Impostor syndrome
You've been promoted. You're leading a team, sitting in rooms you used to look up to, and on paper, you're succeeding. And yet there's a quiet, persistent voice that says you don't quite belong there, that you got lucky, that sooner or later someone will notice you're not as capable as they think. At middle and senior levels, impostor syndrome often gets louder rather than quieter, because the stakes are higher, the scrutiny is sharper, and the comparisons, to peers, to predecessors, to some imagined version of a "real" leader, never really stop.
It shows up in familiar ways: over-preparing for meetings you're more than qualified to lead, deflecting praise instead of letting it land, saying yes to more than you can reasonably carry because saying no feels like confirming the doubt. Often, it isn't really about competence at all. It's an old story, usually formed long before any career began, about what you have to do, or prove, to be allowed to belong.
In therapy, we don't just try to "think positively" past these feelings, because that rarely holds for long. Instead, we look at where the story actually came from: what success meant in your family, what you learned about being seen, praised, or criticised, and how those early experiences are quietly shaping how you read your current role. Once that pattern is named, it loses some of its grip. You start to be able to separate the evidence of your actual track record from the old, automatic feeling that it doesn't count.
The goal isn't to convince you that you're "good enough," a phrase that rarely changes anything on its own. It's to help you build a more honest, durable relationship with your own competence, one that doesn't collapse the moment something goes wrong.