- March 27, 2025
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Tampa marketing and media relations firm founder Holly Clifford Corral, who runs a company named Press, had, I think, an all-time stellar answer to a question on the Business Observer’s leadership podcast, From the Corner Office. This was back in July 2023, episode 6. (We recently dropped episode No. 90.)
Running her own high-intensity business, with sometimes fickle clients and many competitive forces, I asked Clifford Coral how she handled impostor syndrome. That’s defined, generally, as people, many times leaders, who doubt their skills, talents and abilities, especially when compared to how they perceive others.
Clifford Corral’s answer was disarming and delightful. She said: “Can I be honest with you? I had to look that up. I get what it means obviously…but, and I know you are going to think this is the most ridiculous thing, but I don’t think like that. When I stop and think ‘man (my husband) Kit and I have had this business for 16 years, and were still successful, still having fun, that’s definitely pretty cool. But I never doubt myself. Honestly I don’t. Maybe that’s the sports (background) in me, … but failure doesn’t cross my mind. Ever.”
Clifford Coral's answer was top of mind for me at a recent University of Tampa Leadership Summit. The keynote speaker for the event, in its 10th year and held at UTampa’s TECO Energy Center for Leadership, was Kris Kelso, author of the book “Overcoming the Impostor: Silence Your Inner Critic and Lead With Confidence.”
Kelso, who has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, business owners and their leadership teams as a coach, facilitator and mentor, adds to the impostor syndrome definition. “This is not a new phenomenon,” he says, “but it refers to the tendency of many people, it turns out, to overvalue other people's accomplishments and to undervalue or even doubt the reality of their own success.”
Clifford Corral is certainly an outlier for her outlook on impostor syndrome, based on Kelso’s presentation. He says studies show 70% to 80% of the population experience impostor syndrome at some point in their career, “and it tends to be more prevalent among high achievers.” Kelso adds he recently gave a similar presentation to a university audience on the west coast, where an anonymous poll found 97% of the 800-plus attendees had struggled with impostor syndrome at some point in their lives and careers.
Kelso doesn’t only detail the ins and outs of impostor syndrome. He also offers several avenues to overcome it, focused on changes in the way you think and changes in the way you act and behave. That ranges from leading with vulnerability thinking differently about success, failure and the learning points in between.
With a career in media, software and health care publishing before getting into executive coaching and consulting, Kelso came to his impostor syndrome when he launched his own company.
“I had this voice in my head that would try to convince me that my success wasn't real and it was all fluke,” he says, “that I was just on the verge any moment of being undone. And so that voice would say things like: ‘you didn't really start a business, you're just a guy doing some consulting.’ Or ‘you don't actually know what you're doing. You just know how to sound like you know what you're doing.’ It would say ‘you never would have landed your first client if it wasn't for your old boss throwing you a bone, giving you a chance.’ Sometimes it would say ‘you're the only person that doesn't deserve to be in this room with these people.’”
“And I never really talked to anybody about these fears,” he adds. “I didn't have a lot of people I felt like I could talk to. Most people who I knew either were someone I looked up to or someone who seemed to look up to me, and I didn't want to disappoint either one of them. So I felt very alone with these worries, with these fears. I felt very isolated at times.”
The more success Kelso achieved, the more he heard those voices of doubt. And the more isolated he felt.
“The voice inside your head knows your particular hot button issues,” he says. “It knows your story, it knows your background, it knows where your insecurities are, and it will carefully craft a message of doubt that is unique to you and that can make it really hard to identify with other people who are having the exact same experience, but for a little bit different reason. That voice in your head has been called a lot of things over the years. It's been called the voice of self doubt, or the inner critic or the Gremlin. The voice of the saboteur is one of my favorites.”
“I started referring to that voice in my head as the impostor,” Kelso says, “not just because it's trying to convince me that I'm an impostor, which it often is, but it's really to remind myself that that voice isn't real. There's nobody there. It's just a psychological mind game, and that voice will masquerade as wisdom, as prudence, even as humility.”
One way to defeat, or at least, fight back against impostor syndrome, says Kelso, is to avoid the comparison trap. In short, that’s when you see someone else who you think is better than you and better off than you. Maybe that’s the car they drive, the clothes they wear, the way people interact with that person.
Kelso tells the story of how he felt that ping before, once in a hotel lobby, overhearing a person talking about how he’s made millions of dollars in his life but has a strained marriage and subpar relationship with his kids. Kelso came to realize this stranger’s story is a metaphor for overcoming impostor syndrome.
“I see their victories, their wins,” he says. “I don't see their struggles. I don't see the things that they gave up and had I compared myself to that businessman without knowing that part of his story, I might have felt inferior. I might have felt weak because I can't do what he did while maintaining my own values and my own boundaries.”
“There's no value in comparing the reality of your life to a highly polished and filtered version of somebody else's life,” he adds. “It's not real. In fact, it's a trap.”
Another reason to avoid the trap: Kelso quotes President Teddy Roosevelt on the issue: “Comparison,” the 26th U.S. president once said, “is the thief of joy.”
Beyond avoiding the comparison trap, Kelso offers another way to slay the impostor. He does that through a choice: Do you want to be an explorer or a tour guide?
The Tour Guide approach is an avoidance — a negative avoidance. This is when “you stay in your comfort zone and avoid anything that threatens your confidence,” Kelso says.
“Tour Guides are people who tend to follow a script, and they stay in their lane,” he says. “They put tight boundaries around their comfort zone, and they act like a leader, but they're only willing to take people where they've been before and where they're very confident, and so they make the same move over and over.”
“Tour guides are like the media experts, so they don't ask questions. They answer questions,” he adds. “Tour Guides hate it when somebody else seems to know more than they do. And if an unfamiliar topic comes up, they'll steer the conversation back to their expertise.”
One more Tour Guide characteristic: “They're ashamed or afraid to admit they haven't been somewhere before, so they just pretend those areas don't exist. They're not on the tour.”
Kelso says Tour Guides aren’t the answer for a duel with the impostor.
Instead, he suggests, be an Explorer.
Unlike Tour Guides, he says, “Explorers are not only comfortable getting into unknown territory, they get excited about it. They look forward to the opportunity to learn and grow. Explorers see breaking new ground as opportunity, not a threat.”
“Explorers are always willing and happy to bring others around and to defer. In fact, explorers ask a lot of questions, sometimes more than they answer,” Kelso says. “And when they ask a question, they ask it to actually learn, rather than to instruct or correct.”
The mental shift from Tour Guide to Explorer, says Kelso, “is monumental, but it doesn't have to take very long. In fact, I've seen it happen in an instant.”
The key, he says, is “when the impostor starts coming around, when the impostor says ‘these people are smarter than me, you're in over your head here, you don't belong in this room,’ the Tour Guide says, ‘I need to get out of here. I need to get back to my tour. I need to find a safe space.’”
But the Explorer, says Kelso, knows “this is where I need to be. The Explorer sees that fear, that twinge of worry, as a sign there's learning here, there's opportunity here, there's growth here. So I'm going to lean into this.”
