Listen to your imposter syndrome
Change roles enough times and imposter syndrome stops being an event and becomes the weather. I've learned to treat it as an instrument rather than a verdict: check the work, revisit the hard calls, keep learning. The trick is hearing the right message in it.
I’ve changed roles so many times that imposter syndrome stopped being an event and turned into weather. Every time I get the hang of a job, get things in order, and settle into knowing what I’m doing, it’s on to the next role and the floor drops out again. Network analyst, architecture, leading a team, building a security function, then running one. Each step resets me to the bottom of a learning curve I’d just convinced myself I’d finished climbing.
A long time ago I decided the feeling was useful and put it to work. It makes me check things twice. It sends me back through old decisions, the hard ones and the controversial ones, to confirm they were the right call and not just the call I wanted to make. When one turns out to have been wrong, I don’t sit in it. I correct course and make very sure I don’t make that mistake a second time. It’s a carrot most days and a stick on the bad ones, and either way it keeps me pointed forward.
What it has never become is “you can’t do this” or “you’re not good enough.” That’s the version that eats people, and I know I’ve been fortunate that mine never curdled into it. Mine stays a prod, not a verdict. There’s always something I could understand better, some piece I should lab until I get it instead of just reciting it, and the discomfort is what keeps me reaching for it.
The odd part is that I’ve felt like a leader my whole life. The family story has me as a barely-walking toddler on a trail in the woods, turning back to announce, “Follow me, guys.” At twelve I was in cadets learning words like morale and esprit de corps, ideas most people don’t meet until much later, if they meet them at all. Leading was never the part I doubted. The doubt was always about whether I’d earned the particular room I was standing in.
That came to a head recently in a room I had every reason to feel I’d earned: a gathering of senior security leaders, the kind of room you only get into once you’re running security at a certain level. I half-expected to be the least figured-out person there. What I found instead was that the polished executive who thinks he has it all figured out, sleeps through the night, and never second-guesses a decision doesn’t exist. Not in that room, not anywhere. The people I’d measured myself against were carrying the same uncertainty I was; they’d just gotten better at hiding it. The tier I thought I was failing to reach turned out to be a story I’d been telling myself.
The few who genuinely believe they have it all figured out worry me more than the ones who admit they don’t. Certainty like that is a plan that hasn’t met the enemy yet, and no plan survives contact. The leader who’s sure he has it covered is the one with nothing in reserve when the plan breaks and the punch lands. The point was never to feel figured out. It’s to stay ready for the part you didn’t plan for.
So I stopped wanting to be that person, because that person is either fiction or a liability. I don’t need to be the executive with everything handled and nothing keeping him up at night. I’m the one who can see the horizon and the path forward through the coming storm, and who’s honest that there’s a storm coming. That’s who I am, and it’s enough.
Imposter syndrome is worth listening to, because most of the time it’s trying to tell you something true: check that again, learn this properly, you’re not done growing. Just make sure that’s the message you’re taking from it, and not the lie sitting right next to it that says you don’t belong. It’s the same feeling carrying two very different messages. The whole skill is telling them apart.