Impostor syndrome is the belief that you cannot do something despite clear evidence that you can. It appears most often when a skill comes naturally, making genuine competence feel like luck or deception. Practical ways to counter it include naming the inner critical voice, choosing feedback sources who challenge rather than protect, and treating the comfort zone as a spectrum rather than a hard boundary.
Key Takeaways
- Naming the inner critic, for example by giving it a character from a film, creates separation between self-generated thought and self-destructive doubt, making the voice easier to dismiss.
- Impostor syndrome hits hardest around skills that come naturally, because fluency in a task removes the visible effort that would otherwise confirm competence to the person doing it.
- Choosing feedback sources deliberately matters: people who love you protect you from change, while people who see you in your professional context can challenge you toward growth.
- The comfort zone is not a fixed line to cross but a range, and recognizing on a given day how far you can stretch it is itself a skill that reduces the cost of self-doubt.
What impostor syndrome really is
Impostor syndrome is the belief that you cannot do something, even when clear evidence shows you can. The doubt sits next to the proof and refuses to leave.
Linda Van De Vooren describes it from her own working life. Writing a test plan comes easily to her. She does it well, and people are happy with the result. And yet, while she writes, a fear surfaces: what if they find out she is “just writing some stuff”? The thing she is genuinely good at becomes the thing she questions most.
Most people carry some version of this. There is almost always an area where you are in doubt about whether you can actually do it, regardless of what your track record says.
Why being good at something makes the doubt worse
The doubt tends to attack your strengths, not your weaknesses. When a task comes naturally, you stop registering it as skill.
The moment you start thinking about something that is easy for you is the moment the impostor creeps in. In a professional setting, that is where things can slide fast. You may simply be talented at the task, but you are not actively crediting yourself for it, so the absence of effort reads as fraud rather than competence.
This matters for testers in particular. If writing a clear test plan or speaking to management feels effortless, the temptation is to treat it as nothing. Naming it as a real skill is the correction.
The inner critic deserves a name
Treating the harsh inner voice as a separate character makes it easier to manage. Linda gave hers a nickname and a face: Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs, because the voice says the meanest things with a slight smile.
The point of the metaphor is sorting. Her own thoughts do not harm her. Listening to the voice does. By identifying which one is speaking, she can decide whether to act on it.
The voice gets loudest when basic needs go unmet, when she is tired, hungry, or thirsty. The response is practical rather than heroic: feed yourself, drink water, rest. From there it is far easier to tell the voice, “I hear you, but I’m not going to listen to you.”
Hunger is the hard signal to read, especially after years of learned habits that taught her to ignore it. So the rest of the maintenance routine has to carry more weight.
Nobody sees your flaws the way you do
You watch yourself up close in the mirror and catalogue every detail. Everyone else sees you from a distance, and they cannot see your thoughts at all.
When Linda starts doubting how she comes across, she reminds herself that following her own mind on this is bad for her. Most people are not looking that closely, and they are fine with what they see. That single reframe takes much of the air out of the worry about other people’s judgement.
Treat your comfort zone as a rainbow, not a line
The comfort zone is not a hard boundary you either cross or fail to cross. Linda pictures it as a rainbow with bands of color.
On some days she can manage one color with one toe. On other days she can walk all the way to the far side and stay fine. The skill is reading which kind of day it is.
Most days now, she is comfortable far outside that zone. But some days call for staying in and taking care of herself instead. Knowing the difference, rather than forcing the same level of exposure every day, is what keeps it sustainable.
Self-awareness is learned, not given
The ability to read your own state can be built, even if you did not grow up with it. Linda did not always have it, and she traces her route back through several layers.
She is in therapy now, learning to regulate emotions she was never taught to handle. At 42, she finds the number of layers underneath still surprising.
Earlier, anger ran her life. It pushed into her work, her quality of life, and her connections with people. A coaching training roughly ten years ago broke that chain. She learned what active listening is, how to respond, and where assumptions hide inside communication. She realized she rarely listened fully and assumed constantly, and the assumptions were always bad about herself.
Further back still, a boss sent her to a communication training, essentially asking her to learn how to talk to her. The conflict with that boss never resolved. But the training showed her how she degraded herself, how she met almost everything with “no, but.”
Every time I’m surprised there’s another layer. And in every layer there has been a big lesson for me also how to deal with feeling like an impostor all the time. — Linda Van De Vooren
How a saxophone replaced a diploma
Linda never went to university or college. After middle school she trained to become a primary school teacher, discovered she did not like standing in front of a class of children she did not know, and quit.
She started working, and about eight or nine years later moved into testing. The question that followed her from her first interview onward was always the same: why didn’t you study? Early employers told her a degree would come in handy in a few years. It never did, and its absence never held her back.
Her route in ran through music. At 22, a friend pulled her into an amateur orchestra, where a baritone saxophone caught her completely. As a member you also work volunteer bar shifts, and on one of those shifts she complained to Joris Meerts, a Dutch tester, about how hard it was to get anything done in SAP. He listened and told her she should become a tester.
He put in a good word at his employer, who normally did not take people without diplomas. His argument was simple: she had learned that saxophone in four months. That word got her into testing training.
What once felt like a deficit became an advantage she now claims openly. Without formal training in a fixed way of thinking, she can approach problems more freely and creatively, and that helps her more than it costs her.
A fresh view is worth more than knowing everything
For new testers, knowing little about the application is an asset, not a handicap. Linda tells the trainees she works with that this is the most valuable testing time they will ever have.
The less you know going in, the freer and less inhibited your view of what you are testing. So you should say what you think and what you see, because that perspective disappears the moment you get comfortable.
Her job as the experienced person is to build the environment where a beginner dares to use that view. On one assignment at a municipality, she brought in a trainee to set up test automation, work she does not do herself. She gave him room to communicate, try, and fail, and after a few weeks invited him to deliver the team’s test update. He hesitated, then tried.
Knowing what you cannot do is part of the skill
Self-awareness includes drawing your own boundaries out loud. Linda is clear that she should not be doing test automation. She can talk the talk but does not walk the walk, and she states that plainly.
She steps over the gap by using what she is good at. She can advise management on what to do and whom to hire, she can “speak fluent manager,” and she can explain the pain of unresolved technical debt in terms decision-makers feel. That lets her hand the technical work to people who do it better while still contributing her strength.
The structure she builds around herself follows from this honesty. You name what you cannot do, you arrange for someone who can, and you stop pretending the gap is a personal failure.
Choose carefully who you ask for feedback
Honest feedback only helps if it comes from the right source, and the wrong source can quietly mislead you. Linda keeps a small group close who give her both the negatives and the positives, because she knows her own mind is not fair to her.
Who she does not ask matters just as much. Every time she asks her parents whether she should change jobs, they say no, stay where you are. They love her and do not want her life to change. In almost every one of those cases, changing the job was the better move.
So the people worth asking are the ones who challenge you and can see how much further you could grow. For a work decision, that is rarely the people who never see you at work. Be deliberate about whom you ask and why.
Sharing the struggle is itself a strategy
Speaking openly about impostor syndrome carries little real downside. The worst response Linda gets is “I’m so sorry.” The common one is “your story helped me.”
That is why her first conference talk was about impostor syndrome and the ways she copes with it. The talk lands hard, and the audience feels it, because hearing twenty-five minutes of someone’s struggles leaves a mark. The honesty is exactly what makes it useful to other people.
In technical work, this kind of openness is rare, and that is the argument for doing more of it. Everyone is human, everyone is dealing with something, and saying so out loud lets people help each other instead of each fighting the same voice alone.
