I have worked with highly accomplished faculty and staff long enough to notice a pattern I still find striking: A tenure-line professor with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship walks into a coaching conversation unable to articulate why they feel they don’t belong. A newly appointed associate dean – brilliant, relational, well-regarded – spends the first several sessions managing a persistent internal voice that tells them the promotion was a mistake. The credentials are real. The accomplishment is real. And yet neither of those facts reliably quiets the doubt.
This is the terrain of imposter syndrome in higher education, and coaching self-doubt in this setting is far more complex than most professional development conversations allow.
I had the chance to explore it with Dr. AJ Lauer, a coaching colleague, friend, and nationally recognized expert on imposter syndrome, on my podcast, Coaching in Higher Education. AJ’s work reframes something I’ had’ve been observing in my own practice for years: the conventional coaching response to imposter syndrome may actually reinforce it, and the institutional environments where we work with clients are often doing far more damage than any individual client’s inner critic ever could.
The Accomplishment List Trap
The most widely repeated coaching advice for clients struggling with imposter feelings is some version of “reflect on your achievements, and you will feel more confident.” I understand why coaches reach for that intervention (although coaches giving advice like this is problematic on its own). It is intuitive, accessible, and produces an immediate response in sessions. The difficulty is that it can backfire.
As AJ explained, imposter syndrome carries with it a somewhat pernicious built-in rationalization mechanism: For clients who genuinely believe their success was a matter of luck or circumstance rather than competence, a list of achievements does not build confidence – in fact, it provides a structured opportunity to explain away every item on the list. The promotion was a fluke. The grant came through because the committee needed a diversity win. The positive student evaluations reflect low expectations, not real impact. Listing accomplishments gives the inner critic a checklist of excuses, not a reason to go quiet.
What works more reliably, in my experience, is a different starting point: helping clients build clarity on what competence actually means in their specific role, right now. Not past accomplishments, but what the current situation genuinely requires of them, and whether that picture matches what they have been telling themselves about their expertise and place in the institutional ecosystem. That recalibration, once grounded in real expectations rather than an idealized standard, usually creates the conditions under which imposter feelings genuinely lose some of their grip.
Coaching Self-Doubt Starts With Context
One of the most useful frameworks I carry into this work is the idea that imposter syndrome is not primarily an emotional problem – it is a competence mismatch problem. The internal experience of feeling like a fraud emerges when a person’s understanding of what it means to succeed in a given role diverges significantly from what is actually required. That gap can have any number of sources: an unrealistic internal standard, unclear institutional expectations, a role transition nobody adequately prepared them for, or a cultural environment that breeds a simmering values misalignment.
Higher education is particularly fertile ground for all four of these sources. As I have written many times before, institutions frequently promote their most accomplished scholars into leadership roles. Those roles have almost nothing to do with the skills that earned them that distinction. The researcher celebrated for independent intellectual work suddenly finds themselves responsible for managing people, navigating budget conversations, and translating between faculty culture and administrative priorities. That pivot is real and disorienting, and institutions rarely acknowledge it as the identity-level transition it is. At the same time, the norms of academic culture, where admitting uncertainty signals weakness and expertise is a core professional identity, make it exceptionally difficult for people to ask for help or name what they don’t know.
The Institution Is Not Neutral
There is a dimension of this conversation that coaches working in higher education cannot afford to set aside: imposter syndrome is not distributed evenly across an institution. Faculty and staff with minoritized identities, including people of color, women, first-generation professionals, and those from working-class backgrounds who came into academia via routes that did not include informal cultural mentorship, carry a disproportionate share of imposter burden. This is not a coincidence. It reflects that academic institutions, like most American workplaces, were not designed with these groups’ full participation in mind.
This is uncomfortable and probably unwanted as a framing for coaches who prefer to stay focused on the individual client in front of them. But I believe it is a professional imperative to hold both the personal and the systemic levels simultaneously. At the same time, a more agile coaching approach can also help a client learn to regulate their nervous system and recalibrate their expectations for competence, which is meaningful and worth doing.
