During a recent coaching session, a seasoned chief learning officer (CLO) told me: “I have been in this role seven years and I still find myself Googling acronyms during meetings.” I didn’t reassure or normalize their feelings. Instead, I asked: “When you notice yourself doing that, what comes up for you?”

As a coach, my role is to listen past the surface. I pay attention to emotional tone, underlying assumptions and the meanings leaders often assign to their own behavior. I don’t rush to “fix” impostor thinking because that short circuits what their thoughts might be telling them about their growth, context or influence.

As a learning and development (L&D) practitioner, I left the session reflecting on something else. A few hours earlier I had done exactly the same thing in a consulting meeting. I didn’t do it because I wasn’t qualified. I did it because impostor thoughts don’t disappear even when you are at the top of your craft. They don’t magically vanish after your 100th keynote, 1000th coaching conversation or your next learning program with phenomenal return on investment (ROI). They evolve and adapt to new contexts and whisper in more subtle ways.

The term impostor phenomenon was coined in 1978 when psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described high-achieving women, who despite clear evidence of capability remained convinced they were intellectual frauds. Decades later, multiple studies across varied groups estimate that a majority of professionals, often cited in the 70-80% range, experience impostor feelings at some point in their careers.

For learning leaders, there is an additional twist: Your expertise increases your awareness of complexity. The more you know, the more clearly you see how much you don’t know. That is cognitively honest, and it’s also emotionally uncomfortable.

What L&D Leaders Secretly Think

In a recent leadership development program I ran for directors, vice presidents, and heads of talent and learning, I asked participants to anonymously share the impostor thoughts they would never say aloud at work. These are the people responsible for developing other people’s capabilities. Here are the top three common sentiments:

• What if people find out I am just making things up as I go and hoping they work?
• I feel like everyone around me knows what is going on and I have no idea, while asking ChatGPT to explain it to me as if I were in grade school.
• I am not qualified for this; how did I end up here?

When I shared these thoughts back to the group, you could audibly hear people exhale. Why? There was relief in knowing they were not alone.

Having impostor feelings is not a mental health diagnosis. It is a pattern of thoughts and feelings that often show up as chronic self-doubt, fear of being found out or an inability to internalize success despite evidence to the contrary. These emotions happen when perceived competence gaps collide with perfectionistic standards and narrow success narratives. They thrive in high-achievement environments, ambiguous roles and industries that change fast.

For L&D leaders, there is added tension. You are both a teacher and a learner, an expert and an experimenter. You facilitate sessions on agile mindsets while navigating your own discomfort with ambiguity. You coach executives on adaptive leadership while wondering if you are adapting fast enough. You advocate for psychological safety while hesitating to reveal your own uncertainty. Impostor syndrome could almost justify its own line on the balance sheet, often resulting in:

• Overwork: Compensating for perceived inadequacy by working over 60 hours per week
• Risk Aversion: Declining stretch assignments that could potentially expand impact.
• Silence: Withholding perspectives for fear of being exposed
• Turnover: People leaving roles because of unrelenting self-doubt

Sadly, these behaviors can show up in people the organization can least afford to lose.

L&D Is a Perfect Storm

L&D leaders operate under a particular kind of pressure. You are expected to be conversant in business strategy and financial logic, neuroscience and behavior change, learning design and facilitation, talent, culture, change management, technology, data and measurement. You operate in high accountability and low certainty environments. When the learning interventions work, the success is attributed to the business, content or individual managers. When they don’t, people look right at you. You are asked to quantify ROI on complex human systems with multiple variables far outside your control. You are invited to the table and then asked directly (or indirectly) whether you deserve the seat.

Impostor syndrome thrives in environments that equate expertise with authority rather than curiosity with influence. What happens around you impacts, nurtures and grows these experiences.

