Tracy Tutty: You know you're good at this. Nobody in that room's questioning it, least of all the people paying you to be there. So why in the half second before you speak does some part of you still check? Why does a track record that nobody doubts do nothing to quiet the part of you that's rereading your work that one more time? Why does proving it again never seem to be the thing that finally lets you rest inside it? You've probably called this imposter syndrome, but by the end of this episode you might be calling it something else. Let's talk about when competence doesn't feel like confidence. Welcome to Project Joyful, the podcast for health-centered leaders. Project Joyful is the space for conversations at the intersection of leadership, health, and lived experience. Here we explore what it means to lead in ways that honour your body, protect long-term capacity, and support a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This episode is part of the Biology of Leadership series. In this series, We explore leadership through your body, not as a performance to optimize or a mindset to fix, but as a biological experience shaped over time. Leadership doesn't just live in decisions, strategies, or roles. It lives in your nervous system, in how responsibility is held, and how reliability and care quietly organize your body long before you're consciously aware of These conversations are for leaders who are capable, trusted, and effective, and who are curious about how leadership is experienced internally, not just how it performs externally. There's nothing you need to do as you listen, no insight you need to apply. This is simply an invitation to understand what's been shaping your experience of leadership beneath this level. And what's become possible when biology becomes part of the conversation. Let's begin, shall we? It's Monday morning and you're walking into the same boardroom that you've walked into every month for the better part of, say three years. Laptop under your arm, the quarter's numbers already loaded and ready to go. You haven't looked at your notes since you wrote them because well you don't need to. You sit down, you open the laptop and somewhere in the half second before you start talking, something in your checks. Not the numbers, the numbers are right, they're always right. That was never part of the question. Something further back than that, checking whether you're allowed to say it the way that you actually know it. You talk the room through the quarter, someone across the table asks a question, and you handle it. The kind of answer that gets the nod around the table, the kind that moves the meeting straight on to the next item. Out of view, under that table, your foot's tapping. Some part of you still turning the number over, checking the explanation that you gave again, even though you know it's right, even though it was right the first time you said it. Nobody in that room is wondering whether you've got this. Nobody has in years. You wouldn't be the one presenting the numbers if they didn't already know that you've got it. But there's a part of you that still hasn't got that memo. Let's say you finished that report at 6 p.m., the numbers checked twice already, the language exactly the way you want it. You go to hit send, but instead you scroll back to the top and you read it again, start to finish. The way you'd read something that you weren't sure of, but you weren't unsure of it two minutes ago. So you close word and you open it straight back up and read it one more time before your finger finally lands on send. Or maybe it's that project. It came through on Thursday afternoon. Your name already down as the lead. You've run something almost exactly like this twice before. And both times it went really well. But knowing that doesn't stop what's going on in your chest the second you read that email. Tight. Immediate. The kind of reaction you'd expect from something that you've never touched before. But you have touched this before. You know exactly how to do it. And still some part of you's already bracing like you don't. Maybe you get off a call twenty minutes later, and it went exactly the way these calls go when you're the one running them. Good questions, clear answers, the client thanking you twice before they hung up. You open your notebook anyway, you start writing down what you'd tighten next time, the pace in the second half, the phrase you used instead of the bitter one that only occurred to you afterwards. But nobody on that call's thinking about any of that. Just you. Three different moments, three different days. The same thing running quietly underneath every one of them, checking work that was never actually in question. So the interesting question was never whether you're competent because the evidence has already settled that in rooms exactly like the ones that you were just in. The real question is why your internal experience hasn't caught up. That's a different question to the one usually asked about imposter syndrome, hey. The usual version assumes that if you found enough proof, said the achievement out loud long enough times, kept the list of wins somewhere that you could see it, the feeling would eventually catch up. But it hasn't. And it's not because you haven't tried, and not because the proof isn't good enough. It's because proof was never actually what confidence runs on. So competence lives in your explicit memory, the kind stored by your hippocampus. It's a record. Outcomes, decisions that held, the call that went exactly the way you needed it to, the project that landed. You can retrieve it, you can argue with it, you can hold it up as evidence, because that's what explicit memory is built to do. But confidence is generated somewhere else entirely. The amygdala that sits deep in your limbic system, it runs a different older kind of memory, which is called implicit memory, where the hippocampus stores what you know. The amygdala stores what once felt dangerous. And it stores it without language, without a timeline, without