It's Just Like Paris. How I tamed my Impostor Syndrome.
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“I’ve had impostor syndrome my entire professional life. And the first thing I’ll tell you is — stop calling it that.”
The label you put on a feeling determines the ceiling you put on yourself. And “impostor syndrome” is one of the most expensive labels in the professional vocabulary.
If I summed up my entire career into one idea, it’s that I have followed my curiosity into places that I have never been – new industries, new ways of thinking about a problem, unfamiliar concepts, or technology.
I have walked into rooms I’d never been in. Sat at tables I’d never sat at before. Felt that familiar tightening — the one that screams, “ What am I doing here?”
And for a long time, I did what everyone does. I named it. I tried to manage it. I gave into it. I breathed through it. I faked confidence until I found some.
Then one day, I realized the problem wasn’t the feeling. The problem was the word.
I built a personal cage the moment I decided to label this feeling “Imposter Syndrome.”
Imposter Syndrome
“Impostor syndrome” is a clinical frame applied to a universal human experience, and it does something quietly devastating: it turns newness into pathology.
The moment you call it impostor syndrome, you’ve made a diagnosis. You’ve framed the feeling as evidence of a deficiency — something to be treated, managed, pushed through. You’ve accepted the premise that the feeling is right and you are the problem.
But here’s what that feeling actually is: you’ve just never been here before.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
And here’s the part the impostor framing conveniently ignores: You didn’t wander in off the street. Someone put you there. A manager. A client. Or you, after building something that earned the invitation The evidence came first. The feeling came second.
The invitation existed before you walked through the door. The tools, the experience, the instincts — they preceded the feeling. The feeling just arrived louder.
You’re in unfamiliar territory, your nervous system is registering novelty, and your brain is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — scanning for threats, looking for maps, trying to orient in an unknown space.
“You belong in that room. You belong at that table. The fact that you’ve never been there before is not evidence against you. It is the definition of a first time.”
The name “impostor syndrome” tells you the feeling means you don’t belong. Strip the name, and the same feeling means something entirely different.
“We’ll always have Paris.” Bogart said it as an ending. I say it as a beginning.
The first time I stood in a Paris Métro station and looked at the full map — every line, every intersection, every impossible tangle of color and direction — I felt something familiar. That overwhelm. That tightening. The quiet voice: You’re going to get lost.
And I probably was. But I also felt something else rise up alongside it: a rush. Because every line on that map was somewhere I hadn’t been yet. Every intersection was a decision I hadn’t made yet. The complexity wasn’t the problem. The complexity was the entire point.
Paris doesn’t simplify itself for you. The map doesn’t get smaller. You get better at reading it.
And the people who lean into the map — who make friends with the confusion — are the ones who find the extraordinary things. The Arrondissement nobody talks about. The restaurant with no sign. The view that nobody photographs because you only find it by getting lost.
The map is not a warning. The map is an invitation.
Three small words changed everything
Now, whenever I walk into a room I’ve never been in — whenever a client hands me a brief that’s genuinely outside my known territory, whenever I’m in a conversation where the stakes are high and the ground is unfamiliar — I say three words to myself.
Just like Paris.
Not a map to fear. A map to follow. The complexity isn’t telling me I don’t belong. It’s telling me something extraordinary is on the other side of knowing it.
And the beautiful thing about a repeatable phrase — a real one, attached to a real memory, wired to a real emotion — is that it fires fast. Faster than the doubt. You don’t have to process it or work through it. Three words and your nervous system changes its interpretation before it’s fully formed the threat.
Three words changed everything. Not because they removed the feeling, but because they changed what the feeling meant.
What I’ve learned — slowly, over decades — is that the difference between people who thrive in complex, high-stakes, new situations and people who contract in them is not confidence. It’s not experience. It’s not credentials. It’s the meaning they assign to the feeling.
Coping says, “The feeling is bad, but I can manage it.” Meaning transfer says: the feeling is a signal, and I’m going to decide what it signals.
That’s a completely different operation. You’re not quieting the feeling. You’re relocating it into a different emotional context — one with adventure attached rather than threat.
This isn’t positive thinking. It’s not a mantra or a motivational poster. It’s a deliberate cognitive act. You are choosing the frame. And the frame changes what’s possible.
I want to be clear about something: the feeling never went away. It still comes. Every new room, every unfamiliar table, every brief that sits at the edge of my capability — the tightening still arrives, right on schedule.
The goal was never to eliminate it. The goal was to stop letting it be the last word. Because a feeling that arrives every single time, across fifty years of walking into new rooms, is not a disorder. It’s a compass. It’s been pointing at the interesting things all along. I just needed to stop treating it like a warning light and start reading it like a map.
Find your own Paris
The Paris reframe works for me because Paris is real to me. The memory is specific. The rush I felt at that moment is something I can call back in a second. That specificity is everything.
Your equivalent might not be a city. It might be the first time you learned to drive, or to sail, or to read code, or to navigate a hospital system in a foreign country, or to parent a teenager. Some moment where the complexity felt enormous and you leaned in anyway — and it opened into something you couldn’t have found from the easy path.
Find that moment. Name it. Wire it to the next unknown room you walk into.
Stop calling it impostor syndrome. You’re not an impostor. You’re just new here.
And new here is where all the interesting things begin.
Every company has its own Paris right now. A map that got more complex overnight. New technology, new competitors, new consumer behaviour that doesn’t fit the old frameworks. The people who are thriving aren’t the ones who simplified the map. They’re the ones who made friends with the complexity — and found someone who knew how to read it.
That’s what I do. If your organization is standing in front of a map that feels overwhelming, I’d like to be in that conversation.