By: Dar Dowling
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term “impostor phenomenon” in 1978: a persistent belief that you’re less competent than others perceive you to be, despite clear evidence of your accomplishments, paired with a fear of eventually being exposed as a fraud.
That’s the version almost everyone recognizes. A high performer who has earned their credentials and their role, who has the evidence of their own capability right in front of them, quietly believes they don’t really belong there. That they got lucky. That eventually someone will see through it.
That version is real and common, and Ines works with it regularly in her coaching practice. But she has also encountered a version that reaches past the original definition, one that has nothing to do with discounting evidence of competence. It rarely gets called impostor syndrome at all but does just as much damage.
Two of the Versions She Has Seen
Two patterns stand out from the several Ines has encountered through her coaching work with Tech professionals, worth walking through side by side because they look almost nothing alike.
The first is the familiar kind: doubting your own skill despite the evidence in front of you. A client she calls Fernando was a Cloud Solutions Consultant who felt there was nothing out there for him beyond the sales-hunter roles he’d held for more than 15 years. He compared himself unfavorably to peers in Tech and believed he lacked the experience for the Account Manager work he was drawn to, which centered on relationship building, solving client pain points, and ongoing partnership.
When Ines looked at how Fernando actually worked, the evidence told a different story. His sales approach already mirrored Account Manager skills. The resume they eventually drafted together, framed around relationship building, collaboration, roadmap discussions, and client advocacy, reflected work he had already been doing. He had been discounting evidence that contradicted the story he was telling himself about what he was and wasn’t capable of.
The second is subtler, and it rarely gets called impostor syndrome at all: a belief about yourself that isn’t built on missing evidence, because there was never any evidence to begin with. A client she calls Swati felt she could never turn down work or ask for anything she needed, from peers, stakeholders, managers, or leadership, because it felt selfish. Ines pulled up the dictionary definition of selfish: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself, seeking one’s own advantage without regard for others. When she asked Swati if that applied to her, Swati immediately said no. So the question became, if not selfishness, then what is it.
At first Swati couldn’t name it. Over time, she traced the belief back to something more specific, the conviction that being paid for her work meant she owed everyone a yes and had no right to ask for anything in return. That belief was not true. It had never been true. But it had been operating in the background of every professional decision she made.
The Tool That Starts Shifting the Pattern
Whichever version is at play, Ines encourages her clients to try the same simple daily practice to start shifting it, one that takes less than five minutes but tends to build something significant over time. At the end of the day, either in writing or just mentally, a client asks themselves one of three questions. What went well today? What impact did I have? What am I proud of?
The point is not gratitude journaling for its own sake. It is building an evidence base. After a couple of months of that practice, the more important question becomes available: Is there evidence I have been ignoring or mislabeling? That question is where the real work happens. Fernando had years of evidence he’d been discounting. Swati had a belief she’d never actually tested against reality. The practice creates the conditions to finally look at both honestly.
What This Has to Do With Tech Specifically
Ines works primarily with Tech professionals for a reason that goes beyond her own background. The Tech industry has specific conditions that make impostor syndrome both more common and harder to name. High performers surrounded by other high performers. Environments where moving fast and appearing certain is rewarded. Cultures where asking for what you need can feel professionally risky. And a job market right now that is genuinely difficult, where a lot of people find themselves hiring for their own team while also quietly job hunting themselves, and where there is no silver bullet for finding a new role despite what a lot of LinkedIn content would have you believe.
Ines doesn’t pretend otherwise. That honesty, about what is hard and why, is part of what her clients describe as most useful about working with her.
If either version, doubting evidence you already have, or carrying a belief about yourself that was never true to begin with, is quietly running the background of your professional decisions, Ines offers a complimentary intro call at coachwithines.com. What happens after that first conversation is entirely up to you.
