulent after all.

There is another reason I like this way of thinking. Research around the impostor phenomenon is actually less tidy than popular psychology sometimes suggests. Prevalence estimates vary enormously depending on how it is measured, and a recent umbrella review found significant inconsistencies in how the phenomenon itself is conceptualised. The review also highlighted perfectionism, marginalised status and hierarchical workplace cultures among the contextual factors associated with it.

So perhaps we should be wary of reducing something so complex to “you have low confidence.”

Sometimes confidence does need strengthening. Sometimes old beliefs need understanding. Sometimes the environment needs examining. Often all three are interacting.

And maybe the aim isn’t reaching a point where you walk into every room completely certain of your brilliance. I’m not sure that would be particularly healthy either.

Perhaps it is something quieter.

Being able to think, I feel out of my depth right now, but that doesn’t automatically mean I don’t belong here.

Being able to receive praise without cross-examining it.

Being able to make a mistake without treating it as an exposé.

And when that familiar voice asks, “Who do you think you are?”, perhaps confidence is not finally having the perfect answer.

Perhaps it is knowing that you don’t need to prove your right to be in the room every single time you enter it.

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I’m Emma, a BACP-accredited counsellor, EMDR practitioner and trained coach. I work with adults around confidence, self-esteem, perfectionism, neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness, burnout and professional development.

My work is psychologically informed and draws on both therapeutic understanding and coaching. Sometimes that means exploring where self-doubt came from; sometimes it means helping someone stop waiting for it to disappear before taking the next step.

I offer online counselling and coaching, including coaching for professionals and people moving into leadership or navigating change at work. You can contact me through my website to find out more.