When did being good at your job stop feeling good enough?
There is a strange thing that can happen as you become more successful. You imagine that eventually you will reach a point where you feel as though you know what you are doing. Perhaps it will happen when you get the qualification, the promotion, the new job or when somebody asks you to speak at an event. You tell yourself that when you reach that point, you will feel different: more confident, more legitimate and more certain that you deserve to be there.
And then you get there, and somehow the goalposts move again.
I know this feeling well. I am a Health Psychologist. I have a doctorate. I have taught university students, conducted research, spoken at events and worked alongside people with far more impressive CVs than mine. There is plenty of evidence available to me that I am reasonably good at what I do. And yet there have still been moments when I have entered a room and wondered whether somebody is going to realise that I am not quite as knowledgeable, experienced or impressive as they thought I was.
I don't think I am alone in that.
Success doesn't always cure self-doubt
We often imagine confidence as something that naturally follows competence. Learn more, gain experience, achieve something and become more confident. Sometimes that happens, but human psychology isn't always quite so straightforward. You can become very skilled at what you do while simultaneously becoming very skilled at explaining away the evidence that you are good at it.
Positive feedback becomes they were just being nice. An invitation to speak becomes they probably asked lots of people before they got to me. A promotion becomes I was lucky. Something goes really well and our attention immediately turns towards the one part we could have done better. Even qualifications that took years of work can quickly become well, lots of people have qualifications.
The evidence keeps arriving, but somehow it never quite gets admitted into the case for the defence.
The moving goal post problem
I think one of the most difficult things about imposter syndrome is that the standard required to finally feel “good enough” can keep changing. We tell ourselves: when I finish this qualification, I'll feel credible. When I get this job, I'll feel established. When I have more experience, I'll feel confident. When I have more clients, I'll feel successful. When I'm earning more, I'll feel like my business is real. When I get invited to do that thing, then I'll know I've made it.
But every time we reach the marker, we create another one. Achievement becomes something to move past rather than something to absorb.
That matters because there is a difference between wanting to grow and believing that your current self is perpetually inadequate. Ambition can be wonderful. Wanting to learn, improve and stretch ourselves can take us into rooms and experiences we never imagined possible. But if every achievement simply becomes the minimum requirement for the next one, when exactly do we allow ourselves to recognise how far we have already come?
Maybe confidence doesn't have to come first
There is another assumption I find interesting: that confident people feel confident before they do difficult things. I'm increasingly unconvinced that this is how it works.
Some of the most important things I have done in my life have involved uncertainty. I haven't always entered the room thinking, Excellent, I am unquestionably the most qualified person to be here. Sometimes I've entered thinking, Right. Apparently we're doing this. And then I've done it.
Perhaps confidence isn't the absence of self-doubt. Perhaps sometimes it is being willing to act without waiting for your internal critic to issue formal approval. That distinction matters, because if we wait until we feel completely ready, completely qualified or completely certain that we belong, we may spend a very long time waiting.
Who taught us what “good enough” looks like?
I also don't think we can understand imposter syndrome entirely by looking inside the individual. That is something I keep returning to in my work as a Health Psychologist. People don't develop their beliefs about themselves in a vacuum. Our confidence is shaped by our experiences, our environments, the messages we have received and the spaces we have had access to.
And I think this becomes particularly interesting when we consider identity. As a disabled South Asian woman, I know what it is like to enter professional spaces where very few people share my background or lived experience. When you don't often see people who look like you, sound like you or have experiences like yours represented in positions of expertise, leadership or influence, perhaps it isn't surprising that questions about whether you truly belong can become louder.
That will not be everybody's experience, and identity is complex. But I think we need to be careful about treating imposter syndrome purely as an individual confidence problem without asking what might be happening around the person too. Sometimes the question isn't simply, “Why don't I feel like I belong here?” It is also, “What has this environment done to make belonging feel uncertain?”
Who gets recognised as an expert? Whose confidence is rewarded? Who has had to work harder to be taken seriously? Who enters a room already seeing plenty of people like themselves reflected back at them and who doesn't?
Sometimes we are very quick to tell an individual to “work on their confidence” without becoming curious about the environment in which that confidence developed. That doesn't mean our beliefs about ourselves cannot change; they absolutely can. But it does mean that self-doubt is not always evidence of an individual psychological deficit.
Context matters. Identity matters. And belonging matters.
Start collecting the evidence
Perhaps one of the things we can begin doing differently is noticing how readily we accept evidence of our shortcomings compared with evidence of our competence. If something goes wrong, how long do you think about it? If something goes well, how quickly do you dismiss it? When somebody gives you positive feedback, do you absorb it or explain it away? When an opportunity comes your way, do you see it as evidence that somebody values what you bring, or immediately start constructing alternative explanations for why they chose you?
I'm not suggesting we all need to become convinced that we are exceptional at everything. That isn't confidence either. There will always be things we don't know, skills we need to develop, people who know more than us and mistakes we make. Being able to recognise those things is part of professional growth.
But acknowledging what you still need to learn does not require you to erase everything you already know.
You can be a work in progress and still be good at what you do. You can want more and still recognise what you have already achieved. You can feel nervous in a room and still belong in it.
Perhaps the next time the goalposts start moving, it is worth stopping before immediately chasing them again. Look backwards for a moment. Look at the evidence. Think about all the previous versions of you who once hoped to reach some of the places you now occupy.
And ask yourself:
When did being good at what I do stop being enough evidence that I might actually be good at what I do?
Want to explore this a little further?
If some of this feels uncomfortably familiar, I've created a free Imposter Syndrome Quiz to help you explore how these patterns might be showing up for you.
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