I have faced this personally.

There has been many times in the last 24 years that I’ve asked myself at the end of the day if I really know what the hell I’m doing in my psychotherapy practice.

I help clients bust their limiting beliefs, educate them on neuroplasticity, call out cognitive distortions and soothe reactive amygdala’s. Scripts flow out of my mouth on how to have crucial conversations with partners, parents, bosses, borderline personality disordered sisters; yet there are times I find myself thinking that “everyone else” in my field knows the real, big important things and I do not.

Years ago, one of the ways I was able to circumvent these persistent thoughts, while building a thriving practice, was to read stories about women who created their jam in life; one unsteady step at a time.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, said “every time I was called on in class, I was sure that I was about to embarrass myself. Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself—or even excelled—I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up.”

Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice has said that at Princeton, she felt like she was waiting for someone to tap her on the shoulder and say, “You don’t belong!”

Jody Foster once said she thought it was a “fluke” she was accepted to Yale. And after winning an Academy Award thought everybody would find out, and they’d take the Oscar back. “They’d come to my house, knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, we meant to give that to someone else. That was going to Meryl Streep.”

I told myself that if Sandberg, Sotomayer, and Foster had these same feelings and ideas, but persisted anyway, that I would as well.