Hello beautiful soul
Something happened in a room somewhere in London last week that I want to bring you into.
I hosted an event. In person. Women gathered around the topic of imposter syndrome — or more specifically, why I do not think it exists. Not in the way we have been told it does.
If you want my full "hot take" on it, watch my TEDx here.
And something happened in that room that always happens when women of different ages and career seasons get truly honest with each other. The air changed. Shoulders dropped. Voices got quieter and more real. And one by one, women started saying the thing they had not quite been able to say out loud before.
I want to bring you into that room today (and thank you to those of you who braved the tube strike and the rain to be with us IRL).
Let's start at the beginning.
Imposter syndrome — as most of us know it — is the feeling that you are a fraud. That you do not belong. That at any moment someone is going to tap you on the shoulder and ask you to leave. And the story we have been sold about it is that this feeling lives inside you. That it is a YOU problem. Something to fix, to overcome, to manage.
I don't buy it.
What I see — in the women I work with, in the rooms I sit in, in my own life — is not a syndrome. It is a gap. I call it the Authenticity Gap (and it doesn't just exist for women). It's the distance between who you really are and who you feel safe enough to be.
That is a completely different thing.
Because a syndrome puts the blame on the individual. It says something is wrong with you. The authenticity gap recognises what is actually happening — that we have been collectively programmed, for a very long time, to see men as the default model of leadership. And so when we do not match that model, we question ourselves rather than questioning the model.
We were never the problem baby. We were just in the wrong frame.
So let's break that frame open a little further.
In the room yesterday we talked about stress responses. Most people know fight and flight. But there are four — and the one I see most in women in the work context is fawn.
Fawn is when you say what feels safer rather than what is true. When you soften your point to make it more palatable. When you agree in the room and seethe quietly afterwards. When you perform okayness because the cost of not performing it feels too high.
Fawn is not weakness. It is an adaptation. Your nervous system learned that being easy and agreeable kept you safe. And it has been running that programme ever since — even in rooms where you are absolutely the most qualified person there.
You cannot think your way out of a stress response. It is wired into your autonomic nervous system. Which means the work is not cognitive — it is somatic. It lives in the body.
I used something I call the somatic bathtub to explain it, an analogy taught to me by some of my mentors. Soma means body.
Your body can only contain so much before it overflows. And most of us are walking around already full — already at the brim — before the day has even started. Before the meeting that requires us to hold our ground. Before the conversation we have been putting off. Before the moment that asks us to take up space.
The work is building capacity. Not pushing through. Not managing better. Actually expanding what your body can hold — through movement, through breath, through dancing yourself back into yourself, through the daily practice of coming home to who you are.
And that begins with self love, though as I say in my TEDx, that is a process not an event. But a big step in that process is to learn to embrace all parts of ourselves.
"Wait Penfold, even the parts of me that show up that I am a little ashamed of...!?"
Yes honey, those too. And here's how I support women to do it in Women Who Lead.
There are four achetypal energies within us as women — the Explorer, the Creator, the Alchemist, the Visionary. Four energies that move through us, based on where we are in our cycle, and where we are in our lives and on any given day. Not as a rigid system but as a map. A way of understanding why you feel like a different woman at different times — and how to work with that rather than against it.
The Explorer: youthful, curious, willing to try things, not yet worried about what anyone thinks.
The Creator: radiant, magnetic, the version of you that connects effortlessly.
The Alchemist: discerning, truth-telling, the one who calls things out — including in yourself.
The Visionary: she knows who she is. Oracle energy. The one who has come home.
All four live in you. One leads at different times.
At the end of all that work is sovereignty. A word which I think can feel a little opaque, so I want to explain it better for you here.
Sovereignty, for me, is not a grand concept — it is a physical one. It is the supreme, independent authority and power of a HUMAN to govern itself, make its own laws, and control its territory without interference from foreign powers.
A straight spine. An open heart. The ability to walk into a room and command presence not because of your title or your size but because of the relationship you have with yourself.
Treating your body as a place of worship. Making your life an act of worship.
And finally, we talked about women and each other in that room.
About how we have been trained into competition when what we actually need is what I am trying to create. I called a symbiotic constellation of collaborative women, learning from each other, supporting each other. A web of women who fill each other up rather than drain each other. Where sharing your quirks and your vulnerabilities gives other women permission to do the same.
One woman talked about being the only woman in every room she walks into and the invisible preparation that requires. Another talked about guilt — how it shows up in everything, how relentless it is, how it sits underneath almost every decision she makes. Another talked about the fear that if she stops performing the version of herself that everyone expects, she will lose the people she loves.
And I have been sitting with all of it since Thursday my darling, because here is what I know.
The wrong rooms will exhaust you. Not every space is worth the energy it takes to try to change it. Some rooms you leave. Some rooms you transform. And knowing the difference is part of the work.
The right room changes everything.
If you want to be in a room like that — not just for one morning but for six months — Women Who Lead is open now. The next group is forming. Seven women. Sisterhood, somatics and strategy. The inside game and the outside one.
If something in this landed for you today — if you recognised yourself anywhere in it — set up a call with me here and let's talk about what your next chapter actually looks like.
You were never the problem.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Responses