The Voices in Our Minds

I’ve been catching up on the new season of Ted Lasso, and the little jury in my brain is still out on whether a Season 4 was a good call, but I love these characters so much, I’m just happy to spend time with them again regardless.

There was a quick-but-great moment in Episode 5, “Riches of Embarrassment" (teeny tiny spoiler alert, but not one I can imagine has significance). Keeley Jones – the character responsible for launching, branding, and securing funding for Richmond’s first-ever women’s football/soccer team – is feeling great because she sold out the stadium for the first match. Game day arrives, and the stadium is nowhere close to being full, so she falls from her excited high to a disappointed low.

Upon apologizing to the team after the match for how many vacant seats there were, a couple of the players replied with something like “What are you talking about?! That crowd was twice as big as we usually see! This is bigger than any crowd we’ve ever played in front of!”

✨ How often do we assume that our best effort isn’t good enough? In this case, what Keeley assumed to be a failure was actually RECORD-SETTING. ✨

I work with exceptional leaders, and over and over again I see women in particular benchmarking themselves against a standard that was produced under entirely different conditions. In Keeley’s case, this looks like decades of investment, audience, and infrastructure the women's game never received. And then, privately and alone, she concluded the shortfall was her fault.

That move to internalize blame isn’t a confidence or a capability issue, it’s a conditions one.

Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey made this case in Harvard Business Review in 2021: calling this "imposter syndrome" quietly relocates a systemic problem into individual women, then asks them to fix it with better self-talk. My work builds forward from there, into what I call Imposter Conditioning: the learned patterns of self-doubt and overcorrection that arise not from a lack of capability, but from navigating environments where expectations are inconsistent, unclear, or inequitable.

For the leaders and organizations I advise, mitigating Imposter Conditioning is a retention issue. When your most capable leaders are spending a lot of their energy privately auditing or overworking themselves against an uneven standard, it's a systems problem, and one that an organization can and should work to improve.