Imposter Syndrome

Ever sat in a meeting with the fear, "Eventually, they’re going to figure out I have no idea what I’m doing."

You aren't alone. In fact, 70+% of high-achievers experience Imposter Syndrome. The paradox is that it rarely affects people who are actually unqualified—it disproportionately targets the people who care the most. 

In this episode, I'll break down the psychology of why we feel like frauds, how to identify which of the "5 Imposter Archetypes" is holding you back, and actionable strategies to shut down that inner critic, both in your career and your personal life.

If you’re tired of feeling like your success is just luck or that everyone else is ahead of you, this episode is for you.

#impostersyndrome #imposterarchetypes 

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Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29th! ✨

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses imposter syndrome on her podcast, emphasizing its prevalence with up to 70% of people experiencing it at some point. She outlines five types of imposter syndrome sufferers: perfectionists, soloists, natural geniuses, experts, and superheroes. Sara suggests overcoming it by tracking achievements, reframing "I don't know" as an asset, and allowing team members to make mistakes. She highlights the importance of gratitude and acknowledging one's efforts. Sara also addresses the impact of social media on self-perception, advocating for redefining competence and embracing uncertainty. She concludes by promoting her upcoming book, Simply Dag.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Imposter syndrome, Dag Hammarskjold, psychological pattern, self-doubt, perfectionism, natural genius, expert, superhero, brag book, social media, competence, fear, growth, uncertainty, gratitude.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com And now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in today. I will be doing another crossover episode between my two daytime podcasts, so for Decoding the Unicorn, this will be episode 47 but if you're tuning in also through the Causey Consulting podcast, welcome. Welcome. Today I'm going to be talking about imposter syndrome. Now that's a pretty popular phrase in today's world, probably most, if not all, of you have heard it, but I want to talk about why this has been on my mind. Back in 1953 in his journal, Dag wrote maturity, among other things, not to hide one's strength out of fear, and consequently live below one's best. There are several different ways that we could interpret that, but being in this kind of middle-aged part of my life, even though I hate the phrase middle age, just for ease of use, being in my 40s, going through a pretty transitional period in my life, emotionally, spiritually, biologically, etc. The way that I interpret this, at least, touches on the idea of imposter syndrome, and here's the reason why. Sometimes we feel like we have to hide. I'm not good enough, I'm not able, I don't feel smart enough. Somebody else is better than me. They run the race faster, they're prettier, they're taller, they're younger, they're whatever, or older, they're wiser than me. Whatever it is, we could go on all day long comparing ourselves to other people, but I love how Dag says, "Don't hide your strengths out of fear and don't live below your best. This also, I think, is applicable within an organization, because sometimes we think I'm a mid-level manager. There are three managers above me, and other people below me. I'm just stuck in the middle. I can't really affect change at this place, or there may even be a CEO who says, even though I'm supposed to be the top banana, in reality the shareholders and the board of directors are above me. The buck doesn't actually stop with me. I have people that I have to listen to as well. None of that, in my opinion, absolves us from trying our best. It's easy. It's the cowardly way out to say, well, I just don't have the abilities. I just.. there's too many people besides me. What do I have to say that's any different? What could I do that's any better? And then you wind up having a rather ho-hum existence. Who gets to their deathbed and says, I really wish that I had played it small. I wish that I had just stayed hidden, not tried anything new, not had any novelty or fun experiences in life. I wish I had just stayed on the sidelines like a non-playing character and just let everybody else in life have the fun. Probably nobody feels that way when you get to the end of the line. So, what I want to talk about today is what is imposter syndrome, and then how do we overcome it in both personal and business settings, how can we like Dag talks about not hide our strengths, not live below our best, even if it feels like other people are doing it better or faster or more amazingly, even if it feels like when we're at work or within an organization we're not the top banana. How do we make our best effort. Stay tuned.

Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold was awarded Best Biography at the 2026 American Book Fest International Book Awards in Los Angeles. Sara's follow-up project, Simply Dag: The Private Man in a Public and Dangerous Office, will be available anywhere Amazon books are sold on July 29th. And now back to the show.

