The voice that never goes away

I’ve always had a voice in my head. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it shouts.

“You’re not good enough.”

“You’re not smart enough.”

It turns up in meetings and in the middle of pitches.

Last month, it turned up while I was giving a talk.

I was showing around 20 founders how to build and launch their first MVP, every pair of eyes on me.

I’ve built and launched MVPs more times than I can count.

But the voice got louder anyway.

“Why should these people even trust you?”

More common than anyone admits

Imposter syndrome is real, and it’s far more common than most of us let on.

A review of 62 studies covering more than 14,000 people found it in anywhere from 9% to 82% of them, depending on how it was measured.

And it started with high achievers. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described it after noticing that highly successful women kept reporting an intense fear of being found out.

That made sense to me the moment I read it.

Comparison starts early

For a lot of us, high achievement is programmed in from a young age.

At home, we’re compared to siblings and other kids: “Am I better than them?”

At school, we’re ranked and graded: “Can I get better marks than them?”

At university: “Am I smarter than them?”

At work: “Can I get more done than them?”

The comparison never really stops. If you’re always pushing your own limits, the easiest baseline is other people.

I’ve written about self-doubt before. That’s the nerves that come with doing something uncertain, before you have any proof it’ll work. Imposter syndrome is something else. It shows up even when the proof is there, like it did at my MVP talk. Clance and Imes described it as “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness.”

And for high achievers, that voice often carries a second message:

“You need to get better.”

The research points the same way. A study of 242 leaders found impostor feelings were most closely tied to perfectionism, especially worrying about mistakes.

It has a cost

I’m not saying this is healthy.

The same review found imposter syndrome often comes with depression and anxiety, and is linked to burnout and poorer job performance.

But the leaders study found something else too. Impostor feelings didn’t stop people from succeeding. They mostly made success feel worse.

That’s the part I can work with.

What I’m doing with it

The voice keeps me honest. It pushes me to improve. It stops me getting complacent.

So from now on, when I hear it:

I’ll acknowledge it, sometimes even out loud.

I’ll recognise that it’s tied to my drive to get better.

And I’ll respect the care it brings to my work, without letting it run the show.

Maybe imposter syndrome isn’t just self-doubt.

Maybe it’s the quiet voice that keeps high achievers moving forward. The trick is keeping it in the passenger seat.