The Higher You Climb, the Louder It Gets

You'd think it belonged to the first big job, or the first board presentation, and that eventually the evidence would pile up high enough for the feeling to give in. It rarely works out that way.

Two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, first described this in 1978 while working with high-achieving women who were convinced their success came down to luck, timing and having fooled everybody. It's since been documented in men and women, across industries, at every level of seniority. It isn't a diagnosis and it isn't a disorder. It's a pattern, and among senior people it's close to normal.

Why it gets worse, not better.

Four things change as you move up, and every one of them feeds it.

1. 01

   The feedback thins out

   Early on, your work can be checked. The model balances, the code runs, the client signs. Senior work is judgment calls whose results arrive years later, if they arrive at all.

   The catch

   You took away the scoreboard, and you kept the part of yourself that needed one.

2. 02

   The room keeps changing

   Every promotion places you among people who are, by definition, more accomplished than your last set of colleagues, so your sense of ordinary shifts upward each time.

   The catch

   You will always be somewhere in the middle of whichever room you're standing in now. That's what promotion does.

3. 03

   The job stops being the job

   You were promoted for being excellent at the work, into a role that's mostly persuasion, politics and judgment, and nobody trained you in any of those.

   The catch

   That gap is real, but it's a gap in your training rather than proof that you're a fraud.

4. 04

   More is riding on it

   More people are affected by what you decide, and more of who you are is bound up in the decisions, so the doubt gets louder as the consequences grow.

   The catch

   A passing doubt at thirty becomes a settled certainty at four in the morning when you're fifty.

Why the evidence never lands.

Here's the part that genuinely confuses people. You can be shown the results, and you can be told sincerely and repeatedly by colleagues whose judgment you trust on every other subject, and it simply slides off. Two things are going on, and both of them are ordinary features of how minds work rather than anything wrong with yours.

Bad news weighs more than good news. This is one of the most replicated findings in psychology, and it isn't irrational, since historically missing a threat cost you rather more than missing a compliment. So nine pieces of praise and one sharp comment don't average out into a decent day. The comment is what you carry home, and it's what you're still holding at eleven at night.

And praise doesn't fit the story you're telling. If you believe you're getting away with something, then praise doesn't confirm that belief — it contradicts it. We don't automatically update a belief when something contradicts it, though. We explain it away. They don't know what that project actually took. They're being generous. It was a strong team, and not really me.

So every piece of evidence gets absorbed by the belief instead of challenging it, which is why the promotion didn't fix it, why the award didn't fix it, and why whatever you achieve next won't fix it either.

Being good at something and feeling good enough are two different things.

This is the reframe I find helps most, largely because it takes the shame out of the whole business.

Your competence was built out of training, practice and experience, and yours is substantial. Your sense of whether you are enough was built somewhere else entirely, much earlier, out of what happened when you did well and what happened when you didn't.

Those two were assembled separately, and they don't automatically speak to each other. You can be running one at an exceptional level while the other is still using settings from when you were nine. That isn't a contradiction — it's the ordinary situation for a lot of senior people — and it's why you can't achieve your way out of the feeling. You keep adding to a column that was never the one being counted.

Often you can find where it started. A house where affection followed results. A sibling who was the clever one, which quietly made you something else. A parent who withheld praise deliberately, believing it would keep you sharp, and who was right in a narrow way, at a price neither of you agreed to.

What to do tomorrow.

Two things, one small and one rather bigger.

Keep a plain record. When something goes well, write a single line: what happened, and what you specifically did. This isn't a gratitude journal, it's a file. The point isn't that reading it will make you feel better, because it probably won't. The point is that you get to watch yourself explaining away something written in your own handwriting, and that is worth seeing.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Notice that you have never once felt ready and have done it anyway, for twenty years. Feeling ready was never the entry requirement. It turns up afterwards, if it turns up at all, and a great many excellent careers have been conducted entirely without it.

And if you'd like the belief itself to change, rather than spending another decade working carefully around it, that's a different kind of work and it's available to you.