Imposter syndrome at work: signs, causes and how to beat it

Imposter syndrome at work is the persistent feeling that you don't deserve your achievements and that, sooner or later, someone will find out you're not as capable as you seem. It shows up even when the evidence says otherwise: strong results, a promotion, clients who keep coming back. It's a very common thinking pattern, and it isn't a clinical diagnosis.

The good news is that you can work on it with concrete habits. In this guide, you'll learn how to spot it, why it happens, which strategies help you build confidence and how the different ways to train that confidence compare.

What imposter syndrome is (and what it isn't)

Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term in 1978. They called it the "impostor phenomenon" and described it in high-achieving women who, despite their success, felt like frauds. Over time, it became clear that it can happen to anyone, in any role.

Two things are worth clearing up:

• It isn't an illness or a disorder. You won't find it in diagnostic manuals. It's a way of interpreting your own achievements.
• It isn't the same as a real skill gap. If you're missing a specific skill, what you need is training. Imposter syndrome kicks in when the skill is there, but you don't believe it.

Signs of imposter syndrome at work

See whether several of these sound familiar:

• You credit your wins to luck, timing or the idea that "the project was easy."
• You over-prepare for everything, afraid any mistake will show.
• You have a hard time accepting praise: you play it down or change the subject.
• You avoid asking for help because you think it would reveal what you don't know.
• You hesitate to apply for a job unless you meet every single requirement.
• You compare yourself with the top people in your field and always come up short.
• When something goes well, you feel relief more than satisfaction.

Having some of these reactions now and then is normal. The warning sign is when they become the way you usually experience work.

Why it happens

There's no single cause, but there are moments when it tends to show up more strongly:

• New challenges: a promotion, a new company, your first team to manage or going freelance.
• Perfectionism: if your bar is "zero mistakes," any normal result feels like a failure.
• Highly competitive workplaces or ones with little feedback, where you're never quite sure what people think of your work.
• Feeling different from the group: being the youngest person in the room, the only one with your background or the first in your circle to get there.

How to overcome imposter syndrome: 7 strategies

The realistic goal is to stop letting doubt make your decisions for you. These strategies work best when you combine them and repeat them.

1. Keep a wins log. Every week, write down what you solved, what positive feedback you got and what you learned. When doubt shows up, you'll have the facts on hand.
2. Separate what you feel from what happened. "I feel like I'm not good enough" is an emotion; "the client renewed" is a fact. Naming them separately takes the edge off.
3. Catch your automatic thoughts. Lines like "I just got lucky" or "they're going to find out" are often distortions: you overgeneralize, guess what others are thinking or discount the positive. Question them the way an outsider would.
4. Swap "perfect" for "good enough." Before you start, decide what a solid result looks like, and stop when you get there.
5. Ask for specific feedback. Instead of "How did I do?", ask "What would you keep and what would you change?" Specific answers are harder to brush off.
6. Talk about it. Telling a trusted colleague or a mentor often reveals that you're far from the only one who feels this way.
7. Train the skills you doubt. The most solid confidence comes from practice: the more often you handle something, the less room there is for doubt.

Try this today: write down three things you did well this month and, next to each one, which part was down to you. If the answer is always "nothing," that's the imposter talking.

Ways to build professional confidence, compared

Each option helps in a different way. Here's what you can expect from each one.

If the distress is intense, lasts for weeks or affects your sleep, your health or your life outside work, reach out to a mental health professional. A course gives you tools, but it doesn't replace that kind of support.

Where Game Strategies fits in

In the health and wellbeing category, you'll find training games that work on exactly the levers we've covered:

• The Show Plus (45 min): positive thinking on a TV game show. You learn to recognize automatic negative thoughts and common cognitive distortions, and to turn them into more rational, functional interpretations. It also helps you tell healthy positivity from toxic positivity.
• DEX (2 h): the foundations of emotional intelligence: recognizing and regulating what you feel, motivating yourself and communicating assertively.
• S.O.S (90 min): managing emotions in a survival story at sea, with techniques to understand what you feel before you react.

If self-doubt comes with a new role or a rough patch, Lotus (105 min), in the change management category, works on self-awareness, self-control and flexibility. We cover it in our guide to resilience at work.

They're all included in the Serious Games Catalog + Admin license: €299 per person per year (VAT included), with access to all 71 games in the catalog, nothing to install and on any device. Each course ends with a certificate of completion you can add to LinkedIn, which also makes a nice addition to your wins log. The honest take: the game gives you a space to practice without fear of getting it wrong, but confidence really takes hold when you apply what you've learned in your actual job.