#61 | Why Quieting Imposter Syndrome Is the Key to Building Influence and Being Seen for Promotion

Do you know you’re capable, yet still find yourself holding back, second guessing your voice, or staying quiet when it matters most?

In this episode, Caroline explores how imposter syndrome quietly chips away at your visibility, influence, and career progress, especially for women in corporate leadership. She unpacks why being seen is not about becoming louder or more self-promotional, but about recognising the value you already bring and making it easier for others to recognise it too.

• You’ll learn how to stop letting self-doubt silence your contribution in important moments.
• You’ll discover simple ways to build your influence without changing who you are.
• You’ll leave with practical, repeatable moves to build influence and create more career momentum from the value you already bring.

 Play this episode to learn how to quiet imposter syndrome, show up with more certainty, and be seen for the value that has been there all along.

More from the show

Your Gremlin Cheat Sheet to quieten your self-doubt.

Read more about The Hidden Cost of Playing Small

New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

And here is the Spotify Playlist to accompany UnShakeable Her.

This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:00)
Hey there, welcome back. I'm Caroline Esterson and boy, what a week we've had. So on Monday, I gave you three questions, three moments about the promotion that went to someone else, the idea that stayed in your head and the brilliant work that somehow just wasn't enough. On Wednesday, we looked at pie and the visibility problem. I shared the example of the CEO in the room with silence.

where there should have been ideas and gave you three moves that start to put that right. Today, I have the song that sits underneath all of it and three moves so specific and so small, you can start one of them before you even close down this episode. Let's go.

Caroline Esterson (00:48)
Hello, I'm Caroline Esterson and this is Little Moves Big Careers, helping women in corporate leadership who are constantly second guessing themselves to build the daily habits that compound into unshakable confidence. Yep, that's you.

Caroline Esterson (01:06)
So here's what you're getting today. Firstly, yes, song chosen specifically for the woman who has just understood the game she's in and is deciding quietly on her own terms to play it differently in her own authentic way. Secondly, you're going to have three quick fire moves that makes Wednesday's headline, room and name drop easier to actually do.

These aren't repeated moves, they are enabled moves. And then thirdly, you're going to leave this episode knowing exactly what your first move is. Not someday, Monday.

Let's give you the song first.

So, bit of context around the song. The ambition gap isn't about ambition at all, is it? On Wednesday, I shared something from McKinsey's Women in the Workplace report that I want to come back to before we get to the song. For the first time in the largest study of women in corporate America, there is now a measurable gap in ambition. 80 % of women want to be promoted compared to 86 % of men.

And the finding underneath that headline, the one that I find most important is this. When women receive the same career support and visibility as men, the gap disappears entirely. It's not the ambition is missing. It's the conditions that make ambition feel possible.

The women who are not putting themselves forward and not lacking drive. They don't lack desire or even capability.

of being seen, of knowing that when they walk into a room or write a headline or share an update, it will be received as the contribution of someone who belongs there. That is what visibility does at its deepest level. This isn't just about career strategy.

It's the thing that's keeping ambition alive. And that's why this week's song is the one it is. So your anchor track this week is not about fighting or surviving. It's not about proving anyone wrong. It's about something quieter and more powerful than any of these things. It's about a woman who's looked at herself clearly,

not through the filter of what other people think or through the distortion of that little voice in the head. And she's decided, she's decided that she's worth investing in, that her hard work, her energy and her ideas deserve to be lived like they matter.

This week's song is Golden by Jill Scott. So Jill Scott wrote Golden about the radical, quiet, revolutionary act of deciding that your life is worth living fully. The lyric, I'm living my life like it's golden, like it's golden, like it's golden is not a boast. It is a decision. A daily, repeated, sometimes difficult decision. Yeah.

but that decision to treat yourself and your work and your ideas as though they have value before anyone else confirms it, before the promotion comes through, before the conditions of your working environment make it easy. Think about the McKinsey finding, the ambition gap that falls away when women receive the same support and visibility as men. Golden is the song that sits underneath that finding because the support and the visibility

starts with you. They start with the decision made daily in small moments to treat your own contribution as worth naming, sharing and saying out loud in a room full of people.

And the three moves we talked about on Wednesday, the headline, the room and the warm name drop only work if you believe your work deserves to be seen. Golden isn't the strategy, it's the belief that makes the strategy possible.

So remember the right song at the right time shifts not just your mood, but your sense of what you are capable of. Jill's Golden works because it is written in the first person, present tense, active voice. I am living my life. Not, I will someday. Not, I wish I could. I am. Right now.

