Coaching women beyond confidence: rethinking ‘imposter syndrome’
Coaching Today, October 2026

‘I just want to feel more confident’ is something I hear increasingly from women at the beginning of coaching conversations.

For decades, the phrase ‘imposter syndrome’ has been used liberally to account for women’s feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and mild anxiety, particularly at work.¹ I hear it as I listen to them question their competence and intelligence; their success, their voice and their place. It is a theme we see branded across female-focused conferences, leadership programmes and coaching specialisations, offering tips on how to overcome it, as if self-doubt were another personal deficit women must quietly ‘fix’; another burden they must carry.

This is a compelling narrative. It is, perhaps, much simpler to locate the discomfort, the problem, the responsibility of something ‘lacking’ within the individual and to make it a ‘woman’s issue’, rather than to look at how imposter feelings emerge as a relational response to an inequitable workplace.²

As coaches, it is therefore imperative that we question why women so frequently show up to coaching conversations believing their own confidence is the thing they are intrinsically lacking. Blindly accepting this premise not only risks pathologising our clients, but reduces their experiences by stripping them entirely of their structural and systemic context.³ The coaching space, in turn, risks becoming yet another place where women are asked to adapt, overcome and fix themselves.

Imposter syndrome as a systemic issue

It is time to shift the dialogue. As coaching practitioners, let’s not perpetuate the individualistic myth that there is something wrong with women. Instead, let us examine the systemic conditions that contribute to their feelings of personal inadequacy.

A recent systematic review by Bravata et al. established that, while imposter feelings affect both men and women, they manifest with significantly greater psychological distress and professional barriers in women and underrepresented groups.⁴ Indeed, if a client repeatedly experiences being interrupted and underestimated, is constantly asked to justify her expertise, gets excluded from key decision-making and receives vague feedback about needing more ‘executive presence and gravitas’, it becomes less about an internal lack of confidence and more about navigating an inherently biased system.

Malhotra and Burey’s influential 2021 paper ‘Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome’ supports this by arguing that the label implies women are suffering from a crisis of self-confidence, rather than responding to the very real, inequitable systemic obstacles professional women continue to face in the workplace.² It places the onus on the woman’s intrinsic negative monologue, blaming her own emotionality and sense of failure – which is to essentially completely overlook the pivotal role external factors play in generating imposter feelings in the first place.⁵ A coaching intervention centred solely around increasing confidence would therefore completely miss the mark.

Too much and not enough

We can begin by becoming far more curious about the construct of confidence itself. Perhaps our client is experiencing self-doubt because she is stepping into something genuinely stretching and unfamiliar. Perhaps she has internalised years of messaging about what a ‘good’ woman should be: agreeable, likeable, modest, accommodating. Perhaps she has learned that speaking with a sense of self-assuredness risks being perceived by others as arrogant. Or perhaps her organisation is providing repeated evidence that her contribution is less valued, heard or recognised than that of her male colleagues.

Organisational psychologist Chamorro-Premuzic states that we often falsely equate confidence – the type mostly shown by white male leaders – with competence and leadership.⁶ As these leaders progress, the more validation they receive, and the more they find role models who look and sound just like them.

But what about those who do not fit this profile? Indeed, the very systems that reward confidence in male leaders punish women either for not having enough, or for having too much.²

According to Eagly and Karau’s role congruity theory, leadership remains associated with traditionally male characteristics like assertiveness, dominance and decisiveness.⁷ Given that women are generally more socialised to display traits like warmth, cooperation and care, the female leader then experiences prejudice when there is perceived incongruity between female gender roles and male models of leadership. Consequently, women encounter a punishing double bind:

• Be confident enough to be taken seriously, but not so confident that you are perceived as aggressive
• Be ambitious, but not in ways that make others uncomfortable
• Be assertive, but remain warm, approachable and accommodating.

Psychologist Virginia Valian describes the cumulative effect of these gender schemas, whereby small, often barely visible, biases can accumulate over time to deeply influence how competence is perceived and rewarded.⁸ While men are frequently promoted based on potential, women are assessed on a proven track record and performance.⁹

Suddenly, the woman showing up to coaching saying ‘I just need more confidence’ may, in fact, not be lacking anything. Rather, her self-doubt is an appropriate response to an organisational system that rewards confidence differently depending on who displays it and how.²

Consider a woman in a predominantly male senior leadership team. She doesn’t simply think about the content of what she is articulating, she is also monitoring how she says it. Questions I hear women asking themselves time and again in coaching sessions are:

‘Was I being too assertive?’
‘Was I talking too much?’
‘Did I sound knowledgeable enough?’
‘Was I asking stupid questions?’
‘Did they think I was being difficult?’
‘Could I have said that better?’

