I recently moderated a panel on imposter syndrome at a women’s leadership conference.
The stories shared were all too familiar. Accomplished professionals talked about the nagging feeling that they didn’t quite belong. Leaders wondered whether they were truly qualified for the roles they held. Every participant on the panel shared that at some point in their career, they worried they would be “found out” as less capable than others believed them to be.
Most of us know that version of imposter syndrome. At one point or another, we’ve all questioned ourselves. We’ve all wondered whether we were ready for the opportunity in front of us.
As I listened to the conversation, however, I found myself thinking about a different kind of imposter syndrome. One that receives far less attention but, in my experience, is just as common.
Unlike the traditional version, this one doesn’t show up as insecurity.
It shows up as confidence.
It wears business attire. It speaks confidently in meetings. It knows the right words to use and the right people to align with. It understands the unwritten rules of organizational life and has become remarkably skilled at navigating them.
From the outside, it looks like leadership.
Yet, over time, something feels off. You can’t put your finger on it, but you definitely feel it.
You’ve probably experienced this.
You’re having a conversation with a peer or leader at work. They’re polished. They use all the right words and seem to know all the right people. They possess that elusive quality we often call executive presence.
Yet you leave the interaction feeling like you don’t really know them. Their delivery felt scripted, as though you were watching a performance rather than having a genuine conversation. They seemed to be acting rather than relating.
You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but you left with what my teenage daughter would call “the ick.”
There’s a name for it…
The Imposter
In his book, Abbas Child, Franciscan priest Brennan Manning described what he calls the Imposter, a false self built around the need for approval and acceptance. According to Manning, the Imposter suppresses feelings, manages perceptions, and works tirelessly to maintain an image that others will admire.
His description here is striking:
“Living out of the false self creates a compulsive desire to present a perfect image to the public so that everybody will admire us and nobody will know us.”
Everybody admires us.
Nobody knows us.
This is the unfortunate trade off-when we lean into our false self.
As I’ve reflected on this, I’ve come to believe that many leaders aren’t wrestling with a lack of confidence. They’re wrestling with a loss of connection to themselves. Somewhere along the way, the persona they created to succeed stopped being a tool and became the primary way they related to other people.
The result is that people are no longer relating to the person. They’re relating to the persona. Over time, we may begin doing the same.
I call this Persona Syndrome.
Persona Syndrome occurs when a carefully crafted public identity begins to replace authentic self-expression. The goal is rarely deception. Most people are not trying to fool anyone. Rather, they are trying to gain acceptance, preserve relationships, maintain credibility, and navigate environments where success often depends on being perceived positively.
The problem is that adaptation has a way of becoming identity.
Persona Syndrome is the gradual replacement of authentic self-expression by a carefully managed public identity that becomes the primary way a person relates to others.
At first, we learn what gets rewarded. We discover how to sound more executive, more polished, and more strategic. We learn which emotions are acceptable and which are best kept private. We become increasingly skilled at reading the room and adjusting accordingly. These skills are valuable. In many cases they help us advance.
But over time something subtle can happen. The focus shifts from expressing conviction to managing perception. Instead of asking ourselves what we believe, we begin asking ourselves what will land well. Instead of speaking from our values, we begin speaking from what feels safest.
The persona becomes so familiar that we stop recognizing it as a persona at all and begin confusing it with who we are.
One of the reasons Persona Syndrome can be so difficult to recognize is that it often works to our advantage. Organizations reward people who appear confident, composed, and politically astute. Leaders who know how to navigate complexity and project certainty are often promoted. From the outside, everything appears to be going according to plan.
Yet this success is rarely satisfying.
I’ve worked with leaders who promoted quickly, gained influence, built impressive careers, and achieved significant financial success, yet they still carry a persistent sense that something is missing. They continue striving for more. Each accomplishment brings a brief sense of relief, only to be replaced by a new target. The next promotion. The next opportunity. The next accomplishment.
From the outside, it looks like ambition.
But I’ve come to recognize it’s often something else.
They are not simply pursuing achievement. They are pursuing reassurance. Reassurance that they matter. Reassurance that they are relevant. Reassurance that they are worthy. Reassurance that they belong.
The problem is that reassurance has a very short shelf life. It may quiet our doubts for a moment, but it rarely resolves them. As a result, many high achievers find themselves caught in a cycle of striving without satisfaction, continually searching for external evidence of something they have never fully come to believe about themselves.
Achievement can produce success. Reassurance is what we hope success will give us. Unfortunately, it rarely does.
The cost of leading and working this way extends beyond the individual. When leaders operate primarily from a persona, they unintentionally create environments where others begin doing the same. Conversations become more careful. Feedback becomes more filtered. People start offering safer ideas and telling leaders what they think they want to hear.
Trust weakens. Candor declines. Connection suffers.
Eventually, leaders lose access to what they need to know because they have signaled, often without realizing it, that image is more important than the truth.
The Cost of Being Someone Else
Physician and author Gabor Maté offers an important explanation for why this happens.
In his book When the Body Says No, Maté argues that many people learn early in life that attachment is more important than authenticity. To preserve connection with parents, caregivers, or teachers, young people learn to suppress parts of themselves and become what the environment needs them to be, be it at home, school, or church.
