I remember sitting in a meeting with my manager after unexpectedly landing the biggest promotion of my career, surrounded by congratulations, and thinking they're going to find out I can't actually do this. If you've ever felt that exact contradiction - proof of your competence sitting right in front of you, and your brain still insisting you're a fraud - you're not broken, and you're not alone. You're experiencing one of the most counterintuitive truths about imposter syndrome: for many...

I bet that got your attention? There's a statistic doing the rounds right now that stopped me in my tracks. For the first time in years, research shows that women want promotions less than men. McKinsey's Women in the Workplace report found that only 80% of women aspire to the next level, compared to 86% of men and at the early career stage, that gap widens dramatically: 69% of women versus 80% of men. They're calling it an ambition gap. It’s attention grabbing and I imagine a lot of women...

You can look put-together, sound sure, and even succeed, while your self-worth is still up for debate in your own head. Low self-esteem can feel like a personal flaw, something you ‘should be over by now’. Very often it’s better understood as a set of learned expectations about yourself and other people, shaped over time by early experiences and reinforced by what happened next. In this blog, I’ll explore three lenses that can make low self-esteem more understandable (and more changeable):...