If you’ve ever sat in a meeting waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and say “we know,” this article is for you.
You got the job. You passed the exam. People ask for your opinion. And still there’s a quiet voice that says it was luck, or timing, or that everyone else simply hasn’t noticed yet. Researchers usually call it the impostor phenomenon (they spell it with an “o”), and it isn’t a medical diagnosis. It’s a pattern of thinking. That’s good news, because patterns can be changed.
Below are 21 practical ways to loosen its grip. Each one comes with the evidence behind it and something small you can do this week. Some of the research is about you. Quite a lot of it, as you’ll see, is about the places you work in.
1. Call it what it is (and notice how common it is)
The first move sounds almost too simple. Name the feeling. Swap “I’m a fraud” for “this is an impostor thought.”
Naming helps partly because the feeling thrives on secrecy, and the numbers make secrecy hard to justify. When the recruitment firm Hays surveyed more than 8,000 employees, 64% said they had struggled with imposter syndrome at work, and a quarter said they felt it often (reported by People Management, May 2025). Women reported it more than men, 70% against 58%, and people in their twenties more than people over 50. A separate national survey of 1,000 full-time US workers, run by MyPerfectResume through Pollfish in December 2025, found that only 25% said they never experience self-doubt at work.
So if you feel like the only impostor in the room, you are statistically very unlikely to be right.
Start small: the next time the thought shows up, label it out loud or on paper. “Impostor thought, Tuesday, before the client call.” That’s it.
2. Spot your version of the impostor cycle
Imposter syndrome tends to run in a loop, and once you can see the loop you can step out of it.
A 2025 narrative review by Abdullah Al Lawati and colleagues at Sultan Qaboos University, published in Middle East Current Psychiatry, lays out the cycle as it’s usually described. You face a task. You respond by over-preparing or by procrastinating. The task goes fine, you feel a brief flash of relief, and then you fail to take the success as your own. Fear returns, ready for the next task.
Here’s why the loop is so sticky. If you over-prepared, you credit the success to the overwork, not to your ability. If you procrastinated and pulled it off at the last minute, you credit it to luck. Either way the conclusion is the same: “I got away with it again.” Nothing gets banked, so the next challenge feels just as dangerous as the last one. The link between these behaviours and impostor feelings is well described but mostly correlational, so treat it as a useful map rather than a proven law.
Picture this (a hypothetical): you spend four evenings on a ten-minute update that needed one. Your manager says it was clear and useful. Your brain files it under “only because I spent four evenings.” Next month, you spend five.
If procrastination is your side of the loop, these strategies to beat procrastination pair well with this one.
Next time, do this: before your next task, decide in advance how much preparation is enough, write the number of hours down, and stop when you hit it.
3. Check the feeling against your actual results
Feeling like a fraud and performing like one are different things, and the research says so fairly clearly.
Basima Tewfik of MIT Sloan tracked what she calls workplace impostor thoughts, the belief that others overestimate your competence. In her 2022 paper in the Academy of Management Journal, employees at an investment firm who reported more of these thoughts were rated by their supervisors as more interpersonally effective two months later, with no drop in productivity. Physicians in training who reported more impostor thoughts were rated by patients as more empathetic and better listeners. Two experiments with workers across industries suggested the effect was causal: the thoughts made people more focused on others. Tewfik is careful to add that the thoughts also lowered self-esteem, so this is not a reason to keep them. Her 2025 review with co-authors Yip and Martin in Academy of Management Annals argues for using that narrower definition so research can be clearer about what helps.
Impostor thoughts aren’t a gift. They’re just a poor measure of how you’re doing. When you check the feeling against real outcomes, such as deadlines met, feedback received or problems solved, the two often don’t match. Draw two columns on a page tonight, “what the thought says” and “what actually happened this month,” and fill each with three lines.
4. Treat the alarm like a smoke detector, not a verdict
A smoke detector can’t tell burnt toast from a house fire. It reacts to smoke, full stop. The racing heart before a presentation works in a similar way: it reacts to stakes, not to whether you’re actually unqualified.
That’s where the analogy holds. Here’s where it breaks: sometimes there really is a fire. Some gaps are real (more on that in item 14), so the aim is to check the alarm, not to rip it off the ceiling.
