Joyce Roche earned an MBA from Columbia, became the first African American woman to hold a vice presidency at Avon, worked at Revlon, AT&T and Carson Products, and then spent a decade as president and chief executive of Girls Inc.
In 2013 she published a memoir about it. The title is The Empress Has No Clothes: Conquering Self-Doubt to Embrace Success, and the subject is that through all of it, she felt like a fraud.
That’s worth sitting with, because it contradicts the thing most people quietly believe about imposter syndrome: that it’s a phase you pass through on the way to being genuinely competent.
It doesn’t resolve with evidence
The intuitive model is that self-doubt is a gap between your actual ability and your assessment of it — and that as achievements accumulate, the gap closes.
It frequently doesn’t. People describe reaching each milestone they’d assumed would settle the question, and finding that the feeling simply reattaches to the next thing. The promotion becomes evidence that they’re now further out of their depth. The award becomes evidence the judges were fooled.
Roche’s account is striking precisely because the record is unambiguous. There is no reading of that career in which she wasn’t good at her job. And it made no difference to the internal experience.
Which means achievement is not the cure, and waiting to feel legitimate before acting is waiting for something that isn’t coming.
Why it’s worse when you’re the first
There’s a specific version of this that applies when you’re the only person like you in the room, and it isn’t quite the same thing.
If nobody in the role has looked like you before, then two explanations are available for why you’re there: you’re good, or something unusual happened. Both are live possibilities in your own head, and other people occasionally voice the second, which keeps it alive.
On top of that, you’re aware that a visible failure will be read as evidence about the category rather than about you. That’s not self-doubt — it’s an accurate reading of the situation, and it produces exactly the same caution.
Worth separating the two, because they need different responses. The structural version isn’t a confidence problem, and treating it as one means working on yourself while the situation stays as it is.
What actually helps
Name it out loud to one person. The feeling depends heavily on being unspoken, and it loses a surprising amount of force when it’s said. It also tends to produce the response “oh, me too” from someone you assumed was entirely secure.
Keep a record of specifics. Not achievements in general — particular things you did and what resulted. Memory is unhelpfully selective here and will supply the failures on request.
Separate the feeling from the decision. You can feel unqualified and still take the role, send the proposal, name the price. The feeling is information about your internal state, not about whether you should act.
Stop treating it as a problem to solve before proceeding. For a great many capable people, this is simply the texture of doing difficult things. The goal isn’t eliminating it. It’s getting on with work while it’s happening.
And talk to people at your level. The reason this persists is that everyone performs competence in public, so the only version of other people you see is the assured one. A room where people say what’s actually going on recalibrates you faster than any amount of reflection.
The part Roche got right
She didn’t wait to feel ready. The career happened alongside the doubt, not after it was resolved.
And she wrote the book afterwards — which is the more useful contribution, because the alternative is a generation of women concluding that everyone senior is quietly certain and they alone are pretending.
They aren’t. A remarkable number of people you assume are entirely secure have a version of this, and almost none of them mention it.
Three questions worth answering
- What have you not done because you didn’t feel qualified — and would you have been qualified enough?
- Who do you assume is certain, and have you ever asked them?
- What would you attempt this quarter if the feeling weren’t a factor?
That last one is the useful one. The answer is usually specific and usually available.
More on why nobody has it figured out and why clarity matters more than confidence.
