When Imposter Syndrome Becomes Your Identity

Imposter Syndrome had become so insidious in my life that I started thinking: this is just how I am. I began to describe myself using Imposter Syndrome language: diligent and hardworking.

These are wonderful attributes to have. But when they’re driven by Imposter Syndrome, they become exhausting and all-encompassing. I would beat myself up and be so hyper-critical that nobody could possibly find out the truth: that I was terrified of making mistakes, terrified of not being thought of as intelligent, terrified that I wasn’t doing the right thing at all times, no matter how I was treated.

I never felt deserving of my accomplishments and always felt that my successes were attributed to something else besides my own talents or strengths. I had either just gotten lucky or knew the right people at the right time who propelled me along.

This is what Imposter Syndrome does. It tricks you into seeing yourself as incapable of being human. You have to be a people-pleasing machine that churns out perfect work and a perfect life all the time.

I’m Shana Shallenberg, and I’m now a certified Imposter Syndrome coach trained in Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin’s 3C Model. This is my story of how Imposter Syndrome nearly destroyed me, and how I found my way out.

The Childhood Origins of Imposter Syndrome

When It All Started: Elementary School and Undiagnosed Learning Challenges

I first felt the pains of Imposter Syndrome when I was around 6 years old and in elementary school. I had undiagnosed learning differences that made it extremely difficult to concentrate in class. I would break out in hives and race to the bathroom where I would hide until a teacher sent someone to retrieve me.

As years went by, I would have trouble reading books for the oral book reports we would have to give in front of the class. I was so terrified of having to stand up and speak that being able to read the book itself was impossible. I would instead stand up in front of class and make up a story, hoping the teacher and my classmates didn’t catch on.

I thought of myself as a fraud. A charlatan. Someone will catch on that I’m a fraud.

The Pattern That Followed Me Everywhere

I started to have dreams that I was going to get kicked out of classes when in reality I was excelling and making wonderful grades. I reasoned that the only way I made good grades was because I was constantly working on schoolwork and always worrying about it. I had to work twice as hard to keep up with my peers.

Without the constant overworking and worry that I don’t slip up, I would surely get kicked out of my classes.

This is critical to understand: Imposter syndrome doesn’t start in the workplace. It starts in childhood. The workplace just becomes the stage where your oldest fears play out again and again.

How Imposter Syndrome Shaped My Career Path

The Early Jobs: Always Feeling Lucky, Never Deserving

Imposter Syndrome followed me in every career experience I ever had.

One of my favorite jobs was working for the American Psychological Association, but Imposter Syndrome struck deep there. I had unknowingly met the CFO while waiting outside the DMV. We struck up a conversation and when I told him I was job searching, he told me about a temp-to-hire position available.

This was the early 2000s when the job market was exceptionally rough. I was fresh out of college, having quit my first job because my boss was inappropriate with me, all during a recession. I spent six months job searching and having this opportunity meant everything to me.

I took the job, but it also meant I had to apply for the permanent position. I remember the people who interviewed for the position. I would greet them, offer them coffee, and wait while they interviewed. I was sure they would get the position that I currently held as a temp.

When I got the job, I felt a sigh of relief, yes. But I held a deep and lasting belief that I was never deserving of it.

I fully believed that I had actually fooled them and charmed them enough to hire me. I also thought they felt bad for me. I wasn’t who they actually wanted; they just couldn’t tell me no because I was already working there.

This belief was the underpinning of my time there. I loved my job, but I felt like I always had to “earn my keep” by being charming, overly positive, and grateful that they chose me.

The Pattern Repeats: “I Was Just Lucky”

The same happened at a more recent job. I had once worked for the organization but quit when I decided to stay at home with my children when they were small. When I was ready to re-enter the workforce, I approached the organization to see if any positions might be available.

I landed the job, but the feeling was still there from Imposter Syndrome: I was just lucky.

I was lucky I got the job. I was lucky after having been out of work for so long. I was lucky they chose me out of all the other candidates who were surely more qualified than me.

That particular job ended up being one of the most toxic experiences I was to ever have, but one that taught me more than any book or class ever could.

How Toxic Workplaces Exploit Imposter Syndrome

The Perfect Target

Imposter Syndrome didn’t just make me doubt myself. It made me tolerate the intolerable. It told me their behavior was my fault. That if I just worked harder, was nicer, was more likeable, I could fix it.

Toxic workplaces are experts at Imposter Syndrome. They exploit the vulnerabilities you brought with you from childhood. But they also actively create new ones through exclusion, gaslighting, and moving goalposts. The self-doubt you feel isn’t always something you walked in with, sometimes it’s something they built in you.