The checking part has some evidence behind it. In a 2014 set of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School had people say “I am excited” or “I am calm” before stressful tasks. In the public-speaking study, 140 participants prepared a speech, and those who said they were excited were rated by judges as more persuasive and competent. On a maths task, the excited group scored about 8% higher. The study is over ten years old, so it’s worth knowing about the newer test. A direct replication published in June 2025 in Psychology of Language and Communication found the same boost in self-reported excitement, but no difference in how observers rated the speeches. So reframing reliably changes how the nerves feel. Whether it changes how you come across is less certain.
If your nerves show up in your posture, these tips on body language in communication can help with the visible part.
Give it a go: before your next nerve-heavy moment, say “I’m excited” once, quietly, and notice whether the feeling shifts from threat toward challenge.
5. Keep your high standards, drop the need to look flawless
Perfectionism gets blamed for imposter syndrome a lot. The research says it depends on which kind.
In a 2025 meta-analysis in the Journal of Research in Personality, Hill and Gotwals pooled 25 studies with 12,141 participants. Perfectionistic strivings, the drive to set high goals and work hard toward them, had only a small link with impostor feelings (r = .15). Perfectionistic concerns, the fear of mistakes and of being judged, had a large one (r = .61). The authors concluded the overlap comes mainly from the need to appear perfect to others. These are correlations across studies, so they show which part of perfectionism travels with impostor feelings, not which one causes them.
That’s a useful split. You don’t have to lower your standards. You have to stop treating every piece of work as a public exam that you might fail.
A quick experiment: take one goal for this month and rewrite it. “Nobody can find a single flaw in this report” becomes “this report answers the three questions my manager asked.”
6. Say the quiet part to someone you trust
Most workplaces run on what one survey called confidence theater: everyone acting sure, nobody admitting doubt. That silence feeds the feeling.
In the December 2025 MyPerfectResume survey of 1,000 US workers, 66% said they feel pressure to look more confident or knowledgeable than they are, and 65% said their leaders rarely or never talk openly about their own doubts or mistakes. A March 2026 survey of 1,000 professionals in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain by MyPerfectCV found something similar: only 7% said leaders mention their struggles regularly. Both are online surveys by a career-services company, so take the exact percentages loosely. The direction is hard to ignore, though.
If you manage people, you have more power here than you might think. A leader who says “I had a real impostor moment in that board meeting” gives everyone else permission to stop pretending. It’s one of the more underrated qualities of a good boss.
Your move: tell one trusted colleague about a recent impostor moment, in one sentence, and see what they say back.
7. Figure out which type of impostor you are
Imposter syndrome doesn’t look the same in everyone. Valerie Young, co-founder of the Impostor Syndrome Institute, describes five “competence types,” each with its own idea of what being competent means. In a survey of nearly 2,000 European workers that the career platform Kickresume ran with Young’s input (reported in May 2025), here’s how people sorted themselves:
| Type | What it believes | Share of respondents |
|---|---|---|
| The Perfectionist | Competent means flawless | 32% |
| The Expert | Competent means knowing everything first | 32% |
| The Soloist | Asking for help means you’re not competent | 16% |
| The Superhuman | You have to excel in every area of life | 11% |
| The Natural Genius | If it doesn’t come easily, you’re not good at it | 9% |
The types are a framework, not a diagnosis, and the survey is self-reported. Still, knowing your type tells you which rule to break. Soloists might practise asking for help. Natural Geniuses might practise being slow at something new on purpose.
Read the table, pick the row that made you wince, and write down the rule that row lives by. That’s the rule you’ll start bending this week. If you want to go deeper on how habits of thinking shape who you become, see this guide on how to develop your personality.
8. Talk to yourself like you’d talk to a struggling friend
This one sounds soft. The data says otherwise.
In a national survey of 1,225 US doctoral students published in November 2025, Brian Clarke and Michael Hartley’s study in Frontiers in Psychology found that self-compassion explained a meaningful extra share of anxiety, depression and loneliness on top of impostor feelings. When self-compassion was added to their models, the link between impostor feelings and these outcomes shrank by 47% to 75%, and the link with loneliness disappeared altogether. It’s a cross-sectional study, so it shows a strong association rather than cause. But there’s experimental support too: Liu, Wei and Russell reported in the Journal of Counseling Psychology in 2023 that a four-week self-compassion programme for 227 college students reduced impostor feelings and maladaptive perfectionism.
Self-compassion isn’t letting yourself off the hook. It’s dropping the internal shouting so you can actually look at what went wrong. If your inner critic is especially loud, this piece on how to stop hating yourself goes further.
Test it this week: after your next mistake, write two sentences to yourself in the voice you’d use with a friend who made the same mistake.
