TGC Newsletter: The Impostor Syndrome Issue

Tamar Gaffin-Cahn
Jul 2, 2025
3 min read

I'm going to pull back the curtain for a moment and share something vulnerable.

I don’t know what I’m doing with these newsletters. I believe my goal is to teach you something, but I know you’re smart, I know you’re resourceful, I know you’re creative and I know you’re a whole person.

As am I.

And yet, what business do I have thinking I have something to teach you?

Is my role here, in these monthly (haha) emails, to teach you something, inspire you, provide resources, or share a new perspective?

Do I need to narrow down the topics? Go deeper into research?

Is it impostor syndrome? Yes. Are you seeing me experiment with the professional content I create? Certainly. Is that vulnerable? Hell yeah. Am I still figuring it all out? No doubt. Am I practicing what I preach, and is it a rollercoaster of success? You bet.

What I'm Reading

I’ve been researching Impostor Syndrome, exploring the connection to the stories we tell ourselves (our self-beliefs), radical honesty (transparency), vulnerability, and failure. There is a difference between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. The Failure Institute’s article on fraud and impostor syndrome shares the importance of humanizing our experiences through vulnerability and the power of telling stories of how we’ve failed. Normalizing the pain is a significant step towards letting it go.

What I'm Listening To

Esther Perel and Trevor Noah do it again in What Now?: One Of My Favorite People. Out of the many tokens of shared wisdom, there were two that stood out to me:

Trevor shares an example of his friends with babies and how they buy babysitter time. Seems normal, right? His reframe was this: we now live in a society that has tricked us into living alone, rather than buying back our community. What would our communities look like if we no longer needed to pay for babysitters?
Esther and Trevor are meaning-making royalty, communicating it through poetic philosophy. We create meaning in two ways: through our relationships with ourselves and through our relationships with others. What’s your thought process in how you relate to yourself? And to others? How does that process create stories of your relationships?

What I'm Doing

In a student appointment recently, this master’s student started our conversation with, “I’m stuck! I don’t know which direction to take. I have so many ideas and don’t know where to put my energy.” Through coaching, we were able to identify that she will pursue a portfolio career —a career with a variety of ways to receive income and utilize her creative energy.

She shared her two-year goal of finishing her book that she started at the beginning of her degree. Halfway through the program, she’s hit a wall. Can’t seem to keep working on it.

After a few questions, I could tell that she was experiencing impostor syndrome. She had received negative feedback in a course, and it took the fun out of writing. Ah, we got down to the source. Now we know how to move forward.

Much of coaching is understanding what’s underneath the block. Is it not feeling good enough? Loss of joy? Find the issue and you’ll find a solution.

What's Moved Me

Former lawyer and professional poker player Cate Hall on asking for things that feel unreasonable:

"Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what's reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you're only asking for things you get, you're not aiming high enough."