The first time you record a video for your business, put a price on your work, or step up to lead a team, a voice tends to pipe up: what if they work out I don't really know what I'm doing?

Most of us have felt like a fraud at some point, and that feeling is far more common than we admit.

A 2026 Australian study found that 97.6 per cent of new graduate allied health professionals reported moderate to intense feelings of imposterism (Barber et al., 2026).

It does not only affect people at the beginning of their careers. Experienced clinicians can feel it when they take on an unfamiliar caseload, grow a team, step into leadership or put themselves in front of a larger audience.

Feeling like an imposter does not necessarily mean you are unqualified. It can mean you are doing something new. You have reached the edge of what feels familiar and are being asked to grow.

The answer is not always to wait for the feeling to disappear.

The answer is to work out what you need, prepare properly and keep moving.

Think about the parts of your work that nobody trained you for as a clinician.

You may have learned how to be clinically good, but not how to lead a team. You may know how to deliver a great service, but not how to market it. Hiring people, managing a business and speaking publicly can all feel unfamiliar at first.

It is easy to ask: who am I to do this?

But you do not become a leader by waiting until you feel like one. You become a leader by leading.

You do not become comfortable promoting your work by waiting for the discomfort to pass.

You become more comfortable by writing the post, speaking at the event, having the difficult conversation and trying again when it does not go perfectly.

Confidence usually comes after the action, not before it.

I felt imposter syndrome the first time I recorded a video for LinkedIn. I felt embarrassed, silly and honestly I was awful at it. I had the same feeling when I published my first LinkedIn post. I worried about what people would think and whether I had anything worth saying.

Now I post on LinkedIn without blinking an eye lid. Video still feels uncomfortable, but I am slowly getting better at it. The discomfort has not disappeared completely, but it has become easier because I'm a few videos in.

That is the part we often forget when we are trying something new. How we feel at the beginning is not how we will always feel.

The embarrassment passes. The discomfort becomes manageable. We improve.

Psychologist Albert Bandura described this through the idea of mastery experiences. His research found that one of the strongest ways people build belief in their abilities is by successfully doing the task themselves (Bandura, 1977).

Experience builds competence and competence builds confidence.

Encouragement can help. Watching someone else do it can help. But neither replaces the experience of doing something and discovering that you can handle it.

This does not mean ignoring a genuine gap in your knowledge.

If you are working outside your scope, you need supervision, training or support. Moving through imposter syndrome is not about pretending to know everything. It is about being honest about what you need without allowing discomfort to make every decision for you.

There is a difference between moving through the feeling and becoming stuck in it.

Moving through it sounds like this:

This feels uncomfortable, so I will prepare, ask for help and do it anyway.

Getting stuck sounds like this:

This feels uncomfortable, so I must not be capable of doing it.

One response builds experience. The other keeps you where you are.

Moving through imposter syndrome also means accepting that you will make mistakes. You will sometimes misjudge a situation, handle a conversation poorly or realise afterwards that there was a better way.

That isn't evidence you were an imposter. It's how competence is built. We try, we reflect, we adjust, we go again.

Every person you look up to has made mistakes while becoming good at what they do. You just didn't see that part.

I've felt imposter syndrome many times, and I expect to feel it again. I no longer treat it as a reason to stop. I see it as a sign I've reached the edge of what I already know.

The feeling itself isn't the problem. Letting it keep you stuck is. Imposter syndrome isn't something you have to defeat before you move forward, it's something you move through by moving forward.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191 to 215.

Barber, S. J., Flavell, C. A., and Smith, M. (2026). An exploratory study: The presence of imposter syndrome in new graduate allied health professionals and its relationship to location of practice. Internet Journal of Allied Health Sciences and Practice, 24(2), Article 19.

Clance, P. R., and Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241 to 247.

Shanafelt, T. D., et al. (2022). Imposter phenomenon in US physicians relative to the US working population. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 97(11), 1981 to 1993.