What is imposter syndrome? Well, if we want to take a more conventional, almost dictionary type definition, we could say that imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern where people doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments, and they have a fairly persistent internal fear that they're somehow going to be exposed as being a fraud or as being not good enough. Speaking more colloquially, it can be something like a little voice in your head, I call mine the gremlin, this little gremlin inside your head that's like you just got lucky, you were in the right place at the right time. Somebody did you a favor, it could have been anybody. There's nothing special about you, and one of these days everybody's gonna find out that you're nothing to write home about. All human beings, to some degree, have this, but some people allow it. Really, overcome them, it's a phenomenon, and it's an experience, and it's also super common. There have been some studies that say that up to 70% of people experience it at some point in their life. I would argue the number is probably closer to 100 I guess, unless somebody is a total narcissist and they think they really are God's gift to humanity all the time, I dare say, most people have had something happen, a promotion, a special gift, an amazing relationship, and they think, "Whoa, can I handle this? Am I good enough for this? Do I deserve it? And there's also a success paradox to this. Ironically, it rarely affects people who are actually unqualified. That's a, that's another kind of almost funny point about all of this, because if somebody has, has truly stumbled their way into something, almost like blind luck or dumb luck, they're probably not even aware of it. It's almost like they're blithely going along. I'm thinking of the tarot card of the fool, where he has his little hobo bindle, and he's just strolling along, about to step off a cliff, and he's just like imposter syndrome tends to not impact people who are actually unqualified, which is kind of funny, I'm thinking also of the film from the 90s, The Hud Sucker Proxy. I plan on doing an episode about that on my nighttime broadcast, The Conservancy Theories, probably before the month of July is out, because I recently watched that movie and Tim Robbins' character is this sort of, he plays the guy as a deliberate simpleton who gets promoted to be the CEO of this massive company in New York, and he just goes along with it, because it's like to him, oh, okay, I'm promoted as CEO, cool. So he's not suffering from imposter syndrome, it tends to disproportionately affect high achievers, perfectionists, and conscientious people because they care. They care about the quality of their work. They want to try to do the best possible job wherever they go. So, there have been five types of imposters, or imposter syndrome sufferers. I guess we could say this is according to a framework developed by Dr. Valerie Young. So one type is the perfectionist, and my hand is in the air. I call myself a recovering type A personality, and there are still times when I really have to tell myself I like, I have to give myself an adult timeout and say it doesn't have to be perfect. It's never going to be perfect. You are a human being, a fallible human being living on planet earth. You're a skeleton in a meat suit on a rock hurling through space. Get a grip. It's not perfect, and it's never going to be, but the perfectionist tends to think if it's not 100% perfect, if it's not flawless, if it's something that cannot possibly be criticized, then I have failed. The soloist is another one, and I have been guilty of this one too. These people feel that they have to do everything on their own, and it could be because they think nobody else is good enough to do it to their standards, right. I'm thinking of Fraser Crane, you know, when he decided in one of the episodes to put on a radio drama, and all of the actors quit. He even, and Niles, who was his own brother, decided, I cannot do this anymore.

He started popping balloons to kill off characters on the radio broadcast because Frasier had driven him nuts, so you can be a Frasier Crane type. I have exacting standards, and nobody can do this to my exacting standards. Therefore, I must do it myself. There are other people, though, who feel like if I ask for help, it's a sign of weakness. It makes me look like I'm pitiful, it makes me look frail if I can't do this on my own. Another category would be the natural genius people, for whom things tend to come easy. They were always good at school, maybe they always shined with their athletics, like there was not a sport that they couldn't play. So they kind of feel like if I have to work hard, if I'm struggling to understand the material or to get good at a new sport, it must be because I'm incompetent. Things have typically come so easy that if it's now a struggle, then I feel like I screwed up somehow. Another would be the expert. These people are always looking for another certification, another training, another degree, another class, because there's never going to be a threshold of feeling like they're qualified or educated enough, and last but not least, the superhero, this person feels like they have to be the best at every single role that they wear, the worker or the business owner, the. Entrepreneur, the parent, the partner, the brother, the sister, on and on. If they don't feel that they are the best in every single role, they must be a failure. So, how do we overcome this in business as well as personal settings? I'll tackle business and professional settings first. One thing you can do is track your own data, make a brag book or a brag file, because our brains tend to be biased towards negativity. We tend to remember things that we feel that we fouled up, as opposed to remembering the wins, but you can counterbalance that by keeping a notebook that can be a Word document on your computer, if you'd rather not physically write, it doesn't matter, it can be screenshots or nice emails, whatever. When, whenever doubt starts creeping in and telling you all you do is screw things up, you don't deserve a promotion because you don't do anything right. That nagging little evil gremlin, he starts barking at you. It's like, well, wait a minute, that's not true. Look at all the people that I helped, look at my book sales, look at this awesome email that I got, look at this compliment that my boss gave me. You want to be able to clap back whenever that gremlin is telling you, oh, you don't do anything right, you can't do this, and you can't do that, and this is just terrible. There's another tactic that I have started using, because there would be times that I would sit down, I would be so tired, like I would have been writing or editing or proofreading, and after you do that, your brain feels like Jello, because it's like you've made so many micro decisions, and you've agonized over, does this really feel authentic to the character? Or I'm not really sure that this phrase is exactly right. Something doesn't feel right here, or you're trying to proofread to a standard, like Chicago Manual, and you're like, "Oh God, what's even the current thing right now? They change it, and then you don't know. And it used to be that an ellipsis looked like, looked like this, and now it looks like that. Your brain is tired, and I would start to feel like, did I do anything today? So, what I started doing was not so much a brag file, but like a here's a recap of all the things that I did today, and whenever I started actually saying it out loud or writing it down on a note card, it was like, no wonder I'm tired. Look at all the things that I actually did, and it helps. You just want to have some ammunition, so that when the gremlin starts barking, you have a way to silence him. You can reframe "I don't know" as being an asset in business. Pretending to know everything is actually dangerous, however, we tend to see loud extroverts, most of all.