9. Keep a “receipts” file
Imposter syndrome depends on a particular accounting trick. Successes get credited to luck, timing or other people, so they never land in your column.
Here’s the chain, step by step. Something goes well. You explain it away. Because you explained it away, no evidence of your ability gets stored. When the next challenge comes, you look for proof that you can handle it and find nothing, which feels like confirmation that you got lucky last time. The 2025 Al Lawati review describes this outward attribution of success as a core feature of the phenomenon. No study I found has tested a receipts file specifically, so this is reasoning from the mechanism rather than a proven intervention.
There’s a small sign in recent data that the gap between perception and reality is real. In the March 2026 MyPerfectCV survey, 67% of employees said their successes came entirely or mostly from skill, and yet 51% felt like they were faking it at least sometimes. Eighteen percent said they respond to self-doubt by downplaying their achievements.
Here’s a simple way in: create one note on your phone called “Receipts.” Every Friday, add one thing you did well, one piece of positive feedback, and your own part in it.
10. Ask for feedback that’s specific enough to use
Silence is a vacuum, and impostor thoughts rush in to fill it.
When Kickresume asked its nearly 2,000 European respondents what would reduce their imposter syndrome (May 2025), 51% said regular performance feedback. In the 2026 MyPerfectCV survey, a lack of feedback or recognition was named as a driver of self-doubt by 29% of workers, just behind comparing themselves with high-achieving peers at 32%. These are self-reports of what people think would help, not trials, but they point at something you can actually control.
Vague questions get vague answers. “How am I doing?” usually earns “fine.” “What’s one thing I did on the Henderson project that you’d want me to keep doing?” earns information you can file. This guide on how to ask for feedback from your manager has more scripts.
Next time, do this: ask one person one question about one piece of work, and write the answer in your receipts file.
11. Get support from outside your bubble
Talking helps. Who you talk to matters more than you’d expect.
Richard Gardner, Jeffrey Bednar, Bryan Stewart, James Oldroyd and Joseph Moore studied students in a demanding professional training programme, publishing in the Journal of Vocational Behavior in 2019. In interviews with 20 trainees, reaching out to people outside the programme, such as family, friends from other fields and professors, seemed to ease impostor feelings. Reaching in to classmates in the same competitive group often did the opposite. A follow-up survey of 213 trainees backed this up, and impostor feelings showed no significant link with actual performance. The study is from 2019 and I didn’t find a newer replication, so it’s best read as a strong lead rather than a settled rule.
The likely reason: people inside your bubble share your yardstick, so they can’t help you see past it. Someone outside it sees the whole of you, not only the part being graded this month. Tonight, send a message to someone who knows you outside work and has no stake in your performance, and tell them what’s been on your mind. If you’re out of practice at that kind of talk, these tips on how to have a good conversation with anyone are a decent warm-up.
12. Look at the room, not only at yourself
Most advice treats imposter syndrome as your problem to fix. Some of the most interesting recent research says the workplace deserves a share of the blame.
Sanne Feenstra, an organisational psychologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, explained in a 2025 VU news piece that people are more likely to feel like impostors where colleagues have to compete hard for promotions or recognition, and that the effect showed up across gender, age and background. Her co-author Michelle Ryan, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at the Australian National University, put it bluntly: “These findings challenge the idea that impostor syndrome is a personal flaw.” Earlier work points the same way. Melis Muradoglu and colleagues surveyed 4,870 US academics across more than 80 fields for a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology (2022). In fields seen as prizing raw brilliance, women and early-career academics reported stronger impostor feelings.
This matters because it changes the question you ask. “What’s wrong with me?” now has company: “What is this place rewarding?” If you’re thinking about what kind of workplace suits you, our Work section covers it from several angles.
Your move: list three things your team praises in public. If all three are about beating colleagues, your impostor feelings may be telling you more about the culture than about you.
13. Stop measuring yourself against the highlight reel
Comparison is where the culture from the last item gets inside your head.
In Feenstra and colleagues’ six-study paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science (published July 2025, 1,288 participants in total), competitive climates raised impostor feelings partly by prompting more upward comparisons with better-performing colleagues. The cleanest test was Study 5. Researchers randomly asked 334 UK workers to imagine a teammate who consistently did better than them, or one who did worse. The upward group reported much higher impostor feelings, a large effect (d = 1.44). A 2025 study from Poland points the same way. Zuzanna Schneider and colleagues, writing in PLOS ONE with 1,001 participants, found that comparing your abilities with others, though not your opinions, helped explain the link between lower emotional stability and impostor feelings.
