Why Imposter Syndrome Is a Topic Women Should Talk About

When I hold Circles for Women, one theme comes back again and again. It is the feeling that men just go for things, while women constantly question their own abilities and search for a sense of readiness before they even begin. I hear it in so many different stories, but one example has stayed with me because it makes the pattern so visible: surfing.

If you paddle out into the ocean, you will see mostly men. But if you look at who signs up for surf classes, it is mostly women. Why is that? Because women want to prepare. They want to make sure they are competent enough before they go out on their own. Men, on the other hand, often just rent a board and try. They can afford to do that, because their competence is rarely questioned in the same way. Nobody is watching them, waiting for them to prove they belong in the water.

Women, by contrast, often face situations where they feel they need to prove themselves before they are allowed to simply exist in a space. They need to seem competent enough to be taken seriously, long before anyone has actually given them the chance to show what they can do. And this is the part I want to name clearly: it is not really about feeling ready. It is about building intrinsic confidence, the kind that lets you walk into a room and feel grounded and collected, regardless of whether you have proven anything yet.

The Voice That Holds Us Back

This is why working with imposter syndrome matters so much. It is the voice in your head that keeps telling you that you are not good enough yet, not strong enough, not skilled enough, not competent enough. It is patient and persistent, and it rarely shouts. It just keeps whispering the same message in slightly different forms, until you start to believe that everyone else got the memo on being ready and you somehow missed it.

That voice does something very specific. It stops you from starting. It convinces you that ability has to be proven first, before you are allowed to take up space publicly. So you prepare more, you take another course, you read another book, you wait for the moment when you will finally feel enough. And for many women, that moment keeps moving further away, no matter how much evidence accumulates.

Why It Hits Women Harder

For women, this pattern tends to be extra strong, and I think it helps to understand why, rather than just accepting it as a personal flaw. Many of us have learned, sometimes very early in life, that we need to earn our place at the table. Competence is not simply assumed. It has to be demonstrated, repeatedly, before it is trusted. That creates a very different starting point than the one many men grow up with, where showing up itself is often read as a sign of capability.

On top of that, women are frequently socialized to care deeply about how other people feel around them. This is not a weakness, it is often a real strength that builds trust, connection, and genuinely good teams. But it comes with a cost when it tips into constantly monitoring your own impact on others. We want to make sure we are the best version of ourselves for the people around us, and in doing so, we can end up making ourselves smaller. We soften our opinions, we hedge our language, we hold back the idea in the meeting because we are not one hundred percent sure it is right, while someone else offers a half formed thought with total confidence and gets credit for the direction it eventually takes.

What This Costs Us

The surfing example is almost trivial compared to what this pattern looks like in professional life. In tech, in leadership, in any male dominated environment, the same dynamic plays out with higher stakes. Women wait to apply for the promotion until they meet every single requirement on the list, while men apply when they meet a fraction of them. Women prepare exhaustively for a presentation, rehearsing every possible question, while their male colleagues walk in with a rough outline and trust themselves to fill in the gaps live. None of this is because women are less capable, but because the bar for feeling entitled to try has been set much higher, and much of that bar lives inside our own minds now, even in situations where nobody external is actually enforcing it anymore.

This is exactly why I believe the conversation about imposter syndrome cannot stay theoretical. It has to be named, discussed, and worked with directly, because otherwise it quietly shapes decades of choices. Which opportunities you go for. Which rooms you walk into and which ones you avoid. Which ideas you speak out loud and which ones you keep to yourself because you are not fully certain they are worth saying.

From Readiness to Groundedness

The shift I try to support in my coaching, and the shift I hope every Circle conversation plants a seed for, is moving away from chasing readiness and toward building groundedness. Readiness is external. It depends on checklists, on approval, on reaching some invisible finish line that keeps redrawing itself the closer you get. Groundedness is internal. It is the ability to walk into a room, or paddle out into the ocean, without needing to have already proven yourself, because your sense of worth is not on trial in the first place.

That does not mean throwing preparation out the window. Preparation is valuable and often genuinely useful. But there is a real difference between preparing because it serves you and preparing because you do not trust yourself to handle what comes next without it. The first is a tool. The second is a trap, one that can keep you circling the shore indefinitely while everyone else is already out riding the waves, learning as they go, falling off their boards and getting back on without treating each wipeout as proof they never belonged there.

Why We Keep Talking About It

This is why imposter syndrome deserves ongoing conversation rather than a single acknowledgment and then silence. It is not a flaw to be fixed once and forgotten. It is a pattern that gets reinforced by real structural conditions, and it needs just as much ongoing attention as those conditions do. When women gather in a Circle and hear that someone else has been quietly measuring herself against an impossible standard too, something shifts. The voice does not disappear overnight, but it loses some of its authority. It becomes a familiar visitor rather than an unquestioned truth.

That is the real work. Not eliminating self doubt entirely, because a little self awareness is healthy and even useful. But loosening its grip enough that it stops being the deciding vote on whether you try. Enough that you can rent the board, paddle out, and learn to surf in the ocean itself, rather than waiting in the shallow end until you feel one hundred percent certain you have earned the right to get wet. Wiktoria Gasiorowska, Confidence Coach for women