Okay, in my opinion, and in my experience, it's the loud extroverts, and pretty typically beyond that, it would be the loud neurotypical extroverted male, kind of the Western world standard that we're told is supposed to be the boss of everybody, that tends to have this well, I know everything attitude, but that's dangerous. It's okay to be an active learner. It doesn't mean that you're a fraud to say I don't know, I'm not sure the best way to solve that problem, or I need a little bit of extra time to think about it. I want to look at the latest case studies, or I want to look at the latest data and really consider it. That's not fraud, that's an opportunity for you to grow, and it's an opportunity to make that company or your own business better. Whereas, if you just shoot from the hip and say, oh well, according to my opinion, right now, when you haven't even considered what you're talking about, that would actually be a more fraudulent and worse thing to do. You also want to separate feelings from facts. Just because you feel nervous, or you feel unqualified, or you feel unsteady in a meeting, doesn't mean that you actually are. So, one of the ways that you can clap back against that form of the gremlin is to say, what evidence do I actually have to support this fear, and it may just simply be, well, my butterflies in my stomach, or my heart rate's a little increased, or I probably shouldn't have had another cup of coffee this morning, because the caffeine is making me feel none of that actually makes you unqualified. It may mean that your nervous system is going a bit too fast, but it doesn't mean that you're a phony. I think whether you're running the business or you're a manager in the business, you want to give your team the opportunity to make mistakes. Now, I'm not talking about because somebody undoubtedly some knucklehead will write in and say, well, I'm a surgeon and if I make a mistake, somebody dies, or we are operating a defense contractor, and if we make mistakes, soldiers could get killed. I'm not talking about those kinds of mistakes. I'm not talking about life versus death scenarios. I'm talking about what if somebody doesn't know the answer. What if somebody says I. Class, and I didn't pass it, or I tried something new, and it didn't quite work out the way that I thought it would. I ran the numbers, I crunched the numbers, thinking that if we made this change, we would have a bigger profit, but once I really looked at the evidence, we don't. And I'll give you an example: whenever I was learning drafting this, this was like, feels like a lifetime ago, but my on-the-job mentor, who also became a great friend, one of the things that he told me was, we're not going to make changes just because something is newfangled, it has to actually be the right change, just because something is new and shiny doesn't automatically mean that it's better than what we've already been doing. He and I would also have contests, and it was really cool, because sometimes what we would do, like we were working at a small oil and gas company that did a lot of work for petroleum storage tanks, and so sometimes when we were working on the design of a storage tank, or if one was going to have to basically be halfway torn down and repaired again. Like, okay, I want you to come up with your design, and then I come up with my design, and whoever is going to have a savings of materials, a savings of money, everything is still structurally sound, right? Okay, that's that's the key to the operation. Everything is still structurally sound, but if you build a better mouse trap than me, then that's what we do. If I do a better mousetrap than you, then that's what we do. So we would have little contests to see who came up with the better design, and I remember being so proud when I finally bested him, and it was literally just by one weld seam. It was, it wasn't a big, big difference, but my layout had one less row of welding. It didn't make it less structurally sound.

