Imposter syndrome at work: how to stop feeling like a fraud

You might have a promotion, good figures, or colleagues who keep asking you for help. With imposter syndrome, you put good results down to luck or good timing, and you think people who praise you are just being kind. Another achievement rarely fixes imposter syndrome, as you'll put the next achievement down to luck too.

You may sit in meetings and hear a colleague say something you already knew, with much more confidence than you'd have said it. Sounding confident is a habit some people have, and sounding confident doesn't mean they know more than you. You also only hear your colleague's final answer, and you don't hear the doubts they had beforehand.

Confidence makes a real difference to careers. When 2 people do equally good work, the person who talks about their work clearly is usually the one who gets noticed. Talking clearly about your own work is a skill you can practise, and talking about your work gets easier as you start to believe in your work.

Each new role brings things you haven't done before, and doing new things brings back the feeling that you don't know enough. Feeling out of your depth in a new role is normal, and the feeling doesn't mean you aren't good enough.

Keep a list of what you've done. Write down real things you've achieved, with the details. When you doubt yourself, a written list of your achievements is easier to believe than the feeling that you're a fraud.

Ask yourself whether you're the right person to work something out. Instead of 'am I certain I can do this task?', ask 'am I the right person to work this task out?' Hardly anyone is certain they can do a new task, and being the right person for a task mostly means being willing to learn as you go.

Change what you say to yourself. Most people with imposter syndrome have one short thought that keeps repeating, such as 'I've been winging it and it'll catch up with me'. General confidence tips rarely change that one thought. Hearing kinder, truer words about your own situation every day helps you change that thought, and we built Build Your Inner Voice to give you those words.

Calm yourself before big moments. Self-doubt is usually strongest the night before a presentation or just before a difficult conversation. A 5 minute reset that slows your breathing and reminds you what you're good at helps you start the presentation or conversation feeling calmer.

I'm working on improving my confidence at the moment and my track is certainly helping. I listen every day and look forward to it, the affirmations are inspirational and the ocean waves are really soothing.

Joanne, UK · verified review on Trustpilot

One track is a good place to start, and one track is enough for a lot of people. Membership gives you new personalised tracks whenever you need them, a weekly affirmation, a 30-day challenge for the area you want to work on, 5 minute resets for the moments before a big meeting or conversation, and a 66 day planner to help you build a daily habit.

See what membership includes. Membership is £30 a month, and you can cancel any time.

If you manage people, some of your best people probably have imposter syndrome. You might notice someone who stays quiet in meetings even though they know the answer, someone who over-prepares for everything, or someone who doesn't apply for a promotion they'd be great at.

A workplace membership gives each person on your team their own private membership. Managers also get a tool to help plan a team session on topics like confidence. You get a simple monthly report with totals for the whole team, showing how many people are using their membership (once 3 or more people have) and whether they say the membership is helping (once 5 or more people have answered). You can see which email addresses have claimed a membership, so you can hand memberships out and take them back, and that list is for organising memberships, and is not a record of who has used one. You never see whether a named person has used their membership or what anyone writes, so your team can be honest about what they need help with and are more likely to use their membership.

See workplace memberships: £15 per person a month for teams of 5 to 9, £14 per person from 10 people and £13 per person from 20.

Would you like Build Your Inner Voice through your job? Ask your workplace to offer Build Your Inner Voice, and we'll write the message to your workplace for you.

A Build Your Inner Voice track is a personalised affirmation and subliminal audio track. You choose how clearly you hear the affirmations, from spoken out loud to fully subliminal, and you choose the background sound.

Every order goes through an automated safety check before we make the track, and a person reads some orders first. If a track isn't the right kind of support for someone, we tell them and give a full refund. Your track helps you hear kinder, more accurate things about yourself every day, until you start to believe them. Your track isn't therapy or medical care.

Written by Sylvia, the founder of Build Your Inner Voice, a psychology graduate with nearly 20 years of leading teams, who has had imposter syndrome for most of those years.