Who I Help and How: A Behavior-Based Approach to Imposter Syndrome

Posted on December 10, 2022 by Paula Castillo, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

You’re in the meeting. You’ve prepared, you know the material, and your track record speaks for itself. And still, somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers: I’m not sure what I’m doing, do I really belong here?

Who I Work With

I coach high achievers, managers, and leaders who look successful on paper and feel like frauds on the inside. They’re the ones who over-prepare for every meeting just to feel legitimate. They might deflect compliments, downplay wins, and attribute their success to luck, timing, or other people. They might also go quiet in the rooms where their voice is most needed.

They aren’t lacking talent or experience. They’re caught in a pattern, one that shows up most visibly in specific, high-stakes moments: a presentation to senior leadership, a new role where everyone seems more certain than they feel, a difficult conversation they’ve been rehearsing for days.

Why Behavior Change, Not Just Insight

Most approaches to imposter syndrome focus on mindset: challenge your inner critic, reframe your thoughts, remind yourself of your accomplishments. But here’s what I’ve witnessed from coaching hundreds of executives: insight alone rarely changes behavior. You can understand exactly why you feel like a fraud and still go silent in the meeting. You can know your imposter syndrome is irrational and still spend three hours over-preparing for a thirty-minute call.

My approach is different. It’s grounded in the behavioral coaching principles and the science of strengths, as well as Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world’s leading executive coaches, whose work centers on a simple but powerful idea: you don’t change by thinking differently. You change by doing differently, consistently, in the specific situations that challenge you most.

That means we don’t just explore where the self-doubt comes from. We identify exactly when and where it shows up for you, what you do (or don’t do) in those moments, and what small, repeatable behaviors you can practice to shift the pattern over time.

We also use feedforward, a tool Goldsmith developed as an alternative to traditional feedback. Instead of analyzing what went wrong in the past, feedforward focuses on what you can do differently going forward. It’s practical, future-oriented, and remarkably effective for people who tend to ruminate on their mistakes.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Coaching with me is structured and evidence-based. We use an assessment like Gallup’s CliftonStrengths to identify what you’re genuinely good at, not just what you’ve been told to be good at. We use a 360 tool like Leadership Circle to understand how others experience your leadership and where the gaps are between your self-perception and your actual impact.

Then we get specific. What’s the situation where imposter syndrome costs you the most? What does it make you do, or avoid doing? What would one small behavior change look like, practiced consistently, over the next thirty days?

That’s where the real shift happens: not in a single breakthrough moment, but in the accumulation of small, deliberate actions that rewire how you show up.

A Practice to Start Today

You don’t need to wait for a coaching session to begin. Try this now:

Think of one situation where imposter feelings show up most reliably for you. A specific meeting, a particular type of conversation, a moment when you consistently go quiet or hold back.

Now ask yourself: what is one small behavior I could try next time? Not a mindset shift, a behavior. Something observable, something you could actually do in the room.

It might be asking one question you would normally keep to yourself. Making one comment before the meeting ends. Introducing yourself first instead of waiting to be noticed.

Write it down. Try it once. See what happens.

That’s the beginning of behavior change, and behavior change, done consistently, is what moves you from self-doubt to grounded confidence.

Paula Castillo is a bilingual PCC executive coach based in Washington, DC, specializing in imposter syndrome for high achievers, managers, and leaders. She works in English and Spanish.