This podcast is hosted by edWeb.net.

The webinar recording can be accessed here.

Imposter syndrome hits hardest in the people who least deserve it. Every educator who has stepped into a leadership role has felt some version of the question: Who am I to be the one in charge here? The doubt gets louder, not smaller, the more responsibility someone takes on, even when every promotion was earned on results that should have settled the question entirely.

There is a specific reason for that. The instinct to read what students and colleagues need, to keep the room steady, to put relationships at the center of how you teach and lead, is what makes someone good at this work, and it is also the instinct that, taken into a leadership moment, can shift into needing everyone’s approval to feel like you’re doing it right. Leadership asks you to make decisions people will not always like, to hold positions that disappoint someone in the room, and to trust your own judgment when no one is going to confirm you’ve got it right, and for people whose whole craft is built on attunement to others, that is the harder part of the job, and almost nobody names it out loud.

This edWeb podcast is built around Dr. Bill George’s Five Dimensions of Authentic Leadership, interpreted through the lens of educators and people-pleasers who got here by being excellent at a completely different job, exploring what it actually looks like to lead from trust in yourself instead of approval from everyone else, whether the room you’re leading has 30 kids in it or 30 adults.

This edWeb podcast is for you if…

• You got promoted because you were excellent at the work, and now you sometimes wonder if you tricked everyone into thinking you could do this job
• You came up through the classroom and leadership is asking for something completely different from what made you great at teaching
• You are the person your team comes to with everything, and you are starting to feel the weight of that
• You have been told to just be yourself as a leader and found that advice spectacularly unhelpful
• You care so much about getting it right that the caring itself has started to feel like the problem

You leave with…

• A clear understanding of why imposter syndrome is a predictable feature of the practitioner-to-leader path, not something wrong with you
• Language for what is actually happening when leadership feels harder than it should, so you can stop treating it like a personal flaw
• The ability to spot where your people-pleasing instincts are serving your team and where they are running the show in ways that cost everyone
• A real distinction between being liked and being trusted, and why that gap matters more in education than almost anywhere else
• At least one concrete reframe for a leadership challenge you are facing right now, drawn from Dr. Bill George’s Five Dimensions interpreted through the lens of people who got here by caring deeply about everyone else

Buy The Imposter’s Guide to Authentic Leadership by Lori Kirksted here.

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