Online, the comparison is even less fair. You’re stacking your messy middle against someone else’s edited ending.
A quick experiment: for one week, mute or unfollow three accounts that reliably leave you feeling behind. A broader reset is covered in this piece on digital minimalism.
14. Close the gaps that are actually real
Not every doubt is an impostor thought. Sometimes you really are missing a skill, and pretending otherwise only keeps the alarm ringing.
When Kickresume asked what would help, the most common answer, at 55%, was more training or experience. In the 2026 MyPerfectCV survey, 24% named rapidly changing technology or job demands as a driver of their self-doubt. That second number makes sense. When the tools keep changing, everyone is a beginner at something, and beginners feel exposed.
The trick is to separate the two. An impostor thought is vague: “I’m not good enough for this job.” A real gap is specific: “I can’t build a pivot table without looking it up.” Vague fears don’t respond to effort. Specific gaps do. And if you’re learning something new, these active recall and spaced repetition methods help it stick.
Start small: write down one concrete skill you’re missing, then book 20 minutes in your calendar this week to work on it.
15. Teach someone what you know
It’s hard to keep believing you know nothing when you’ve just explained something clearly to another person.
The mechanism is fairly direct. To give advice, you have to pull knowledge out of your head, organise it and say it out loud. You hear yourself being competent. That evidence is harder to dismiss than a compliment, because you produced it. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach and Angela Duckworth tested something close to this in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science with 2,274 participants. People struggling with a goal, from studying to job-hunting, were more motivated by giving advice than by receiving it, and the boost came through raised confidence. In a field experiment, middle-school students who gave advice to younger pupils spent more time on homework over the following month. The study wasn’t about imposter syndrome itself, so treat the link as a reasonable extension rather than a tested treatment.
Offer to walk a newer colleague through something you do every week. Ten minutes is enough, and you’ll notice how much you know that you’d stopped counting.
16. Act before you feel ready
Nobody feels like a driver after the first lesson. You feel like a person sitting in a car, gripping the wheel too hard. The feeling of being a driver arrives later, after the hours, not before them.
The analogy holds in one important way: confidence tends to follow practice, not the other way round. It breaks down in another. Driving ends with a test and a licence. Most jobs never hand you a certificate that says “you’re officially qualified now,” so waiting for that feeling can mean waiting forever.
Plenty of people do wait. In the May 2025 Kickresume survey, 56% said they had turned down or missed out on opportunities because of imposter syndrome. When a job ad listed skills they weren’t sure about, 29% overthought it to the point of not applying, and another 16% didn’t apply at all. That’s a lot of qualified people filtering themselves out before anyone else has a chance to.
Give it a go: apply for one thing, pitch one idea or volunteer for one project this month that you’d normally talk yourself out of. If the stalling is the real problem, these tips on how to stop procrastinating may help.
17. Try coaching, ideally in a group
Some of the strongest trial evidence on imposter syndrome comes from coaching, and it’s more convincing than most.
Adrienne Mann, Tyra Fainstad and colleagues at the University of Colorado ran a randomised trial of an online group-coaching programme called Better Together, published in JAMA Network Open in October 2023. They enrolled 1,017 women physician trainees across the US. Over four months, impostor scores in the coaching group fell by 1.43 points, against 0.15 in the control group. It built on their 2022 pilot trial with 101 residents, which found a similar drop. A November 2024 systematic review in BMC Medical Education looked at six studies of online programmes for medical trainees, including two randomised trials that showed significant reductions, and concluded that formats with coaching and cognitive reframing look most promising. The limits are worth stating: these were mostly women in medicine, and the outcomes were self-reported.
You don’t need to be a doctor to borrow the structure: regular sessions, a trained coach, and other people working on the same thing.
Test it this week: look up whether your employer, professional association or alumni network offers group coaching, and sign up for one introductory session.
18. Join (or start) a group that admits it’s figuring things out
Here’s what this looks like when an organisation takes it seriously.
At Northumbria University in the UK, Kirstin Mulholland, David Nichol and Aidan Gillespie studied new lecturers on the university’s Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, publishing in the Journal of Further and Higher Education in 2023. Through interviews, they found that the newcomers’ impostor feelings came from many directions at once: dealing with students, learning the university’s language, its culture and its systems. The programme leaned on reflective practice and teaching methods built around learning together. What came out of it were communities of practice, peer groups that gave participants a sideways source of support instead of relying only on the hierarchy, and helped them build a more secure sense of themselves as academics. It’s a qualitative case study from one university, so it shows how this can work rather than how often it does.
