It's Not Imposter Syndrome. The System Was Designed to Make You Feel That Way.
I was a confident child. Genuinely, naturally, sometimes inconveniently confident.
I had opinions. I shared them. I took up space loudly, enthusiastically, without much apology. Nobody had to coax me into a room.
But there were rules about how that confidence was allowed to show up.
Be polite. Be ladylike. Say yes. Do as you're told. Shocked looks when I answered back, not because I was wrong, but because girls didn't do that. I could take up space, but only within the approved dimensions of what a girl was supposed to be. Confident was fine. Too much was a problem.
And then there was my dad. He loved me I never doubted that. But when there was a disagreement, when I was certain about something my two older brothers disputed, the default position was theirs. Intellectually, their read on things carried more weight. Not because they were older, not because they were consistently right but because they were the boys.
I noticed. Of course I noticed. And I did what girls learn to do: I recalibrated. Not all at once, not consciously, but gradually. I learned which version of my confidence was acceptable and which version created friction. I learned that being right wasn't always enough. I learned to hold some of it back.
That's not a dramatic origin story. There was no single moment of being crushed. Just a slow, steady installation of limits delivered by people who loved me, in a world that didn't question them, long before I had the language to push back.
The problem with calling it imposter syndrome
The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. It described something real, the internal experience of feeling fraudulent despite clear evidence of competence. And for a long time, naming it was useful, I used the term a lot. It helped women recognise they weren't alone.
But somewhere along the way, the framing shifted. Imposter syndrome became something women had. A psychological quirk to be managed, coached away, journalled out of existence. The solution was always internal more self-compassion, more positive self-talk, more reframing.
Nobody asked why so many capable women were having the same experience at the same time in the same kinds of environments.
Here's what I think is actually going on.
When you spend your formative years being subtly and not-so-subtly told that your instincts are suspect, your confidence is presumptuous and your ambition requires justification, you internalise that. When you enter workplaces where the metrics of credibility were designed around a different kind of person, where the way you communicate is read as less authoritative, where you watch less qualified people advance with a confidence you've been trained to distrust in yourself, your nervous system responds accordingly.
That's not a syndrome. That's a sane response to an environment that has been sending you consistent signals.
Calling it imposter syndrome locates the problem in the woman. The problem is not in the woman.
What it actually costs
The self-doubt that gets labelled imposter syndrome isn't just uncomfortable. It has a material price tag.
It's in the job you didn't apply for because you only met 60% of the criteria, while the man who got it met 40%. It's in the salary you accepted without negotiating because asking felt presumptuous. It's in the idea you didn't pitch, the boundary you didn't set, the room you didn't walk into with the authority you'd actually earned.
It's in the years and for many women it is years, spent waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the internal signal that you're qualified enough, certain enough, prepared enough to stop hedging and just say the thing.
That signal was always going to be slow to arrive. You were trained to distrust it.
The second chapter shift
Something tends to happen to women in midlife that doesn't get talked about enough.
The internal regulator starts to loosen.
Not all at once. Not without effort. But the tolerance for performing doubt you don't feel, for making yourself smaller to keep others comfortable, for waiting for permission that was never going to come it drops. Significantly. Hello peri menopuase!
Partly it's experience. You have enough evidence by now that you're capable. The record exists. It's harder to argue with.
Partly it's exhaustion. The energy required to maintain the performance of being less than you are is considerable and at some point the cost outweighs the benefit.
And partly, if you do the work it's clarity. You start to see the installation for what it is. The rules you absorbed before you could question them. The systems that were built without you in mind and then handed to you as neutral. The confidence gap that was never a personal failing but a predictable outcome of being a woman in structures designed around a different default.
When you see it clearly, it loses some of its grip.
Not all of it. The installation runs deep and it doesn't uninstall cleanly. But you stop mistaking it for your personality. You stop calling it your syndrome. You start calling it what it is, conditioning and you start making deliberate decisions about which parts of it you're done with.
What this actually looks like in practice
It looks like applying for the role before you feel ready, because ready was always a moving target.
It looks like saying the thing in the meeting instead of saving it for the car park conversation afterwards where you tell your colleague what you actually thought.
It looks like negotiating. Not because it's comfortable, it usually isn't but because the discomfort of asking is smaller than the cost of not asking, compounded across a career.
It looks like taking credit. Fully. Without the reflexive deflection to the team, the timing, the luck.
It looks like trusting your own read on a situation, even when the room pushes back. Especially when the room pushes back.
None of this is about becoming someone you're not. It's about stopping the performance of being less than you are. Those are very different things.
You were never the problem.
The self-doubt you've been managing, the fraud feeling that arrives uninvited, the voice that says who do you think you are every time you try to move forward, none of that started with you.
It was handed to you, carefully and consistently, by a world that had a very specific idea about how much space you should take up.
You absorbed it before you had the language to question it. You've been enforcing it on yourself, often more rigorously than anyone around you would bother to.
That's what's worth examining. Not whether you have imposter syndrome. But which rules you've been living by, who wrote them, and whether you're still willing to let them run the show.
The Next Chapter Clarity Quiz was built for exactly this moment.
When you know something needs to shift but you're not sure where the block actually is, it shows you. Specifically. Which area of your life is most out of alignment, and where to direct your energy first.
Two minutes. Real clarity.
