I was sitting on my couch, fiddling with the tassels on a cushion, listening to a woman I greatly admired.

Her confidence. The way she owned every word without apologising for a single one.

And a thought dropped into my head so fast I didn't even see it coming.

"Well of course she's successful. She's nothing like me."

I stopped fiddling with the tassel.

What IS that?! Why do we do that to ourselves?

If you've ever led a meeting, closed the deal, got the promotion and then gone home wondering when everyone is going to figure out you don't belong there, you know exactly the voice I'm talking about. Most people call it imposter syndrome. But I've come to think that label sends us looking in the wrong place.

Imposter syndrome isn't telling you the truth about you

Here's what most of us were taught. Imposter syndrome is a confidence problem; Feel more confident and the fraud feeling goes away. So we read the books and write the affirmations on sticky notes taped to our mirror... And the voice keeps talking anyway.

That's because confidence was never the missing piece.

The day it finally clicked for me was, honestly, one of the worst mental health days I'd had in a long time. And sitting in the middle of it, I realised something that changed how I see this whole thing.

It wasn't that I wasn't having success. It was that I was failing to see MY success.

I was measuring myself against her things. Her stage and her version of what winning looks like. Meanwhile, my things were sitting right there in front of me, completely uncounted; The relationship with myself I was healing. The recovery I was fighting for every single day. What I could finally see as possible for my life. The woman I was becoming.

None of that registered as success, because I wasn't looking for it.

Your brain finds what it's looking for

Try something for me. Look around the room you're in right now and find everything that's blue.

Go on, I'll wait!

Now tell me... while you were looking for blue, how many yellow things did you see?

Probably none. Not because there's nothing yellow in the room, but because your attention was pointed somewhere else.

That's what imposter syndrome does. It points your attention at every piece of proof that you don't belong. The question you couldn't answer. The one comment in your review that wasn't glowing. And it quietly filters out everything else.

For 34 years, I went looking for proof of the stories I carried that told me I didn't matter and I didn't belong. And for 34 years, I found it. Everywhere. In my relationships and in every workplace I walked into.

The proof was always going to show up, babe. I was the one sending it the invitation.

So when you feel like an imposter, it isn't a verdict. It's a search history.

Why it gets louder the more you lead

This is the part nobody warns high-performing women about.

You'd think the voice would get quieter as you rise. More experience and more people relying on you. Surely at some point the evidence wins out?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work like that. Every next level of your growth will trigger your demons. A bigger room means more people who could see you get it wrong, and your nervous system reads that as more danger, not less.

So the woman leading the room is often the one internally asking "who do you think you are" the loudest. Not because she's less capable than she was. But because there's more at stake, and the old search filters are still running in the background.

Which means the work isn't to wait until you feel worthy of the room. It's to change what you're looking for while you're in it.

What else are you not seeing?

One night I was looking up at the sky, marvelling at the moon, when I noticed something I'd never seen before. Behind the thin crescent that was showing the world, I could see the whole moon.

I actually looked it up, because I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. They weren't. On a clear enough night, you can see the full moon sitting there regardless of which phase is shining.

It was always there. I simply wasn't looking.

And I stood there thinking... what else am I blind to, simply because I'm not aware of it or I'm not looking for it??

That's the question I want you to sit with. Not "how do I become someone who deserves this?" but "what's already here that I haven't let myself count?"

Where to start:

You can't argue your way out of imposter syndrome. Your inner critic is far better at arguing than you are, because it's had decades of practice and it knows exactly where your soft spots are. What you can do is start feeding your brain a different search.

Keep a record of what you're not counting. At the end of each week, write down what you did, handled, decided or survived that you would have praised in someone else. Not the big wins, the quiet ones. You're training your attention to find yellow. It will feel awkward and a bit forced at first, and that's ok. That's what a new search feels like.

Use her as proof, not as a verdict. When you catch yourself thinking "of course she's successful, she's nothing like me," flip the conclusion. Her success is proof that it's possible, not proof of what's wrong with you. I stopped asking "how can I DO what she does?" and started asking "how can I BE that?" Those two questions take you to very different places.

Name the voice when it speaks. Mine is called Patrice, and she has opinions about everything! Giving your inner critic a name puts a little bit of space between you and her. It's much harder to believe a voice once you can hear that it isn't yours.

Let the compliment land. When someone praises your work, say thank you and stop there. No "oh, it was a team effort," no "I got lucky with the timing." Every time you explain a win away, you teach your brain it didn't count. Every time you let it land, it gets filed where it belongs.

Listen... You belong in that room

I think about that afternoon on the couch a lot. I was so sure the difference between us was something she had and I didn't.

It wasn't. The difference was that she'd learned to see her own success and I hadn't yet.

You are not a fraud for feeling like one. You're a capable woman whose attention has been pointed at the wrong things for a very long time. That can be retrained. I've watched it happen in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, over and over again.

So here's your invitation for this week. Go looking for yellow.

If you want a place to start, my free Confidence Catalyst workbook walks you through building confidence the way it actually gets built: by proving it to yourself, one action at a time. [Download The Confidence Catalyst]

And if you're ready to stop putting yourself on trial and do this work with me directly, the application to work with me 1:1 is here. [Apply to work with Sabrina]

Love you. Mean it 💋

Sabrina.