That fits the wider picture. A March 2024 scoping review by Emma Para and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology mapped 31 intervention studies and concluded that educating people about the phenomenon and offering support in a group are the main levers that seem to work.
Here’s a simple way in: invite two or three people at a similar career stage to a monthly coffee with one rule, everyone shares one thing they found hard.
19. Protect your sleep and your off-switch
Imposter syndrome doesn’t stay at your desk. It follows you home and climbs into bed with you.
In the May 2025 Kickresume survey, 33% said impostor feelings disrupt their sleep and 40% said they respond to self-doubt by overworking. A small 2025 study of 56 medical residents in Brazil, published in the Brazilian Journal of Anesthesiology, found that higher impostor scores went with more emotional exhaustion (r = 0.48) and more depersonalisation (r = 0.54), two core parts of burnout. It’s a single-centre, correlational study, so it can’t say which comes first. Exhaustion probably makes the impostor voice louder, and the impostor voice probably drives the overwork that causes exhaustion.
Whichever way it runs, a tired brain is a worse judge of your own competence. Set a hard finish time on two weeknights, close the laptop, and notice whether the next morning’s doubts feel any quieter.
20. Coach yourself by name
Ethan Kross, a psychologist who directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, has spent years studying how we talk to ourselves. In a September 2024 TED@BCG talk, he described a tool he calls distanced self-talk: when you’re stuck in your own head, address yourself by your name and as “you,” the way you’d coach a friend.
His reasoning starts from what he calls Solomon’s paradox, after the biblical king who was wise about other people’s problems and much less so about his own. Most of us give better advice than we take. “Using your own name and you shifts your perspective,” Kross said in the talk, nudging you toward the calmer, advice-giving mode. It’s a natural partner to self-compassion and to the skills behind emotional intelligence.
For tonight: next time you catch “I’m going to mess this up,” rephrase it silently as “Anna, you’ve prepared, you know this material, you’ll handle the questions.”
21. Get professional help when it’s heavy
Sometimes self-help isn’t enough, and that’s not a failure either.
The 2025 Al Lawati review notes that the impostor phenomenon isn’t classified as a mental disorder, but that it’s closely linked with anxiety, depression and burnout. Among treatments, it points to cognitive behavioural approaches that challenge distorted thoughts, along with self-compassion work and support groups. Medication isn’t a treatment for imposter syndrome itself, but it may be considered when severe anxiety or depression sits underneath. The 2024 Para scoping review adds a caveat: interventions vary a lot, and the evidence for any single approach is still thin. That said, the general direction is consistent.
If impostor thoughts come with low mood most days, poor sleep for weeks, or dread that stops you functioning, book an appointment with your GP or a psychologist and describe it exactly as you’d describe it to a friend.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. A harsh piece of feedback, a new job or one bad presentation, and the old voice is back as if it never left. That’s normal, and it doesn’t mean the work didn’t count.
Progress here is lumpy. In a 2026 pilot study in Education Sciences, Itunu Hotonu, Kirstin Mulholland and colleagues ran a semester-long programme for 19 early-career academics. By the end, three reported less frequent impostor feelings, two reported more, and 14 saw no change on the scale, even though participants valued the peer support and said it reduced isolation. It’s a tiny sample, but it’s honest about something most advice skips: feelings lag behind effort.
How you respond to the slip matters more than the slip. In four experiments published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley found that people who took a self-compassionate view after a failure were more motivated to improve, not less. In one study, students who failed a hard vocabulary test and then received a self-compassionate message spent longer studying for the next one. The work is older but still widely cited, and the Clarke and Hartley findings from item 8 point the same way.
So when it happens, keep it simple. Name it (“impostor thought, it’s back”). Open your receipts file and read three entries. Then do one small, concrete thing from this list, today. If the day has gone sideways completely, these steps to turn a bad day around are a good place to restart.
Conclusion
Imposter syndrome rarely disappears in one go. What changes is how much it gets to decide for you. You can name it, check it against your results, keep receipts, talk to people outside your bubble and, when it’s heavy, get proper help. And you can remember that some of it belongs to the room you’re in, not to you.
Pick one item from this list, just one, and do it this week. Then come back for another. For more ways to build confidence that holds up under pressure, browse our Self Improvement articles.