The adaptation works. The child keeps the relationship and the feeling and fact of belonging. The challenge is that what begins as a survival strategy often becomes an identity.
Decades later, the strategy remains remarkably similar. We continue reading the room, managing perceptions, and suppressing thoughts or feelings that might threaten acceptance. Only now it looks like professionalism.
This is why I believe the Imposter Manning described is best understood as a trauma-informed self. It developed for a reason. At one point it helped us stay connected, accepted, valued, or safe.
The Imposter served a purpose. It helped us survive. In many cases, it may even have helped us succeed. The challenge is that adaptations that help us survive are not always the same adaptations that help us thrive. At some point, the strategies that once protected us can begin limiting us.
One of Maté’s central observations is that the stress associated with suppressing ourselves does not disappear simply because it remains unspoken. The mind may ignore it. The body does not.
Viewed through this lens, burnout is often about more than workload. Certainly, long hours and constant demands take a toll. But, I find many leaders are exhausted for another reason as well. They are spending enormous amounts of energy maintaining a version of themselves that no longer serves them.
Burnout may be, at least in part, the cost of spending years being someone other than yourself.
It is difficult to feel energized when so much of your energy is devoted to performance. It is difficult to feel connected when you are constantly managing impressions. It is difficult to feel fulfilled when your deepest motivation is earning approval rather than expressing who you are.
This is what makes Persona Syndrome so costly. The very strategy that once helped us gain acceptance can eventually distance us from ourselves, and, ironically, others as well.
The Path to Alignment
The good news is that the Imposter is not who we are. It is an adaptation, and what was learned can be unlearned.
I use a simple (but not easy) three step process with clients: Recognize, Release, and Return.
Start first by recognizing the pattern. Notice those moments when we are managing perceptions instead of expressing conviction. Become aware of the times when approval is driving decisions and when protection is taking precedence over candor or connection. Notice those times when we feel insecure and how you react. It is often in those moments when we feel less sure of ourselves that the Imposter comes to the forefront.
From there, we begin the work of release. We let go of the belief that our worth depends on maintaining a particular image. We stop treating every interaction as a performance review and start engaging with people more honestly.
Part of this process requires reconnecting with our feelings. Many high achievers become exceptionally skilled at thinking about their emotions while remaining disconnected from actually experiencing them. One of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves is deceptively simple: What am I feeling right now?
Not what am I thinking.
Not what do I think I should feel.
What am I actually feeling?
Mindfulness (being fully present in the moment without judgment) can be helpful here because it anchors us in the present moment. It helps us notice how we are showing up rather than becoming consumed by how we are being perceived. Mindfulness enables us to observe our feelings without being consumed by our feelings. Here is an example of how to cultivate mindfulness.
Eventually, we arrive at the final step: return.
Or, for some people, discover.
Much of the conversation around authenticity assumes there is a true self waiting underneath the persona, ready to be rediscovered. For some people, that is exactly the case. They can remember a time when they felt more connected to who they were before years of adaptation caused them to stop acting in the service of their true self.
That was the case for me years ago. I was a full professor at a university, writing obscure articles that few would read, all the while, diminishing the importance of teaching, because “real professors” do scholarship, not teach.
But, that was not the real me. That was a persona I adopted to be successful in academics. So when I had the opportunity to leave the university and join a company where I would be building leadership development programs to deploy globally, I jumped at the opportunity. In that moment, it felt like coming home to myself, which incidentally, is my definition of authenticity: “The process of coming home to ourselves.”
For others, though, there is no clear self to return to. The adaptation became so effective, and often started so early, that self-discovery never had much of a chance.
In those cases, the work becomes one of discovery rather than rediscovery. It becomes a process of learning what matters most to us and who we want to be. Identifying the values that guide our decisions and separating what we genuinely want from what we have been conditioned to pursue.
One of the most gratifying parts of the work I do is help people explore their values and how they differ from goals. Goals tell us where we want to go. Values tell us how we want to live. Goals can be achieved and checked off a list. Values become a compass that helps us navigate decisions long after a particular goal has been reached.
The danger isn’t that people don’t know us.
The danger is that we stop knowing ourselves.
As we become clearer about our values, something begins to shift. Decisions become easier. Boundaries become healthier. We spend less energy trying to become who others want us to be and more energy becoming who we want to be.
This is also where an experienced coach can be invaluable. One of the challenges with Persona Syndrome is that we are often the last person to see it. The patterns have become so familiar that they feel normal. A skilled coach can help identify blind spots, challenge assumptions, and provide an objective perspective that helps us distinguish between who we have learned to be and who we are at our best.
As I think back to that panel discussion, I’m reminded that many conversations about imposter syndrome focus on helping people believe they are more capable than they think they are.
That is important work.
But I suspect there is another challenge many of us face.
The challenge is not believing we are capable.
The challenge is remembering who we are underneath the persona we built to succeed.
The Imposter may help us gain approval. It may even help us achieve success. Fulfillment asks something different of us. It asks us to close the gap between the person we have become and the person we truly are.
The goal is not perfection.
The goal is alignment.
For some of us, that means returning to parts of ourselves we left behind. For others, it means discovering who we are for the first time.
Either way, the work is the same: to close the gap between the person we have become and the person we truly are or truly want to be.
This is where true fulfillment lives. It is also where we are most effective at work and in life.
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