Such pervasive self-monitoring consumes cognitive and emotional bandwidth. What gets perceived from the outside as a ‘lack of confidence’ is actually, in part, the exhausting byproduct of navigating an environment that invalidates her authority and competence.

Beyond the label: coaching ‘imposter syndrome’

When ‘imposter syndrome’ shows up in executive and leadership coaching, it would therefore be reductionist of us as practitioners to default towards exploring limiting beliefs, challenging negative self-talk and looking for evidence of competence. As Edmondson’s work on psychological safety indicates, confidence does not develop through positive reframing alone.¹⁰ It depends partly on the social conditions around us and how safe we feel to contribute, question, challenge and make mistakes. We must therefore widen the coaching lens and recognise confidence as something impacted through repeated experiences of bias, exclusion and diminished belonging.

Perhaps then, instead of asking how we help improve the confidence of our female client, a more useful question would be ‘what is her confidence (or lack of) in response to?’ Perhaps, instead of asking ‘what belief needs challenging?’, a more useful question would be ‘what experiences have shaped her beliefs?’

We must hold two truths simultaneously. Yes, the individual has agency, but the system impacts what is possible. As coaches, let’s not become another mechanism through which that system tells the woman she is the problem.

Furthermore, this experience is not merely psychological; it is deeply somatic. We often talk about confidence as a mindset; a cognitive distortion to be reframed. Yet, our bodies instantly respond to being in environments where we feel scrutinised, excluded or unsafe.¹¹

A client may tell us she ‘knows’ she is capable but finds her throat tightening or her mind blanking when asked a question in leadership team meetings. Another may over-prepare, staying up late to rehearse every conceivable response, questioning how she is being perceived, feeling stuck in a state of hypervigilance. After all, women are conditioned from childhood to ‘be nice’, ‘be good’, ‘don’t be too bossy or too loud’, ‘don’t brag’, ‘don’t take up too much space’, ‘be helpful’, ‘make people feel comfortable’ … ‘smile’.

This highlights another layer that I think, as coaches, is worth paying attention to.

Over time, when a client’s nervous system perceives an environment as exclusionary or threatening, it naturally mobilises a fight, flight or freeze response.¹² For coaches, this offers another way of listening. We can support women to distinguish between the very real response of being activated by the systemic conditions that trigger imposter syndrome in the first place, and the blame and shame driving them to ask yet another question as to what they can do better.

What if we shift our inquiry and invite our client to become curious about what her body is telling her? In what environments does she think more clearly, speak more freely and take up more space? This moves us away from coaching women into ‘feeling more confident’ and towards helping them develop greater awareness of the relationship between their internal experience and an adaptive response to the system that they inhabit.

So, rather than focus on what women should get rid of, how might we help expand the lens? Women are fantastic leaders, because much of how we have been socialised – to be collaborative and empathetic – is fundamental to leadership. We need to let women know that a feeling of healthy self-doubt is not only normal, but experienced across the gender spectrum. The issue is why women’s careers are being so unfairly stalled because of a label placed on them.

As women have been socialised to compete, compare and privately question themselves, coaching must become a place where those experiences are named rather than silently carried. We have a responsibility to help our clients recognise that some of what they have interpreted as personal inadequacy is in fact shared, constructed and socially produced. Indeed, Hawkins and Turner caution against coaching in a vacuum; that the individual cannot be understood in isolation from the wider system.¹³

Perhaps the more important question is whether, as coaches, we have been asking the right questions.

What if it is not that women are suffering from a personal confidence crisis, but that they are responding to real systemic obstacles: microaggressions, gendered double binds, pay inequity, and cultures that evaluate male behaviour as the default leadership standard? It is imperative we move away from treating confidence as something women must strive to improve, and instead do better to collectively acknowledge the societal, cultural and historical context within which that confidence has developed, and which surrounds the very places in which we work.