There's a phrase that took off in the 1890s called bicycle face. A made-up affliction that posters warned women about right at the moment they started riding bikes, wearing trousers, and gaining freedom. We open this episode with a real question: is imposter syndrome the same thing? A label that arrived just as more women, more people of colour, more people from non-traditional backgrounds started entering rooms they'd been kept out of?

Our take: it's complicated. There are people walking around with way too little of it (we're looking at you, British politics) and people drowning in too much of it (the founders we coach who leave themselves off their own pitch decks). We unpack both, why one of us needs more humility and the other needs more of their own evidence, and what to actually do when the voice gets loud.

We talk through the questions that have helped us most. What is true here, not what's the worst case. Whose voice is the imposter voice using. So what if it is true. And the practical tools we've stolen and shared along the way: Amy Widener's wind bank, Hattie's rejection therapy challenge from her Wimbledon survey-job days, Andy's three-futures prompt for when imposter syndrome dresses itself up as a career decision.

Plus the question we've found genuinely useful: what would someone completely mediocre but very overconfident be doing right now that you're not?

In this episode:

- The bicycle face history and why labels matter
- Andy's definition of imposter syndrome as the voice that gets louder when confidence is low
- Why some people need more imposter syndrome (and what unchecked confidence looks like)
- Why others need much less (and how systemic signals get internalised as personal failings)
- "What is true?" as the most useful grounding question
- The three-futures prompt for big career decisions
- And the always-useful: what's the actual worst that could happen?

Subscribe to our substack for the journalling prompts: https://substack.com/@untanglinglifepod