That grammatical choice puts you in the body of a woman who has already decided and your brain, given that music in that state, starts to believe it too. Add that to your Little Moves playlist. Play it on Monday morning before your first meeting. Play it before a conversation that matters or when that little voice in your head gets loud and you need to hear something louder. And then just go, go be seen.

So let's move on to the little moves. So on Wednesday, I gave you three moves. Today's moves don't repeat them, they make them stick. Because the reason people don't do the moves they already know that they should do is never that they don't know what to do. It's that they forget, maybe overthink, or they bottle it in the moment. These three moves solve each of those problems. Firstly, the trigger so you don't forget.

Attach the headline habit to something you already do every day without thinking. The end of your daily standard, the moment you close a task in your project management tool, the last thing you do before you lock your screen up at the end of the day.

You're not adding a new behavior. You're attaching 30 seconds of writing the headline to a behavior that already exists. Pick your trigger, write it down, stick it on your screen, and that will remind you to write that headline. This is how habits actually stick, not through willpower, but through building the architecture to support it. The headline move fails not because it's hard, but because it gets forgotten in the rush of our day.

Attaching it to a trigger solves that problem for you. You don't have to remember to write the headline. You just have to complete the thing that you already do and the headline naturally follows. Pick your trigger, write it down today.

move number two is the prep before the prep of the meeting so that you can show up believing that you belong. Before you prepare the question or the comment that you're thinking of making in a meeting, before you even open up the meeting invite, spend 60 seconds reflecting and answering this. What do I actually think about these topics? Not what am I supposed to think?

Not what will sound impressive. What do I genuinely believe based on what I know and what I've seen? Write it down in a sentence and this becomes your anchor. The prepared question or comment just naturally flows from it. But this, this reflection comes first because you can't prepare a contribution you don't believe you're entitled to make.

And thirdly, the permission slip so that you don't talk yourself out of it. The warm name drop fails not because people don't know how to do it, but because in the moment they actually talk themselves out of it. It feels too small, too boastful, not the right time, ⁓ a million and one excuses. So before the moment arrives, decide it in advance. Write down the specific update, the specific person.

the specific 15 seconds. Decide it when the little voice is quiet, because the moment you're standing at the coffee machine next to the person who needs to hear it is not the moment to decide whether you're going to say it or not. The permission slip is a note to your future self. It says, this is worth saying.

You decided so when you were thinking clearly. And then it becomes easy to say. It removes that in the moment calculation where you decide to play it safe. It removes that self doubt that surfaces at the worst possible time. And it means that when the opportunity arrives and it will arrive, you're ready. So this week, decide it in advance, write it down and then just say it.

One of things that I do is that I write it down on a piece of paper and I put it in my pocket. So when I'm in that moment, if I'm a little bit nervous, I just touch my paper and it reminds me, it kind of anchors me to that moment and makes me do it.

You might want to try that.

So there you go. Three moves from Wednesday and three enablers today. Six things in total and none of them requiring more than a few minutes of your week.

That is Pi being actively managed. that's the exposure and image columns starting to pull their weight alongside the performance column you've already invested in. And underneath of all, the belief. McKinsey told us this week that when women receive the same visibility and support as men, the ambition gap disappears, which means the ambition was always there.

It just needed the conditions to feel possible. And you, you don't need to depend on anybody else. You can create those conditions starting this week in small moments, in 30 second headlines, in two minute preps, 15 second updates at the coffee machine. Remember, I'm living my life like it's golden. Not someday, not when the promotion comes through.

Not when the system finally catches up with what you already know about yourself. Now, exactly as you are with the work you're already doing, it's always worth seeing. Start letting people see it.

So next week, we're moving into leading without the map.

the reality of leadership and why it feels nothing like it looked like from the outside. Monday story opens on someone's first week in a new management role. And it's going to be very real and slightly terrifying in the best possible way. But before Monday, three things. First, add golden to your little moves playlist.

Then pick your trigger, the thing you already do every day that you're going to attach your headlines to, and then decide your permission slip.

What's the update that you're going to give this week? One 15 second moment. That's the whole of the ask, all of it's small and all of it yours. And if this week felt familiar, if those three moments from Monday sounded like a Tuesday that you've had,

episode to a woman you know who's working brilliantly and wondering why it isn't translating.

She doesn't have to keep wondering. We're here to help.

I'm Caroline Esterson. This is Little Moves, Big Careers. Have a brilliant weekend. Speak to you on Monday.