I've stood at the front of a lot of rooms. Pitches. Staff meetings. I co-founded a web agency in Vancouver in 2003 and ran it as CEO. Years later I wrote a book on ChatGPT that went #1 in Amazon's AI category.
And most of the time, standing up there, part of me was waiting for someone in the back to stand up and say, that guy has no idea what he's doing.
Nobody ever did. That didn't help as much as you'd think.
So why do you feel like a fraud even when you succeed? Psychologists call it the impostor phenomenon, often shortened to imposter syndrome. You put your wins down to luck or sheer overwork, and you live with a steady fear that people will eventually find out you're not as good as they think. It isn't a formal diagnosis. It's a pattern, and a very common one. A systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine pulled together 62 studies and found rates anywhere from 9% to 82%, depending on how it was measured, in men and women alike and across age groups. It often comes with depression and anxiety.
Where "feeling like a fraud" comes from
The term goes back to psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in the 1970s. As the British Psychological Society's magazine tells it, they talked with about 150 highly successful women who had every outside marker of success and still felt no inner sense of it. They considered themselves impostors.
It was first described in women, but it isn't only women. That same BPS piece mentions a 1984 survey of American psychologists in which a big majority said they'd felt like impostors. Psychologists. The people you'd think would know better.
I find that weirdly comforting.
What it feels like at the front of the room
For me it runs like a commentary track.
When people praise the work: they're being polite, or they haven't looked closely. When I'm asked to speak: this is the time they'll figure it out. I make jokes to deflect compliments. Self-deprecation is practically my second language. It's quicker to run myself down than to sit still and take a nice word.
With the book, the #1 ranking felt like a lottery ticket. Right topic, right month. That might even be partly true, which is what makes impostor thinking so slippery. There's always some luck in any success, and the impostor voice grabs that piece and calls it the whole thing.
The CEO years and the robplosions
Here's a connection I've only made recently, and I hold it loosely.
The word "robplosion" was coined by a friend nearly 20 years ago, back when I was CEO at Raincity Studios. It meant me losing it and exploding at people when problems came up.
Looking back, I think some of it was fear. When a problem landed on my desk, it felt like the moment I'd be found out. The guy at the front of the room, finally exposed. Exploding was a way of pushing that feeling outward, onto other people, fast. I'm not proud of it. It doesn't excuse it either. But it makes more sense to me now than "I'm just an angry guy." There's more on that in why I explode over small things.
Why autistic people may feel like frauds more
I was only diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at 50, during a breakdown in the COVID years. Before that, 50 years of being "weird" and not knowing why.
So I did what a lot of undiagnosed autistic people do. I learned to perform. I studied how people talked in meetings and how a CEO was supposed to act. I got good at it. Good enough that nobody guessed how much it cost.
Now think about what success means when you're masking. The applause lands on the performance. Some part of you knows it's a performance. So of course you feel like a fraud. In a sense you were acting, every day, just to get through. I wrote about this in what masking is and whether being the life of the party is a form of masking.
I can't point you to a big study that proves autistic adults have more impostor feelings. The question is wide open, and I've asked it in imposter syndrome and the neurodivergent brain. But the logic is hard to shake.
What has actually helped
Not affirmations. I tried. I felt like a fraud saying them.
Saying it out loud. The BPS piece notes that simply learning the phenomenon exists, and hearing others describe it, brings some people relief. That matches my experience. The feeling gets smaller every time I say it to someone and they nod.
Separating luck from skill honestly. Yes, there was luck. There was also work, and a skill set built over decades. Both things are true at once. The impostor voice only lets you hold one.
Not comparing my insides to other people's outsides. Everyone at the front of the room looks confident. I know exactly how much that's worth, because I look confident too.
Working on the self-esteem underneath. Impostor feelings feed on low self-esteem, and I've had that most of my life. That's slow work. I go into it in building self-esteem after 50. And if the fear is making you bail on good things, fear of success is real might sound familiar.
If it's tangled with depression or anxiety, as the review says it often is, it's worth getting help with that part. In Québec, the Ordre des psychologues explains where to find a psychologist, and the public route starts at 811 or your CLSC.
I still feel it. Last time I spoke in front of people, the voice was right there. I went up anyway, and that's about as far as I've got.
If the "I'm a fraud" voice has turned into "I'm worthless" and it's getting dark, the numbers for your country are on the Get help now page.