When the Mask Falls Off: Toxic Leadership Exposed

When I was hired, I was told my role was to help develop new ideas and help create new initiatives, everything from employee satisfaction surveys to new organization-wide programs. I worked as hard as I could, working late, skipped lunch, and constantly thought about work on the weekends.

My job was the main character of my life. And it became painfully obvious to me when abruptly, I fell out of favor.

I can remember the very moment in a staff meeting where the director shot down a suggestion I made in a way that made everyone in the room uncomfortable. It was said aggressively, dismissively, and fueled with the kind of uncontrolled contempt that reminded me of a sinister movie villain whose rage had suddenly become exposed.

This was their mask falling off. And I started to see that I was in danger.

The Erasure Begins

My direct supervisor informed me after this humiliation ritual that I would no longer be invited to those meetings. I asked what I did wrong.

“Don’t take it personally” was the only response I was given. It was the kind of gaslighting I would endure for the rest of my time there.

That was the first of a string of meetings I would be excluded from, but I was asked offline to work on projects that the team would use in their meetings. I was not welcome, but my work was – only when it could be rebranded as separate from me.

It was the ultimate act of beginning to slowly erase me.

The Silent Treatment as Punishment

Soon thereafter the silent treatment began. I would walk down the hallway, and the same director would glare at me and say nothing as I greeted them. It was the kind of look you give someone who repulses you. It was more than a look; it was meant as punishment.

This is where the disorienting pain sets in. You are inside of a building where organizational values are framed and hung on the walls (and in my case the extra irony was that I was the one who worked on getting them hung up there), and yet the ones with the most power not only ignore embodying those values, they actively contribute to the weaponization of the opposite.

The Real Values of Toxic Workplaces

The values on the wall said one thing. But the real values revealed themselves every time I demonstrated integrity, curiosity, or growth.

Because toxic systems can’t tolerate any of those things.

Their actual values would read: fear, intimidation, corruption, collusion, distrust, sabotage, contempt, envy, shame, and pain – all of it encased in a frame etched with one word over and over again: deception.

How Imposter Syndrome Makes You Vulnerable

My Imposter Syndrome baseline was already one of self-doubt, gaslighting, and invalidation – the trifecta that toxic workplaces love to exploit.

I couldn’t even see myself as fully human and capable of making mistakes, and now I was in the kind of environment that hopes you have Imposter Syndrome.

This is how your overworking, diligence, and lack of personal boundaries get taken advantage of. They make you easier to control. They can weaponize what you believe to be “professionalism” and “commitment” and know that you want to be well-respected and liked irrespective of their treatment of you.

How much you tolerate becomes how much they will take from you.

Imposter Syndrome will let them have everything, and it will take an abundance of self-compassion and some strategic planning to fight your way back from this kind of narrative and environment.

When You Try to Win Over People Who Mistreat You

Imposter Syndrome told me that not only did I need to work harder and never make a mistake to prevent anything else demoralizing happening to me, I also needed to be more likeable.

I bought a Christmas gift for the same director. I reasoned that I did it the previous year, so I should take the “higher road and do the right thing.”

Imposter Syndrome makes you chase approval from the very people who are harming you, convinced that your perfect performance will somehow make them stop.

The Day Everything Changed

The Meeting I Knew Was Coming

The day came when my boss called me into a meeting. It was ironically a day that I was scheduled to be off, but my Imposter Syndrome was also my scheduler. I had wanted to get a head start on a project. I had zero work-life balance.

When I saw that my boss had booked a conference room for our meeting, I asked if there was anything I could do to prepare. I was met with a curt reply: “NO.”

I walked back to my desk and wrote my resignation letter.

Something deep inside of me, perhaps my intuition or even something much bigger than I could possibly perceive, had told me I needed to get out immediately.

“What’s Gotten Into You?”

When the meeting started, I was asked “What’s gotten into you?” I felt like a teenager who was caught being out after curfew.

“Your work is good, but what has gotten into you?” I asked for more context and I was told that the way I was speaking at staff meetings was unacceptable. The accusations were absurd, I had suggested that part-time employees be included in a holiday event. I had also mentioned and asked questions about an initiative that had been buried.

In a toxic system, all of this was a threat.

Then came the escalation: my boss threatened to have me written up by HR.

I asked, “What would I be written up for?”

“Because you’re not staying in your lane.”

The department had just been reorganized. The team itself was barely taking shape. There were no lanes to stay in besides the ones we had previously known, and they knew it. ‘Stay in your lane’ wasn’t about boundaries. It was code for we want you gone without having to admit to our toxicity.

What became clear was I didn’t belong in any of their lanes.

