For years I thought being able to fit in anywhere was my superpower.
I could walk into a room and read it in about four seconds. Adjust the accent a bit. Find the right jokes. Work out which version of me this lot would be most comfortable with, and then be that version.
And it worked. It got me jobs, friends, contracts, the lot.
And then I'd have a birthday party.
Because a birthday party is the one day everybody turns up at once. School friends in one corner, work people in another, family somewhere else. And I'd spend the whole evening moving between the corners, running a slightly different personality in each one, with a different voice and different jokes.
I found birthdays stressful for years and had no idea why. Then one year it clicked. It wasn't the party. It was that I had a hundred different relationships with a hundred different people, and a hundred different versions of myself to keep up, and for one evening they were all in the same room.
It's exhausting being the person other people want you to be, and it's much less draining being the person you are.
The radar was built somewhere.
But the interesting question is where that skill came from in the first place.
And here's the link I was slow to see.
If you've spent years being the version of you the room seemed to want, then some part of you always knows there's a gap between the person in the room and the person on the drive home. And a gap like that comes with a fear attached. That one day, somebody will look properly, and see it.
That fear has a name you already know. Imposter syndrome.
For many of us, we didn't get that good at reading a room by being welcomed into rooms. We got that good at it from having been made to feel small in them.
Maybe, somewhere a long way back, you learned the atmosphere could turn without warning, and the safest thing was to see it coming.
Maybe it turned up in your working life, and you were the youngest person there, or the only woman, or the only person who looked like you.
Maybe it turned up in your childhood, where love and warmth arrived when you performed well, and went quiet when you didn't.
Whatever your version was, you may have built yourself an early warning system. And it was a sensible thing to build. It probably worked. The trouble is a system that good doesn't switch off when the room is safe. It keeps scanning. And when there's nothing in the room to scan, it turns around and scans you.
Which is why the evidence doesn't work.
The standard advice, mine included, is to keep the receipts. Save the kind emails. Keep a folder of the things that went well. Then when the imposter feeling turns up, go and read the folder.
That advice is fine when the problem is forgetting.
But someone I taught in class this week showed me where it fails, without meaning to. She's training for a fifty kilometre race. She's done more 10Ks, half marathons, and trail races than she can count. And she said she doesn't feel like a real runner, because she occasionally walks the hills these days.
Then when she really looked at it again, she realised that a few years ago, when she didn't walk the hills and ran the whole way, she didn't feel like a real runner then either.
So the bar was never a bar. It moved with her. It's been moving the whole time.
And you can't out-evidence a moving bar. Every finish line just resets it a bit further out. Which makes the folder of receipts a great tool aimed at the wrong problem. It helps with the wobble. It doesn't do much for the feeling buried underneath.
So, three things instead.
1. Correct the grammar.
When the voice says you're a fraud, catch it and change one word. Not "I'm a fraud." Instead: "I'm having the thought that I'm a fraud." Not "I don't belong here." Instead: "I'm having the thought that I don't belong here."
Say it silently, or out loud if there's nobody about. Do it even if you don't believe a word of it, because believing it isn't the job.
So you're in a meeting, about to speak, and the sentence arrives: “any minute now they're going to realise I've no idea what I'm doing”. In the first version you're standing inside that sentence, and there's nothing to do with it except believe it. In the second version you're holding it, at arm's length, having a look at it. Same thought, completely different position.
Why it works: you can't argue with the second sentence, and that's the point of it. It's simply true. You are having that thought. So there's nothing to defend and no case to build. It's a technique called cognitive defusion, from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by the psychologist Steven Hayes, and it has decades of research behind it. It doesn't make the thought go away. It changes where you're standing in relation to it, and that turns out to matter more.
2. Write down the rule you're being measured against.
Underneath the fraud feeling there's nearly always a rule, and you almost certainly wrote it yourself.
Finish this sentence on paper: "A real 'blank' would 'blank'."
“A real coach would never need to look at their notes”. “A real writer would write every day”. “A real manager would know the answer without having to ask”. “A real mother would enjoy every minute of it”.
Write it in the exact words your head uses, not the tidy version you'd say out loud. They're always more brutal on paper than they sound inside, and that's the useful bit.
Then ask one question. Would you apply that rule to anybody else? Would you tell the woman training for the fifty kilometre race that she isn't a real runner because she walks one or two of the hills? Of course you wouldn't.
Why it works: the psychoanalyst Karen Horney called this the tyranny of the 'shoulds', the private rulebook we write for ourselves and then quietly live under. And the reason these rules survive so long isn't that they're harsh. It's that they're invisible. You never said yours out loud, so nobody ever got the chance to tell you it was silly. Writing it down is the first time it's been out in the open where it can be looked at.
And that, by the way, is the evidence that works. Not the list of your achievements. The fact that you're running a rule on yourself you wouldn't impose on another person for a second.
3. Check whether evidence moves it.
Once you've found the rule, this last tool tells you whether a rule was ever the problem.
Next time you get the thing, the qualification, the promotion, the good review, don't just enjoy it and move on. Wait a few days. Then check the dial. Is the fraud feeling lower than it was before?
If it's dropped, brilliant. You were new, you learned the thing, and the feeling was doing an honest job. It was accurate, and now it's finished.
If it's sitting at exactly the same level it was a fortnight ago, that's the result that matters. It means the feeling was never about competence, and the next certificate won't touch it either.
I ran this test on myself about five years too late. I got my qualification to teach mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and I felt legitimate for roughly four days. Then it wore off, and I decided the real problem was that I wasn't certified at level two. And then the next thing, and then the next…
I've a fair few letters after my name now, FYI 😅
And here's the thing I know: I was exactly as good a teacher the day after that qualification as I was the day before it. Nothing about my teaching changed. Not one thing. The only thing that changed was a feeling, and it changed it for four days. At one point I seriously looked into doing a PhD. Years of work and a great deal of money, so I might finally feel allowed to stand in front of a room.
Why it works: when Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described this pattern in 1978, the thing that struck them was that the people carrying it already had the evidence. Objective, external, undeniable evidence, and it made no difference whatsoever. So this test isn't about whether to do the course or get the credentials. Do the course, if the work needs it. It's about what you're expecting the course to fix.
The tools don't reach all of it.
And if none of that touches it, that's worth knowing too.
Because sometimes the fraud feeling has nothing to do with the room you're standing in. Sometimes being the version people wanted was the only way you were ever sure of being welcome, and no ten-second test is going to shift that. That one doesn't move for a tool. It moves slowly, over years.
But you don't have to have finished that work before you're allowed to turn up as yourself this week. You can be halfway through it, or barely started, and still let one room see the actual you.
And if the whole thing comes back to visit at two in the morning, wanting to go through every room you've ever misjudged, this is the one I'd put on 👇🏾
Have a wonderful week!
With love,
Chibs 💙
▶ Watch: Feel Nothing But Floating Bliss | For Exhausted Minds and Bodies
