I’ve struggled with impostor syndrome my entire life, though up until a few years ago I was unaware there was a name for it and that it was a documented phenomenon. If you struggle with impostor syndrome, you think that you don’t really belong, that eventually you’ll be exposed as a fraud. I used to think I was the only one who ever felt this way. As it turns out, the majority of people feel this way, no matter how successful they are. Doctors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, actors, moms, and everyone in between struggle with impostor syndrome.
When I was a kid, I got good grades. I hated the recognition that came with it. I dreaded the day when the teachers and my classmates would realize I was not smart. Maybe this is why I became a perfectionist. If I missed a single problem on a test, I would mentally thrash myself and double down on my efforts for the next one. On the other hand, maybe I was a perfectionist already, and that’s why I was susceptible to impostor syndrome. Either way, it’s not good. It can make life pretty miserable. On the bright side, I’ve found that you can fight impostor syndrome.
In my experience, impostor syndrome can affect every area of your life: I’ve felt dread that my husband will one day see who I truly am: a flawed, average human being, and rue the day he married me. After losing weight, I felt like an impostor. I felt like the truth was that I was an overweight person disguising herself as someone at a healthy weight. I learned that I must recognize impostor syndrome for what it is, and push past it. (The book Mindset by Carol S. Dweck was also exceedingly helpful with this work.)
Impostor syndrome has been my constant companion since starting this website and my YouTube channel. Before almost every video thoughts like these go through my head:
- “You don’t have a flat stomach. You shouldn’t be making videos about weight loss.”
- “You might gain the weight back someday. Then everyone will see what a fraud you are.”
- “People are going to think this video is stupid, and then they’ll see that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
- “You really need a studio to record videos. People who will watch this will think you’re an idiot for recording this in your RV.”
These thoughts have only become more persistent as my subscriber count has grown. It doesn’t matter that I’ve lost the weight, and have been maintaining a healthy weight for years. It doesn’t matter that the majority of comments I’ve received have been positive, or that people have reached out to say that my videos have helped them. Self-doubt continues to lurk. To continue to function, I acknowledge the thoughts, and then I ignore them, and make the videos anyway.
Back in 2018, I wrote and published The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting. That marked my hardest battle with impostor syndrome to date. I felt like a complete fraud, writing about weight loss. My belly was still very much post-partum-y. I had no credientials to speak of, except for my own real-world experience with using intermittent fasting to lose 80 pounds. My husband and I had a terrible argument just as I was finishing the book, directly because of how much self-doubt I was feeling at the time.
On my last read-through and edit of the book, I almost threw away the entire manuscript. The only thing that prevented me from doing it was that I had learned about impostor syndrome, and it crossed my mind that this might just be a manifestation of it. The thought that the book might help one other person pushed me to publish it, and I’m glad that I did.
Fresh from that battle, I debated about whether to also record it as an audiobook. We were travelling full-time and living in a class C RV with our three kids. I’d never recorded an audiobook before. I had no studio. All these things seemed like perfectly valid reasons not to record an audiobook. But then I remembered something.
Several years before, I had been watching an episode of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. If you’ve never seen the show, the host, Mike Rowe, traveled around the country and spotlighted people who do some of the dirtiest jobs in America. In one particular episode, it showed Mike in his hotel room, sitting on his bed, enshrouded by his bedspread, recording the voiceover for that episode. He explained that sometimes due to deadlines, they had to record the voiceovers while on the road. He said that sitting on a bed underneath the covers served as an acceptable makeshift studio.
I decided my self-doubt about recording the book was another case of impostor syndrome. I opened up my manuscript on my tablet, sat down on the bed, set up the microphone, threw the bedspread over my head, and started to record. Meanwhile my husband attempted to keep our kids quiet in the living area of the RV just a few feet away. The entire time I was recording I felt like a fraud. I was sure that people would think I sounded like a hillbilly and that I would be publicly humiliated in some way for putting my recording on Audible. I knew that people would say that I should have hired a professional voice actor to read the manuscript.
As it turned out, the audiobook has sold well, and the reviews have generally been positive. In the end, I’ve found that to defeat impostor syndrome, you have to ignore that self-doubt in your head and do the thing you’re wanting to do anyway.
I used the same recording setup for my second book, Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles: How to Keep Going When Things Get Difficult. Here’s what it looked like behind the scenes: 
Would you believe that I still felt those same feelings of being an impostor while I recorded it? I also felt loads of it when I was writing the book in the first place.
I hope that by sharing a bit of what goes on behind the scenes for me, it will encourage you if you’re also prone to impostor syndrome. Of course, even as I write this post, impostor syndrome is sitting right here with me. Don’t show them how you record your audiobooks! No one will ever buy them now! Now they’re really going to know you’re a fraud!
How will I defeat impostor syndrome today? I’ll click publish on this post. Will impostor syndrome ever go away completely? I kinda doubt it, but I think it’s worth fighting it at every turn, because my life gets better when I do.