needing you to consciously remember the original moment at all. In fact, it keeps rewriting that moment every time you revisit that memory. And that's what makes it so hard to argue with. Now you don't need to recall what originally why getting this wrong is dangerous, or your body to still respond as if it's true right now, whether it's in the boardroom. Over an email, on a call. The circuit fires whether or not the story behind it's available to you. Which is why the tightness in your chest reading that email doesn't move when you remind yourself that you've done this twice before. The reminder is explicit. The tightness is implicit. Two different systems answering two different questions, and only one of them is listening to your record. And the imprint isn't the same for everyone because what it's protecting isn't the same for everyone. For one woman, it's the belief that being needed is the only thing that's keeping her safe. So competence has to be proven again every single time someone might need her. For another it's maybe never having been allowed to ask a question twice. So every new ask becomes a test that she's not sure she's allowed to fail. For another, it's simpler and it's harder to name. It's just the old early sense that getting it wrong the first time costs more than you think it should have. Different imprint, same result. None of it's reading the record, but all of it's running anyway. So this was never a competence problem. Most of what gets called imposter syndrome starts from the opposite assumption that somewhere underneath the achievement, there's a real Question about whether you can actually do this. But what if that's not the question? What if what you have is a mismatch between two systems that were never wired to talk to each other automatically? And no amount of competence closes a gap that competence didn't create. Which is why that usual response doesn't work, right? More preparation, rereading the report a fourth time, running the numbers again before you've said anything wrong, doing more study. Earning another qualification, doing that extra hour, building the case a little more solid than it needed to be. All of it's aimed at the explicit side, the record, the part of you that was never actually in question. None of it reaches the part that's running the response because that part was never reading the record to begin with. So you can hand your amygdala an unlimited amount of proof and expect something to change because It has no mechanism for taking it in. It's not rejecting the evidence. It just doesn't have a door for that evidence to come in through. So it's not that you need to work harder to become someone that the doubt can't reach. There's no version of competent enough that reaches it. The tightness in your chest, the rereading, the bracing before something you've already proven you can do. That's your system doing exactly what it was built to do a long time ago. in conditions that had nothing to do with the boardroom that you're standing in now. And what holds regardless of which imprint is actually running it, whether it's the one that needs to be needed or proving itself fresh every time someone might come to lean on you. Or the one that never got to ask twice. So every question still lands like a test. Or it's that one that's harder to name, just the old early cost of getting something wrong the first time. All of these scenarios served a purpose and that was to keep you safe. It's just still running that same protection in a life that doesn't require it anymore. So recalibrating it was never going to happen through argument because it was never installed through argument. It doesn't update because you've won the case. It updates the way it was built through repetition, through direct felt evidence gathered slowly, that this specific room or this specific kind of moment doesn't cost what it used to cost. And that's not information, it's experience. So picture the same boardroom, another Monday, months from now, same numbers loaded, the same room you've walked into more times than you can count. You sit down, you open the laptop, and this time there's no half second before you speak. Not because the material's any different, because the part of you that never got the memo has finally got it. You answer the question from across the table the same as you always do. And it gets the nod around the table the way it always does. But this time nothing is running underneath it. There's no foot tapping, there's no quiet second pass at a number that was already right the first time. Just the answer, landing, and you still in the room with it. Instead of three steps ahead checking whether it was really right. That shift doesn't happen because you finally gathered enough proof. It happens the way anything actually changes at that level. It happens at the speed at which you feel safe. The safer you feel, the faster that change gets locked in. And then you repeat it until the system underneath stops bracing for it because it's become normal. So this is exactly the ground I'm opening up in a live executive briefing on the fifteenth of October. It's called when preparation isn't the problem. And we're going to look at why the most prepared, most Proven people in the room can still be the ones quietly running this pattern and why no amount of additional preparation was ever going to be the thing that resolved it. And what actually starts to shift it. It's free, it's live, and if you can't make it the recording comes to you. Details are at tracytty.com forward slash preparation isn't the problem. I'm sending you lots of love. Bye for now. Hey, thanks for listening to today's podcast. Can I ask you a favor? If our conversation spoke to you today, could you please take a moment to leave a five-star review? Your review will help people discover this podcast and together we can create a world where there's even more love and more laughter. And if you want to hear more from the Project Joyful podcast, just click the subscribe button. Bye for now.