When I was first promoted to an Area Manager position in retail back in 2001, I walked into my first conference in Livingston and immediately noticed I was the only female in the room. The corporate culture back then was one of fear, anxiety, and aggressive confrontation.
To survive, I adapted.
Oscar Wilde famously said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” But in that environment, being myself felt like a career risk. I lowered my voice, started wearing more masculine clothing, and adopted a confrontational style that wasn’t mine. It worked, but it left me completely drained. For the first 14 years of my operational career, I was defined by a constant, underlying feeling of inadequacy. I felt like I didn’t belong, and I was anxious about being “found out.”
It wasn’t until I hit 40 and pursued a master’s degree in high-performance leadership that the shift finally happened. Learning about emotional intelligence and coaching techniques helped me transition from a space of “not feeling quite enough” to finally “feeling enough.”
This journey, from not enough, to enough, to finally having had enough and setting boundaries, was the core of my recent keynote at the Senior Women Leaders Conference at Swansea University. The resonance in that room was profound. This lack of self-belief, often labeled “imposter syndrome,” is a powerful negative belief held across multiple disciplines.
But as an executive coach working with senior leaders, I see the real cost of this phenomenon. It isn’t just a confidence issue. It is a direct pathway to exhaustion and burnout.
The Competence vs. Confidence Trap (And the “Permission Gap”)
There is a widely cited statistic in leadership research: women often need to feel 100% qualified before pursuing opportunities, while men typically feel confident at 60% readiness.
For years, the narrative around this data was that “women just need to be more confident.” But this individual-deficit framing is incomplete and inaccurate. The confidence gap often peaks not at the beginning of a career, but in the middle. Why? Because it isn’t about what women lack; it is about what the environment asks them to suppress.
This is the permission gap. Evaluation bias in professional settings is very real. Women are evaluated differently than men, held to stricter standards for likability, penalised more harshly for confident self-promotion, and frequently required to prove their competence repeatedly in contexts where men are assumed capable until proven otherwise.
A recent Harvard Business Review piece pushed back hard against pathologising imposter syndrome. The authors noted that the concept’s 1970s origins excluded systemic factors, concluding that the answer isn’t “fixing” individual women, but building environments that support different leadership styles and view diverse identities as equally professional.
When we understand this, the self-doubt makes perfect sense. It is partly a rational response to a biased system.
The Scale of the “Imposter” Experience
The term “imposter phenomenon” was coined in 1978 to describe an internal experience of intellectual phoniness, prevalent among high-achieving women who persisted in believing they were “not really bright” despite objective evidence of their competence.
Today, the scale of this feeling is massive:
- It is widespread: A meta-analysis of 108 studies (over 40,000 participants) confirms this self-doubt shows up more frequently in women.
- It impacts the top: A 2020 KPMG study found three out of four female executives had experienced imposter syndrome in their careers.
- It stalls advancement: Russell Reynolds’ recent research shows women leaders are 2.3x more likely than men to believe they aren’t equipped to do their manager’s job (34% of women disagreed they had the skills to step up, versus only 15% of men).
The Direct Line to Burnout: Invisible Over-Functioning
How does this low self-belief translate into the workplace? It shows up as over-functioning.
When you feel you don’t belong, you compensate. You over-prepare for every meeting. You over-give your time to your team. You struggle to delegate because you feel you have to prove your worth by doing it yourself. You shrink or play small to fit in, just as I did when I adopted a persona to survive an aggressive culture.
This over-functioning is a fast track to burnout. McKinsey and Lean In’s Women in the Workplace research highlights this starkly: six in ten senior-level women report frequently feeling burned out.
The mechanism here is critical. Senior women do 60% more than their male counterparts to provide emotional support to employees, and take on twice the “office housework.” Yet, while 87% of companies say it’s critical for managers to support employee wellbeing, only 25% formally recognise this work.
Low self-belief drives women to take on this unrewarded, invisible work to prove their value. Because it is structurally unrewarded, the exhaustion compounds. In my own career, the constant relocations, eight in total, four with my children, and the shift back to a fear-based culture eventually became unsustainable. I acted against my values to survive, felt like a square peg in a round hole, and began to numb myself emotionally. I had finally reached the breaking point.
Prevention: The Power of Self-Compassion
How do we interrupt this cycle? The answer isn’t “just be more confident.” The answer, backed by solid research, is self-compassion.
Self-compassion is not wellness fluff; it is a proven, evidence-based lever against the perfectionism that drives burnout:
- Reduces Stress: A systematic review found self-compassion is linked to the prevention of occupational stress, burnout, and compassion fatigue.
- Improves Coping: Cross-sectional research found self-compassion facilitates positive coping with work-related tension.
- Breaks Perfectionism: Crucially for high-achievers, studies show self-compassion significantly mediates the relationship between perfectionism and burnout.
Finding Your Own Voice
My own shift from “not enough” to “enough” started with education and awareness but it solidified through understanding psychology and behavior. This is exactly where executive coaching becomes invaluable.
Coaching isn’t about fixing a deficit. It is about creating a space where leaders can recognise how they are intentionally shrinking. It is about identifying the strengths that can overcome professional insecurity, navigating that stubborn imposter syndrome, establishing boundaries, and gaining true professional traction without sacrificing wellbeing.
When we drop the corporate masks and talk about the psychological reality of leadership, we realise how many of us are navigating the exact same hurdles. If you are exhausted from over-functioning to prove your worth, it is time to stop trying to fit into a system that asks you to suppress who you are.
Everyone else is taken. It is time to be yourself.
