You didn’t choose the patterns running beneath your confidence. But you can be the one who finally changes them.
When she was promoted to VP, she didn’t celebrate. She explained it away.
Her boss had moved into another role, the seat opened up, and in her mind she had simply been next in line. So she began behaving like a guest in her own job. In meetings where her voice mattered, she held back ideas she believed in. When it came to delegating, she handed her team the interesting projects and kept the tedious work for herself, as if she owed rent on a title she didn’t feel was hers.
She knew she was capable. She had the track record to prove it. And still, she felt as though she was about to be found out.
Telling yourself to be confident doesn’t work
Most advice about impostor syndrome operates at the level of thought. Track your wins. Reframe the story. Remind yourself of your credentials. This advice isn’t wrong. It’s just insufficient, because it’s aimed at the wrong layer.
Your mind can hold two things at once: I know I’m capable, and I feel like I’m about to be found out. That gap between knowing and feeling is not a logical error. It’s a protective response, and it doesn’t take instructions from your thinking mind. The shrinking affects your thinking, but it doesn’t live there. It lives in your body: your breath, your shoulders, the way you walk into a room that feels like it’s measuring you. And if being seen has ever registered as risky, that response will make you smaller in exactly the moments that matter most.
Where the pattern comes from
Some of these patterns come from our own lives: an early family rule about not taking up space, a boss who punished visibility, a first job where speaking up cost something. And some, I’ve come to believe, are older than we are.
I learned this firsthand. For more than a decade, I taught finance to over 5,000 professionals, and I loved standing in front of a room. Yet the first time I joined Toastmasters and was asked to tell a story about my own life, I froze. My whole demeanor changed. Speaking about finance was easy; speaking about myself felt unsafe, and I couldn’t explain why.
When I finally looked closely, the pattern was simple: it isn’t safe to share your personal story. And knowing my family’s history, it made sense. In the 1940s, my great-grandfather was taken from his home in Siberia for telling the wrong joke to the wrong person, and he never came back. His twelve-year-old daughter, Valentina, the grandmother whose name I was given, was made to denounce him in order to stay in school. My family learned, at a very high price, that being seen has consequences.
Researchers are still studying how stress responses may pass from one generation to the next, and I can only speak to what I’ve seen in my own life and in my clients’. But I was born decades later, into a different life, and that lesson had still found its way to me. Freedom in the world doesn’t automatically mean freedom in the body.
The part of you that holds back is trying to protect you
The young part of you that shows up in high-stakes meetings isn’t sabotage. She’s protection. At some point she learned, or inherited the knowledge, that being too visible, too much, or too loud was dangerous. Her job was to keep you safe, and she’s still doing it.
The work isn’t to silence her or override her. It’s to meet her, and to let the adult woman in you offer her the safety she never had. When that happens, she doesn’t need to run the show anymore. She becomes part of the team rather than the one at the wheel.
In my coaching, we don’t start there. We start with your goals and your strategy, and we look underneath only when something keeps getting in the way. But when the obstacle is a feeling that you don’t belong in a room you clearly earned, this is usually where it lives.
What becomes possible
For my client, the change was night and day. We worked on how she prepared and held herself in the room, on what she told herself in the minutes before she spoke, and on the old belief underneath it all. She came to know, not just intellectually, that she had more than earned her promotion. When she spoke in meetings, people listened. Her leadership noticed, and within six months she was being invited to speak both inside her company and at outside events.
For me, the proof is the article you’re reading. The woman who froze at Toastmasters could never have written it. Now I share what I can, because I’ve seen how much it helps when someone else names what you’ve been carrying quietly.
If you’ve ever felt that you don’t fully belong in the room you worked so hard to enter, or frozen when it was time to speak up for yourself, that response may not be entirely yours. And you can be the one who finally changes it.