Recently I caught myself wondering something uncomfortable.
Am I actually performing at the level I expect from myself?
From the outside, things look fine. Projects move forward, decisions get made, responsibilities grow.
Yet occasionally there’s a quiet doubt: How high of a performer am I… or have I simply been fortunate with timing, opportunities, and the people around me?
A while ago I would probably have called that feeling imposter syndrome.
Today I’m not so sure anymore.
The illusion of certainty
Once you spend enough time in leadership environments, a few things become obvious.
First: Nobody has the full picture.
Second: Most important decisions are made with incomplete information.
And third: Confidence is often performative.
Many leaders project certainty long before they actually feel it internally.
At some point you realize something slightly uncomfortable: Most people are not executing a perfectly defined plan.
They are navigating complexity in real time.
That realization can be strangely liberating, but also humbling.
Vulnerability and leadership
In The Power of Vulnerability, Brené Brown describes vulnerability not as weakness, but as the courage to show up without guarantees.
That definition resonates strongly with leadership.
Because leadership rarely comes with guarantees.
You make decisions without having all the answers.
You move forward without knowing the full outcome.
And occasionally you wonder whether you’re really doing as well as people around you might assume.
Admitting that uncertainty can feel uncomfortable, especially in environments where leaders are expected to project confidence.
But pretending certainty where it doesn’t exist isn’t leadership either.
The trap high performers fall into….
Something else I’ve noticed over time.
Many high-performing professionals have a tendency to internalize outcomes too quickly.
When something goes wrong, the instinctive reaction is often:
“Where did I misjudge this?”
That instinct comes from ownership. And ownership is a good thing.
But it can also create a misleading equation:
Outcome = my judgment
Reality is more complicated.
Outcomes are shaped by systems: strategy, execution, people, timing, market conditions, and sometimes plain randomness.
Your judgment is only one variable in that equation.
Recognizing that doesn’t remove responsibility.
But it does create a more honest perspective on causality.
Decision quality vs. outcome quality
One mental shift that has helped me is separating decision quality from outcome quality.
A good decision can still produce a bad outcome if circumstances change.
A poor decision can occasionally work because of luck.
If we evaluate ourselves purely on results, we risk learning the wrong lessons.
A better question is:
Was the reasoning sound given the information available?
Did we execute well?
What changed externally?
Only after that does it make sense to question your own judgment.
Why leadership discussions often drift.
Another observation: Many meetings quickly drift toward operational details.
Which tool should we use?
Who owns the task?
What timeline should we set?
But those questions sometimes appear before the real problem has been clearly defined.
Organizations naturally gravitate toward action. Action feels productive.
Yet leadership often requires something different: stepping back and clarifying the problem first.
Sometimes the most valuable contribution in a meeting is simply asking:
What problem are we actually solving?
What outcome are we trying to achieve?
Is this even the right initiative?
These questions may sound simple, but they often change the entire direction of the discussion.
The uncomfortable transition
Looking back, I think many professionals move through three phases in their career.
Performer
“I must prove I’m capable.”
Expert
“I must know more than others.”
Leader
“I must make decisions when nobody knows.”
The transition from expert to leader is not always comfortable.
Expertise gives certainty. Leadership often removes it.
And perhaps that’s where the feeling people call “imposter syndrome” sometimes appears.
Not because someone is incapable, but because the job itself has changed.
A more honest question
The more I reflect on it, the more I think the real challenge of leadership is not eliminating uncertainty.
It’s learning to operate with uncertainty.
For me, the question has gradually shifted, even though I often struggle…
Instead of asking:
“Am I good enough for this?”
A more useful question might be:
“Given what we know today, what is the best decision we can make now?”
And maybe the real question for many of us is this:
Is what we call imposter syndrome actually just the feeling of stepping into responsibility that is bigger than certainty?
