Imposter Syndrome in a Second Career: I Have the Credentials and I Still Feel Like I'm Faking It

I teach Pilates now, and every single time I do, some part of me is waiting for somebody to work out that I shouldn't be up there.

Which is ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous, because I've done the actual work. I've taken the classes, the fun ones and the excruciatingly detailed ones, I've done the credentialing, I practice, I'm on a schedule with real people who show up expecting a real instructor and I teach them. Every box a person could point at is checked. It hasn't made one bit of difference to the feeling, which turns out to be something you cannot argue with using paperwork.

The cueing is what I work on the most. Cueing is finding the words that make somebody else's body do the thing, which is more or less the whole job, and I'm still finding my way. I find that genuinely funny given that I spent twenty years being paid to choose words carefully. Negotiating, briefing, picking the one right word because the wrong one was going to cost somebody something. I have talked a room full of ministers into an agreement that not one of them walked in wanting. And then I stand in front of a class, go to explain where they should be feeling it, hear myself say the tried and true, “engage the glutes.” There's always more advanced work than I've got, too, and I'm far enough along now to know exactly how much I'm missing, which is considerably less comfortable than not knowing.

In twenty years of diplomacy I never once wondered whether I belonged in the room. Not once, and I walked into some rooms I had no business being relaxed in. I thought that was confidence. I genuinely did, I thought it was a thing I had and carried around with me, and it wasn't, it was the title. Somebody handed me a card and the card did all of that work, and I've spent this past year slowly figuring out that I don't have it anymore and that I never actually did.

And this credential is more mine than any of those ever were. Nobody assigned me to it. No panel, no orders, no assignment cycle, no institution deciding where I was going next. I went and got it on purpose, starting from nothing at an age when most people have stopped starting things, and it is easily the most earned line on my résumé. It also gives me about a tenth of the certainty a business card used to hand over for free.

The one part that has gotten easier is being corrected, and I did not see that coming at all. I'm still learning while I'm teaching so I'm getting feedback constantly, and I take it so much better than I ever did in the old job. There's nothing to protect. No reputation in the room, nobody writing it down for later, no twenty years riding on whether I got the cue right. Somebody tells me my hands were in the wrong spot and I go oh, right, and move them, and that's the end of it. I used to be a little impatient with people who got prickly about feedback and I'd take that back now, because I know exactly what they were protecting. I just don't have it to protect anymore.

I've been trying to remember when I started feeling like a diplomat instead of somebody doing an impression of one, and I honestly cannot place it. It's entirely possible it never flipped at all and the title just got loud enough that I quit hearing the other thing, which is a strange realization to be having while you're standing at the front of a room counting people into a hundred.

I teach Tuesday either way.