Midlife MavericksLast week a grown man wrote the words “imposter syndrome” on a piece of paper in front of me.
He’s a client. He’d asked how I do what I do online, and how I actually write this newsletter. Somewhere in the middle of it he told me he hadn’t been writing, because he had massive imposter syndrome. Then he wrote it down. In his own handwriting.
I have never watched a man do that before. I’m not sure I’d ever heard one say it out loud. Something clicked.
That same week, over lunch, another one. A man who runs a multi-eight-figure business inside a financial institution, telling me he gets imposter syndrome about public speaking, walking me through how he’s working on it.
Two men. Two quiet rooms. Both carrying the thing we’ve decided belongs to women.
That’s the script, isn’t it. Imposter syndrome is a female problem, something we’re meant to sort out with affirmations while the men stroll in unbothered. The men I sat with last week were plenty bothered. They have it too. They just have fewer places to set it down, so it comes out in a small room, to one person, once they trust you enough to say it out loud.
More of you reading this are men now, since I got louder on LinkedIn. So I’m putting it here in the open, for all of us.
And I’ll go first.
I have imposter syndrome.
My husband jokes about it. My friends have heard about it a hundred times. After 25 years in capital markets, you’d think I’d have got over it by now.
I haven’t.
I overprepare for everything. I overwork. I go into meetings having read every document three times. I send emails and then reread them four times after they’ve already gone. I lie awake before important calls thinking about all the ways I could mess it up.
And I still, after all these years, walk into rooms and wonder if today is the day someone figures out I don’t belong there.
Quote of the Week
“I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.'”
Maya Angelou
The handbag problem
Let me tell you about the conference.
It was an investment bank event. Hundreds of people. I was on a panel. I’d prepared. I was ready.
And then, backstage, about two minutes before they called my name, I thought I was going to throw up.
Physically. Actually. Going to vomit.
And my brain, instead of doing something useful like calming me down, started running logistics. Okay, I’m going to throw up. There’s no time to get to the toilet. My handbag is not big enough. And it was expensive. I cannot throw up in my handbag.
This was going through my mind. Options. Probabilities. Container capacity.
They called my name. I walked on stage. And it went brilliantly.
Once I started, I was fine. More than fine. I enjoyed it. The audience was engaged. The conversation flowed. I forgot about the nausea completely.
But the before? The before was hell.
The podcast that made me sick
Same thing happened with a podcast earlier this year. A hedge fund industry podcast. I’d been invited to talk about what I do, raising capital for early-stage managers.
I was nearly sick beforehand. Properly, physically ill. My stomach was in knots. I was sweating.
And then it went, in the host’s words, “completely bonkers.” My LinkedIn went crazy after it aired. People I hadn’t heard from in years reached out. It directly led to new business.
But I’d almost cancelled because my body was telling me to run.
What imposter syndrome actually looks like
People think imposter syndrome is a lack of confidence. For me it’s the opposite problem. Confidence I have. What I don’t always have is a nervous system that agrees with my brain.
I know I’m good at what I do. I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I’ve helped managers raise millions. I’ve sat across from some of the sharpest institutional investors on the planet and added value to those conversations.
A friend told me something recently that stopped me cold. We were talking about investor meetings, and I was giving what I thought was completely basic advice. How to present, how to handle the hard questions.
And he said, “Claudia, for a rocket scientist, what you do is rocket science.”
He’s a quant. PhD in mathematics. Builds quantitative investment strategies. My world is foreign to him. The things I take for granted, the things I think are so obvious they barely count as expertise, those are untouchable skills for someone wired differently.
We forget that. We forget that most people don’t know a fraction of what we know. We’ve been so deep in our own world for so long that we can’t see our own value anymore.
The overwork loop
Imposter syndrome has a favourite trick: it makes you work more.
If I just prepare a bit more. If I just send one more follow-up email. Then I’ll feel ready. Then I’ll feel like I deserve to be in the room.
It never works. The feeling of “not enough” doesn’t go away with more effort. It just gets buried under exhaustion.
I’m competitive, but not with other people. With myself. I want to be better than I was yesterday. That’s a useful engine when it’s healthy. It becomes destructive when it’s driven by fear instead of curiosity.
And I’m learning, slowly, to tell the difference.
What I know at 49
I know who I’m not.
I’m not going to be the tallest, fastest, richest, most connected person in any room. There’s always someone more. A billion people out there. There’s always someone smarter.
And that’s fine.
I’m grateful for what I have. I could be so many other things, but I’m not. And you know what? That’s fine.
I don’t compete with other people. I really don’t. I don’t care how many followers someone has or what their revenue was last quarter.
I care about doing good work and going home to my kids.
The imposter syndrome doesn’t go away. But at 49, I’ve learned to walk on stage anyway. With a churning stomach and an expensive handbag that’s too small to throw up in.
This week, name one thing you’re brilliant at that you keep calling “basic.” Someone out there would call it rocket science.
Then tell me: do you have imposter syndrome? When does it hit hardest, standing in front of a room or sitting across a table? What sets it off? And if you’re one of the men reading this, I want to hear from you especially.
Hit reply.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