That said, coaching self-doubt at the individual level may have limited impact if the institutional conditions generating the imposter experience remain intact and unexamined.
One critical question to help clients explore is whether the gap they are experiencing is theirs to close, or whether it reflects something about how the organization communicates expectations, distributes recognition, or defines whose presence feels natural and whose requires justification. While this question does not necessarily lead clients to a decision to leave their institution, it does, however, often produce more insight than another round of achievement reflection, and it positions the coaching work as more than personal coping.
How We Show Up as Coaches
The somatic dimension of this work is one area where I see coaches – myself included – continue to develop. Imposter syndrome isn’t only a cognitive experience; clients feel it in their bodies: tight shoulders, a constricted chest, and an attention that narrows when someone feels their legitimacy is in question. Noticing those signals and gently reflecting them back to clients can create a different kind of awareness than talking through the imposter concern alone. Many times, grounding practices, breathing, and the simple act of naming where the experience lives in the body can shift the physiological state in ways that make the analytical work more accessible.
As AJ outlined, it may be useful to approach this work through the lens of viewing imposter feelings as a protective mechanism worth understanding rather than an enemy to defeat. A client whose “imposter monster,” to borrow a vivid and useful frame, shows up as overcontrol or defensiveness is not being unreasonable and may be protecting a part of the client that has learned by experience that appearing less than fully competent was not safe. Working with that protector, rather than against it, often allows a more sustainable shift.
Coaches who want to deepen their capacity in this area might explore Internal Family Systems principles, which offer a coherent framework for engaging with these protective internal patterns, and for building the relational safety that allows a client’s protective parts to stand down long enough for genuine insight to emerge.
Institutional Accountability
I often wonder what upper-level administrators would discover if they looked honestly at how their institutions define and communicate competence expectations. Clear, role-specific expectations do not eliminate imposter experiences entirely, but they close one of the most common gaps that imposter feelings rush in to fill. When people do not know what success is supposed to look like, they invent a standard – and standards people make up and then impose upon themselves are almost always more demanding and less forgiving than anything the institution actually expects of them.
That is a structural lever institutions can pull, and it costs relatively little. Here, coaching can help individual clients build awareness and navigate the gap, but the impact is certainly much broader when the institution does its part as well.
If you are a higher education administrator thinking about how your institution’s culture shapes the inner experience of its people, I invite you to explore my professional coaching and advisory services. My work sits at the intersection of organizational development, leadership capacity, and the deeply human dimensions of professional life in higher education.
You can find this and all other Coaching in Higher Education podcast episodes on:
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Frequently Asked Questions: Coaching Self-Doubt in Higher Education
Why do accomplished faculty still feel like imposters?
Achievements alone rarely quiet the doubt. A list of accomplishments can even hand the inner critic a checklist of excuses. The feeling often grows from a gap between what someone believes competence means and what their role really asks of them.
Is imposter syndrome just an emotional problem?
Not really. It is often a competence mismatch problem. When your picture of success drifts away from what the role requires, you feel like a fraud. Getting clear on what competence means in your role, right now, usually helps more than pep talks.
How can an institution make imposter feelings worse?
The burden is not shared evenly. People of color, women, and first-generation professionals often carry more of it, because academic workplaces were not built with them in mind. Vague expectations also leave people inventing harsher standards for themselves.
What can coaches do differently when a client feels like an imposter?
Hold the personal and the systemic together. Ask whether the gap belongs to the client or to how the organization communicates expectations and recognition. Notice the body too, like tight shoulders or a tight chest, since grounding and breathing can shift things.
What can higher education leaders do about imposter feelings on campus?
Start with clear, role-specific expectations. When people know what success looks like, they have less room to invent impossible standards. It costs relatively little, and the impact reaches far beyond any single coaching relationship.