fake it until you make it...

"Fake it until you make it" originally meant acting with confidence before you fully felt confident. It did not mean claiming expertise, credentials, experience, or results that you do not have.

Somewhere along the way, particularly in parts of tech, startups, coaching, advising, and social media, the idea drifted from confidence ahead of certainty to credibility ahead of competence.

Those are very different things.

A junior executive taking on a bigger role and learning on the job is not faking it. They are growing into the role.

An advisor selling expertise they have never demonstrated is something else entirely.

The same applies to impostor syndrome.

Real impostor syndrome affects people who are often competent but underestimate themselves. They worry they are frauds despite evidence suggesting otherwise.

The reality is that not everyone who says they have impostor syndrome is suffering from impostor syndrome. Sometimes the feeling is an accurate signal. Sometimes the anxiety exists because the competence has not yet caught up with the positioning.

A useful question is:

"Am I feeling like an impostor despite evidence that I belong here, or am I feeling like an impostor because deep down I know I still have work to do?"

Those are fundamentally different situations.

The first calls for confidence. The second calls for competence.

Competence is usually harder to acquire than confidence is to display.