The final blow: I was told I was no longer allowed to speak up in staff meetings.

I was already being erased from the physical space, no longer invited to meetings, pushed out of rooms. Now they were erasing my voice too.

The Resignation That Changed Everything

Without thinking I blurted out that you should never tell an employee that. Staff meetings are supposed to be where people can speak up respectfully, not where voices get silenced.

I told my boss that my values didn’t align with the organization and slid my resignation letter across the desk. I had been holding it close like cards in a poker game.

I was met with contempt: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I said I’ve never been more sure in my life.

My boss said slowly, “I’ll say it one more time, are you sure you want to do this?”

What I have come to learn now is that this was a threat. It was “are you sure you want to live with how you will be talked about after you go? How we will smear your name and reputation, just like we have done with everyone else who ever left here?”

The entire meeting was a warning. But I fired myself instead.

In that moment, I found the part of myself that refused to be erased, and it became the fuel to do all the hard things that would follow.

The Final Moment

As I was leaving, I accidentally walked out with my work phone. I had to turn back to hand it to my boss. I caught her still shaking and teary-eyed. I could see pain in her eyes.

Fear and intimidation were tactics she used, but they were tactics used by insecure people caught in their own dysfunction.

“You’ll make a great coach someday,” my boss said as I walked out. She meant it.

Even in that moment, she could see what I couldn’t yet see in myself. She knew I had something worth protecting – even if she’d spent months trying to extinguish it.

Breaking Free: My Path to Recovery

The Struggle Continues – Even After Leaving

I moved back to my home state, became a credentialed coach, and started my own coaching practice.

But leaving the toxic workplace didn’t mean leaving the Imposter Syndrome behind.

The art of coaching requires much courage, especially as a solopreneur. And I struggled. I doubted whether I was a good coach. I questioned if I could ever be successful. I was riddled with the same self-doubt, just in a far less toxic environment.

This is what Imposter Syndrome does. It hitches a ride wherever you go. You carry it with you, and it gets triggered in new ways.

I wasn’t overworking for an abusive boss anymore, but I was still overworking to prove I deserved to exist in my own business. I wasn’t seeking approval from toxic leadership, but I was seeking it from potential clients, from other coaches, from anyone who might validate that I belonged.

The environment had changed. The pattern hadn’t.

Discovering Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin’s Work

That’s when I discovered Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin’s research-backed work on Imposter Syndrome.

Dr. Orbé-Austin’s work did more than inspire my own practice. Her work offered the grace I needed to be compassionate to the deeper wounds. She shed light on the way I became a target naturally in my toxic environment, as this is so common for people with Imposter Syndrome.

For the very first time in my life, I had the words to describe the constant experience I had since I was a small child.

Becoming a Certified Imposter Syndrome Coach

My coaching practice began to evolve as I overcame my own Imposter Syndrome with the help of Dr. Orbé-Austin. I realized that same spark I had back in the dark time of leaving my toxic job was alive and well, and I decided to commit my practice entirely to Imposter Syndrome and helping people recover from toxic jobs.

I am a certified Imposter Syndrome coach. I am trained in the very model that helped me overcome it, Dr. Orbé-Austin’s 3C Model.

I am familiar with the claws that Imposter Syndrome can hook into you. The ones that make your work and personal life so exhausting.

I felt the need to perform all the time.

The new me is one with boundaries. I now tolerate the discomfort of being disliked. None of it looks pretty, but it’s done with the kind of self-compassion of someone who is committed to changing the patterns that once kept them small and in harm’s way.

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What’s Possible When You Work on Imposter Syndrome

This is what’s possible when you work on Imposter Syndrome with someone who actually understands it. Not surface-level “believe in yourself” advice, but the deep, research-backed work that changes the patterns that kept you small and in harm’s way.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in my story, know this: You’re not broken. You’re not an imposter. And you don’t have to figure this out alone.

The Signs You Might Be Struggling with Imposter Syndrome

• You attribute your success to luck rather than your abilities
• You overwork to “prove” you belong
• You tolerate toxic behavior because you think it’s your fault
• You people-please even with those who treat you poorly
• You can’t internalize your accomplishments
• You feel like a fraud waiting to be exposed
• You have zero work-life balance because you’re always trying to prove yourself

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Recovery from Imposter Syndrome isn’t about becoming more confident in a surface-level way. It’s about:

• Understanding the childhood origins that created your patterns
• Recognizing when toxic workplaces are exploiting your Imposter Syndrome
• Building boundaries that protect you from manipulation
• Developing self-compassion for the wounds that made you vulnerable
• Learning to internalize your accomplishments
• Breaking the cycle of overwork and people-pleasing

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