All of this, by the way, was signed off by a professional engineer. It wasn't just us playing drafting games, you know. A PE looked at the figures and stamped it, but I was so proud of that, and he said, "Look, a win is a win, that's less time and less labor that has to be done for somebody to run that weld scene, and it's also less of an area for the tank to fail, because if it's solid, as opposed to being something that's welded together, like that's a benefit, that's what I'm talking about. There were times that we would have contests where I didn't win, he came up with a better design, I mean, he had years of experience that I didn't have. It wasn't a surprise, but it was okay for me to not have the winning design every time, and it made me better. It helped me to learn. That's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Not a surgeon plays silly games and kills a patient. I'm talking about in non-life or death situations, which, to be honest, is most business and work situations in the world. Let your team have a little bit of room to build a better mouse trap, and maybe it's better, maybe it isn't, but it tells the culture that we're not robots, we're not expecting perfection, because we have opened ourselves up to the reality that we're not perfect, and we live in an imperfect world. Now, let's think about our personal life, our interpersonal relationships, because imposter syndrome doesn't stay solely at the office, it can also bleed into parenting, dating, friendships, your creative hobbies, and so forth. A number one on my list is the social media mirage, because curated feeds fuels this myth, and that's all it is. It's a myth that everyone else has it figured out. Everyone else is doing better than me. Everybody else has more money, they have more fun, they have more adult relationships. Whatever, whatever it is, fill in the blank as you see fit. You can find somebody on social media who appears to have it better than you, because it's curated. Okay, and so, so very much of it is fake. It's like, whenever we get into adulthood, you know, and we realize that the emperor doesn't have any clothes on. When we're kids, we tend to think the grown-ups have it all figured out. I can go out and play and slide down the slide and ride the teeter totter. Do kids even do that anymore? I don't know. Moving it back to being a kid in the 80s, you know, swinging on the swing set and using the merry-go-round and the teeter totter, and you just thought that the adults had everything figured out. I was thinking the other day about the Challenger, because there I was talking to another member of my generation, and we were remembering what that was like, you know, you get into the classroom and everybody's all excited, the teachers had wheeled the TVs in, and then the explosion happened, and everybody's crying, like the kids, at least for me in the classroom where I was, we were all just stunned, and nobody really said anything, but like the teacher started to cry, and it was like, whoa, whoa, what just happened, but in those moments. We tend to look to the adults as kids, and we think, well, the adults know, the adults know what happened, and they can help us, and they can explain everything. But then you become an adult yourself, and you're like, oh my god, adults don't know anything. It also reminds me of, I want to say, it was 1989 when Marlon Brando sat down with Connie Chung, and he was giving his interview to her, and he said, "What do we really know, anyway? That's so sage. And after we get older, we realize, like, wait, there's so much that we don't know. Sheldon Kopp, in his eschatological laundry list, says all people are making decisions on the basis of insufficient data. Yeah, we are, but yet if you look on social media, everybody's got it figured out, everybody's living the life, so you may be comparing what's going on in your very messy and very real life against what's going on in somebody else's highlight reel.

Think about how many times you've seen a couple date night with this cutie, look at our vacation, and then two weeks later they're filing for divorce. You know, they didn't have fun on that trip. You know, they were probably at each other's throats if they're getting a divorce two weeks later. But on social media, it all looked great, didn't it? You have to remember, this is fake. It's like seeing a movie, it's not real. You also want to redefine what competence means. Competence doesn't mean flawless, and it also doesn't mean that in order to deserve or to be worthy of things like love, friendship, or just a place at the table, that you have to be perfect. You don't. True competence, I would say, is knowing your limits and being willing to try anyway. To say I may not be able to do the amount of push-ups I could do 20 years ago, or I may not be able to run around the track as fast anymore, but it doesn't mean I can't go out and get some exercise and fresh air. I think it can also be good to have a buddy, somebody who gives you a reality check, but not in a bad way, not a, not a bad reality check person, not a Debbie the Downer, but if you have a couple of trusted friends, a close family member, a mentor, someone where you can be like, you know, I'm just really feeling it today. I, I start my new job on Monday, and I just feel like they're all going to hate me, I feel like a big old phony. What if I can't figure out their software? Sometimes, if we just voice it out loud to someone who can say, 'Wait a minute, you're kind of going down the spiral here, you're getting into worst-case scenarios, you've survived all of your worst days so far, you're still here, like you're going to make it. It's not going to be that bad. Also, you can change your vocabulary and watch your self-talk, because we have the tendency sometimes to be self-deprecating, because we don't want to be arrogant. So, we might say, I just got lucky, anybody could have done it, I was in the right place at the right time, or next time it probably will all blow up on me, and it won't work out so well. You're okay saying I worked hard for this. I like, I did this, or if you want to give thanks to your higher power, God helped me with this, or Jesus, or Allah, like my higher power helped me to accomplish this, and I'm happy. Like, it's okay to say that, but you know, I will just go looking. Well, I mean, it could have been anyone. Well, I was just standing in the right place at the right time. You can instead say thank you. I'm glad. Whether you're paying thanks to a compliment from a person, you're saying thank you to God, thank you to your higher power. It's okay to do that. It doesn't make you a bad person or someone who's arrogant by expressing gratitude or giving yourself a little pat on the back. Feeling like an imposter often means that you're stepping outside of your comfort zone, and you're growing. If you never feel that way, then it might be that you're playing too safe. Let's remember Susan Jeffers' landmark book, feel the fear and do it anyway. Fear doesn't go away, especially if you're growing. That's a myth that we have. I had the pleasure recently - I'm not going to name drop - but I had the pleasure recently of speaking to someone twice my age, someone elderly who's been writing and creating for a long time, and it was such a pleasure to just get to sit in the company of someone who knows so much more and has had so much more life experience than me. It's like the saying, if you are the smartest person in the room, get up and leave, go find another room, because you're probably not going to learn anything there if you're the smartest one.

