There's a voice that's been in my head for most of my professional life.
It has excellent timing. It shows up right before a client presentation, right as I'm about to send a pitch, right in the moment between finishing a piece of work and declaring it good enough. It has an impressive archive of evidence. It knows every rejection, every project that didn't land, every room where the response was polite rather than electric.
For a long time I thought this voice was quality control.
It isn't. It's the Impostor Boss — and a few years ago I made the decision to fire it.
What impostor syndrome actually is
Impostor syndrome is usually described as the fear that you'll be found out — that despite your apparent credentials and achievements, you're actually not qualified and someone is eventually going to notice.
That description is accurate, but it misses what makes it so persistent. The reason impostor syndrome is hard to overcome isn't that it's irrational. It's that it's selective. It acknowledges your successes by dismissing them (luck, timing, the client was easy) and it takes your failures as confirmed evidence of the underlying truth.
It's a rigged argument. The evidence that supports the thesis gets counted. The evidence that contradicts it gets explained away.
For people with ADHD, this dynamic is amplified. The ADHD brain is generally faster to perceive threats and slower to update its threat assessment when the threat turns out to be manageable. Which means the voice is louder, the physical anxiety is more intense, and the archive of failure evidence is more vividly catalogued than the equivalent wins.
The moment I understood what was happening
I was preparing a pitch for a significant client — the kind that felt like a real threshold, a step toward the work I actually wanted to be doing. The work was good. I knew it was good. My collaborators thought it was good.
And yet I spent the forty-eight hours before the presentation in a specific kind of productive-looking paralysis. Refining things that didn't need refining. Re-reading slides that were finished. Finding problems that weren't there. Working through the night not because the work required it but because the anxiety required the appearance of action.
In the debrief after the presentation — which went well — I realised I had spent twice as much energy managing the Impostor Boss as I had spent on the actual work.
That's when I started understanding it not as a feeling to be managed but as a pattern to be interrupted.
What firing looks like
I want to be honest: you don't fire the Impostor Boss once and it's gone. It comes back. It'll probably always come back, in some form.
What you can do is learn to identify it faster, refuse to give it authority over your decisions, and build practices that diminish its influence over time.
For me, the most useful shift was separating the signal from the noise. The Impostor Boss generates anxiety. Some anxiety is information — it points to a genuine gap, a real risk, something worth attending to. But most of it is noise. The voice catastrophising about outcomes that are unlikely. The replaying of failures that are irrelevant to the current situation.
Signal worth hearing: there's a part of this presentation I'm not confident about and I don't fully know why. Let me figure out what's actually missing.
Noise to ignore: everyone in that room is more accomplished than me and they're going to see through this immediately.
The difference, over time, becomes easier to identify. And the ratio of noise to signal in the Impostor Boss's output is significantly higher than it wants you to believe.
The thing about the creative work
Impostor syndrome is particularly insidious in creative fields because the judgment of creative work is genuinely subjective. There's no clear external standard the way there is in surgery or engineering. A presentation that changes the room for one client is dismissed by another. This gives the Impostor Boss enormous material to work with.
What I've found — and what I've watched other creative people find — is that the work done in spite of the voice is almost always better than the work done in service of it.
Work produced to satisfy the Impostor Boss is safe work. Carefully hedged. Built to not be wrong rather than to be right. It's the work that avoids risk and therefore avoids impact.
Work produced in defiance of the voice — the pitch that feels almost too bold, the concept that you're not sure the client will accept, the design that breaks the category norms — is the work that changes things.
The voice wants you to make forgettable work. Don't.
The only thing that actually works
The most reliable way I've found to reduce the Impostor Boss's influence is a simple and unsatisfying one: do the thing anyway, and accumulate evidence.
The voice claims you're not capable. The only argument that works against it is demonstrating capability. Not convincing yourself intellectually. Actually doing the work, delivering it, watching it land.
Over time, the evidence accumulates. Not enough to silence the voice entirely — it has very selective memory. But enough to give you something to stand on when the voice is loud.
I've fired the Impostor Boss several times. It keeps coming back. But each time, it has less authority in the room.
That's enough.