You got the role. You are doing it well. You are also certain that any day now, someone will realise they made a mistake.
Impostor feelings are the persistent sense that your success is undeserved and that you will eventually be exposed as less capable than people think. It is not a formal diagnosis, it is extremely common among high-performing people, and its defining feature is that evidence does not fix it — each achievement gets explained away rather than absorbed.
How to recognise it
- Attributing your success to luck, timing, or someone liking you — never to competence
- Believing you fooled the interview panel
- Over-preparing enormously, then treating the good outcome as proof that you only just got away with it
- Or the opposite: delaying and rushing, so any success is “despite” the effort and any failure is explained
- Deflecting praise, sometimes visibly uncomfortable receiving it
- Refusing to apply for roles unless you meet every requirement
- Staying quiet in meetings where you have something to say
- Fearing that one mistake will reveal everything
The engine underneath is a closed loop: success is discounted, failure is absorbed as confirmation. Nothing that happens can improve the conclusion, which is why “but look at your CV” never works.
What drives it in Nigerian offices specifically
Being the first or the only. First in your family in a professional role, only woman on the team, only person without a foreign degree, only one from your part of the country. Standing out invites the sense that you are being watched for errors — and often that is not entirely imagined.
A steep education-to-workplace jump. Nigerian schooling rewards knowing the correct answer. Professional work rewards judgement under uncertainty. People who were excellent students often experience that transition as evidence they are no longer good, when it is a change in the game rather than a drop in ability.
Credential hierarchy. Foreign degrees, foreign certifications, foreign accents carry a premium in many Nigerian workplaces, whatever anyone’s actual output. If yours is local, it is easy to internalise a discount that was applied externally.
Praise culture that skips the specifics. Feedback in many offices here runs to extremes — public commendation or public dressing-down, with little in between. Neither tells you what you actually did well, so there is nothing concrete to hold on to.
“Man know man”. In a market where connections genuinely open doors, someone who got in on merit can still suspect they were carried — and someone who did get help concludes it was only help. The ambiguity gives the doubt something real to feed on.
The pressure of being the one who made it. If a whole family invested in your education, the stakes attached to being adequate are not just personal. See black tax and coping with the pressure to succeed.
What it costs
Not just discomfort. Impostor feelings have practical consequences.
Suggested read: WhatsApp After Hours: Boundaries With Work
Chronic overwork. If you believe you are compensating for a deficiency, there is no natural point at which enough is enough. That is a direct route to workplace burnout.
Career stalling. Not applying, not putting yourself forward, not asking for the raise. The result is that people who are less good but more certain progress past you, which then supplies further evidence for the story.
Constant background anxiety. The vigilance required to avoid being found out is exhausting and never ends.
Never enjoying anything. Each achievement produces relief rather than pride, and relief lasts a day.
If it has gone further — persistent low mood, dread of work, sleep going — look at high-functioning anxiety and high-functioning depression, both of which sit close to this.
What actually shifts it
Stop trying to argue yourself out of it. Listing your achievements does not work — the mechanism discounts them automatically. This is why reassurance from colleagues evaporates so fast.
Write down the evidence at the time, not from memory. A running note of what you did, what decision you made, what result followed. Memory is where the discounting happens; a contemporaneous record is harder to rewrite. Read it back when the doubt is loud.
Get specific feedback and insist on it. Not “well done” — what specifically worked, and what would you do differently? Concrete feedback gives the mind something it cannot easily dissolve.
Separate feeling from behaviour. You will probably not stop feeling like a fraud any time soon. You can still apply, still speak in the meeting, still put your name forward. Acting against the feeling is what erodes it over time; waiting to feel ready does not.
Notice the double standard. You would not conclude a colleague was a fraud on the evidence you use against yourself. That comparison is more useful than self-affirmation.
Suggested read: Sexual Harassment at Work: Your Options
Say it out loud to one trusted person at work. The most common response is that they feel it too, which does more than any amount of private reasoning. Most people at your level are carrying some version of this and none of them mention it.
Expect it at every step up. A promotion or a new role reliably brings it back. That is not regression — it is what happens when you are doing something genuinely new.
When it is worth treating
Impostor feelings are ordinary. Take it to a professional if you are working to the point of exhaustion to stay ahead of exposure, if you are turning down opportunities you want, if the anxiety is affecting your sleep or your health, or if it has settled into something more like depression.
CBT is well suited to this, because the core work is on the interpretation loop rather than on the achievements. You can filter for workplace stress and self-esteem in our directory, and there is more on the self-esteem hub and in how to build self-esteem and confidence.
Frequently asked questions
Is impostor syndrome a mental illness?
No, it is not a formal diagnosis. It is a common pattern of thinking, and it becomes a clinical matter when it drives anxiety, overwork or depression.
Why doesn’t evidence of my success help?
Because the pattern discounts successes and absorbs failures. Without changing that loop, more achievements simply supply more things to explain away.
Does it ever go away completely?
For most people it recedes rather than disappears, and it tends to return at each step up. Acting despite it matters more than eliminating it.
Is it more common in some people?
It is reported more by people who are the first or only of their kind in a setting, which describes a great many Nigerian professionals.
When should I get help?
When it is driving exhaustion, stopping you taking opportunities, or has tipped into persistent anxiety or low mood.