The Neuroscience Behind the Loop

Cognitive neuroscience offers a helpful lens on why high-performing leaders fall into impostor loops. The amygdala, the brain structure that processes threat, responds strongly to uncertainty and social comparison. When stakes feel high and roles are ambiguous, your nervous system interprets “I’m not sure,” as “I’m not safe.” At the same time, your reward systems become overly reliant on external validation, like praise and visible success. It is easy to become dependent on approval as your primary evidence of competence. When that happens, not being sure feels like a risk to your psychological safety versus being a normal part of learning. This is why affirmation alone doesn’t solve learning problems or impostor dynamics. The issue is the metric: What are you using to internally define competence and worth? The antidote is recalibrating those metrics toward learning, contribution and integrity of effort.

The Unexpected Upside of Doubting Yourself

There is an emerging body of research suggesting well channeled impostor thoughts can create relational advantages. MIT researcher Basima Tewfik examined workplace impostor thoughts and their impact on interpersonal effectiveness. She found that people who reported more impostor thoughts:

• Asked more questions in interpersonal interactions
• Demonstrated stronger listening and relational behaviors
• Were rated as more interpersonally effective and trustworthy by supervisors
• Did not perform worse on task- or competence-related outcomes

In other words, self-doubt didn’t erode performance but instead shifted it to others’ focus and empathy. For learning leaders, this should sound familiar. When you aren’t sure, you prepare more, clarify carefully and earn buy-in. You pay attention to how your stakeholders are responding instead of assuming your expertise is sufficient. This attention you use to do discovery and analysis of learning needs is a key leadership asset.

Moving From Impostor to Influencer: The RISE Shifts

Through coaching and consulting with learning leaders, I have noticed that those who consistently turn impostor moments to influence move through four internal shifts. I call these RISE:

• R — Recognize: Notice when thinking moves from problem solving to rumination. Googling acronyms, overpreparing or overexplaining can be cues.
• I — Interpret: Ask what story you are telling yourself about what the doubt means. You may think uncertainty is interpreted as incompetence. And if you worry enough about it, the misinterpretation fuels action. One example of this might be the pattern of overwork.
• S — Shift: This is the place where your influence begins to change. You test a more accurate, evidence-aligned interpretation. For example, “I have no idea” becomes “I am a person who can ask questions others might also have”; “I am not technical” becomes “I work intentionally to translate complexity into learning and action”; and “I am too new” becomes “I might be able to see patterns others overlook because of experience or closeness to the project.” This shift changes how you show up, which in turn changes how others experience your leadership.
• E — Experiment: Convert the new interpretation into outward-facing behavior. Ask for feedback, invite collaboration or share your learning process out loud. When you do this, you model the learning culture you are tasked with building.

I watched a CLO apply these shifts while preparing for a company-wide town hall. Initially, she was braced for critique. She was worried if she didn’t have the answer to every question now, people would lose confidence in her.

After working through RISE, she reframed her role from answer-provider to sense-maker, entering the town hall with a questions-first approach. She clarified assumptions, invited input and was explicit about what was known, unknown and in progress. People talked to each other and stayed engaged. Her influence increased because she modeled responsible transparency.

While models are useful, daily habits make them real. When you are having impostor thoughts, name and neutralize them. Say aloud, “I am having impostor thoughts,” not “I am an impostor.” This simple shift reframes the experience as data, not identity. Keep a record of your outcomes, give yourself tangible proof, practice confident actions and not confident feelings, and see mistakes as information. Anchor yourself in purpose, and ask:

• Where might my doubt signal an emerging area of growth for me?
• What assumptions am I making about what others expect me to know or do?
• What evidence do I have that this is true?

Influence doesn’t come from eliminating doubt. It happens when you interpret doubt accurately and respond deliberately. The Googling CLO has transformed learning strategy at multiple organizations, mentored dozens of leaders and reshaped how capabilities are developed in organizations. That CLO still has moments of doubt. So do I, and so will you.

The leaders with influence aren’t the ones who never question themselves. They are the ones who notice the doubt, extract the signal and show up anyway: more attentive, prepared and connected because of it.