And so it was so nice to just sit in her company and draw water from that well, and I was telling her, like, I'm in this transitional period in my life, you know, biologically with the hormones, and you know, I know that I'm I'm trying to go from the summer of life to the autumn of life, and I'm not scared about that, because actually fall. And winter are two of my, my favorite seasons. Summer is overrated, it's full of bugs and mosquitoes and heat. You know, you're a big fan of it when you're a kid, and it means getting out of school and being able to rip and romp, but you get older and you're like, oh my god, summer, let's just get this over with and get on to spooky season. And I asked her, like, at what point does it stabilize, when does the uncertainty go away? Because it just feels like the transition is everything, it's physical and hormonal and biological, but then it's also emotional, it's spiritual, it's financial, it's all of it. And she laughed and said, Well, it doesn't like I'm not saying you're never going to have stability in your life again, you probably will. I'm just saying, like, uncertainty is not going to go away if you decide to try something new. If you decide to write in a new genre or take on a new project, it's not like you get a telegram from God or a telegram from the universe that says I will tell you A, B, C, and D is going to happen up front, and I'll give you a nicely drawn roadmap, and here's what you do, and you don't have to ask any questions, you just go on and do it, like that's never going to happen. It's not going to happen for you at 5060, 7080, 9100, It's, you're not going to ever get that roadmap. You're going to have to learn how to trust whatever higher power or higher self, whatever it is that you believe in. You're going to have to learn how to trust, because the uncertainty is just not going away. And part of me, like, I laughed at two, and part of it was a sad laugh, and part of it was a happy laugh, because all right, if the uncertainty is never going away, or like Susan Jeffers says in her book, if you're always going to have some amount of fear when you're stepping out of that comfort zone and trying something new, or as David Bowie put it, you should always go a little further out into the water than you feel comfortable with. If you're in the river and your feet are always touching the river bed, like you're not taking enough risks with your art, you're playing it safe creatively. I love, I love getting out into the water, where I'm like, oh my god, I don't know if this is going to work, like people might get really mad at me if I write this, or people might be really upset, or I might get a bad review, or somebody might not get the satire, I, I like being in that space, because it tells me I'm not playing it safe, I'm not doing something milk toast or halfway, I'm not doing what everybody else is doing, like okay, happily ever, happily ever after romance and romantic sees, or what's popular right now. I don't want to just do that to do that, I'm doing something different, and that makes me feel good. To bring it back to what Dag says, you don't get a pass card to not live below your best, you should be trying to do your best, and I think that a big part of that is stepping away from imposter syndrome and saying I don't have to be perfect, I don't have to be an expert, I don't have to get everything right the very first time that I try it, but all of these realities about what it's like to live on planet earth, it doesn't absolve me from the trying. I've talked before about JFK, was he a saint, was he a god amongst mere mortals, did he do every single thing right all the time?

No, of course not, but one of the things that I find endlessly interesting about his presidency was that I really believe that he tried, not that he always got everything right or that he always did the right thing in every situation, he didn't. He tried. There seems to me to have been an actual sincerity there, and that means something to me, and I think it should mean something to all of us in our own lives and in our own way, that sincerity of saying I'm imperfect, living in an imperfect world, but that's okay, it doesn't absolve me from trying to live up to my potential and be the best that I can. In the meantime, until I see you in the next episode, which, by the way, by the time I make an episode for August, simply Dag will be out in the world. I'm so terribly excited and ready and stressed out, you know. That's where some of my imposter syndrome comes out, because I'm like, oh God, I've worked so hard on this book, and Dag, and I collaborated on it together. Whether you believe that or not is up to you, but we did, and I'm like, oh my god, I just hope that people love it as much as I enjoy creating it, and as much as I've enjoyed going back and even just looking through the author proof copies, being so proud of what's been accomplished here. I don't control other people's reactions, and that's okay. Neither do you, neither does anybody, but it's ultimately okay, because the right people at the right time will find what you've produced, and that's what matters. Take very good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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