Neil sat opposite me in my office. The hollowed-out stare and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails told me this was a man who probably hadn't slept or eaten much in days. As the 29-year-old CEO of a highly successful tech firm, he was at his wits end. The company he helped to create was undergoing explosive growth that had caught him by surprise, requiring a new infusion of venture capital, dozens of new hires and a major company restructuring. He missed the good old days, he told me, when it was just him and his partner working from his Brooklyn apartment. "I don't get it," he confessed. "This is what I always wanted. I just wish I knew what the hell I was doing!"  

Lots of very successful and accomplished people feel this way some of the time. Or maybe all of the time. They are troubled with high levels of self-doubt and anxiety about their own abilities. Some even believe they are "faking it" and live in terror of actually being "found out." I remember reading an interview with Jodi Foster some years ago. She had been acting in movies since she was nine, and had just won an Oscar for her role in The Accused. And yet she couldn't shake the feeling of fraudulence. "I felt like an impostor," she said. "I kept thinking that some day they would find out I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't. And I still don't."  

Look, it's okay to not know what you're doing sometimes. We all, to some degree, feel uncertain at work. A lot of our time is spent developing workarounds and elaborate coping mechanisms to pretend that we do in fact, know what we're doing. (Wall Street has developed this to a fine art. Too big to fail? Yeah, right!) Yet most people, if they're honest, will probably tell you it's about fine-tuning your instincts, a good deal of luck and educated guess work. The fact is that we cannot avoid not knowing, because life is full of surprises. But what we can do is learn to quiet the impostor that lurks within.

Relax