The Junkyard Cure for Corporate Imposter Syndrome
At 21, broke and needing to pay off a debt, I found myself working the 5 AM to 8 AM shift at a local junkyard run by a guy named Frank. Rows of metal shelves stacked with parts going back twenty years. Dust and exhaust grime on everything, including me. By the time the real morning rush hit, I was already blowing black boogers out of my nose.
Frank got a kick out of leaving me alone up front when the big guys came in looking for parts. "Where's Frank?" they'd ask. "The girl's gotcha," he'd shout from the back. They'd look me over, head to toe. Not in a sexual way, just trying to work out how this thing with boobs knew anything about carburetors. Nobody said it out loud. You learn to read that particular silence fast, or you don't last a week.
I did know what I was doing, mostly because Frank refused to make it easy. He'd watch me wander the lot hunting for a part for ten minutes before bellowing, "Girl, whatcha doin'? That ain't a Ford, look at the headlights, that's a Chrysler." I rebuilt a carburetor wrong three times before he finally told me I had a gasket flipped.
He could have just handed me the right part every time a customer looked at me sideways. That would have made me look like I knew what I was doing by lunchtime. Instead, he made me walk the yard, get it wrong, and work out for myself why a Chrysler headlight sits differently than a Ford's.
By the end of that summer, I wasn't reciting an answer from memory. I was the source of it. I could tell you why a part fit before I even checked because the knowledge lived in me. That's the actual difference between performing something and knowing it. One comes from outside you and has to be maintained. The other just is you, so nothing can rattle it.
I’ve watched the corporate equivalent of this happen more times than I can count. A woman gets sharper in meetings. Steadier under pressure. Better at holding a room. And then, months later, she plateaus somewhere she can't quite name.
Confidence and inner authority get talked about like they're the same thing. They aren't. Confidence is teachable in a few days: posture, tone, the right words to say when your mind goes blank. Inner authority is the deeper layer underneath. It’s the actual reason the self-doubt shows up in a given room in the first place, and it doesn't move just because someone told you to stand up straighter.
Picture a sharp question in a meeting: the kind meant to test you, not necessarily to hurt you. Your stomach drops half a second before your brain even catches up. You know the material. You've known it for years. It doesn't matter; an old pattern already fired, and now you're managing your face instead of answering the question.
That's not a confidence problem. Confidence would tell you to pause, take a deep breath and speak slower. It wouldn't touch the half-second where the actual damage already happened. Most of the time, that flinch traces back to a room from years ago: a teacher who called on you before you were ready, a parent whose disappointment you learned to read, a group of friends laughing at you. It just shows up today as the flinch.
You cannot talk someone out of a pattern that's been running since before they had language for it. But shifting it doesn't require some dramatic, painful excavation. It’s actually a lot like finding that flipped gasket. You just need to spot exactly where the old pattern started, see it as an outdated reflex rather than a truth, and build a new pattern in its place. Once you reset that one piece of old wiring, the new, confident actions happen naturally.
That's the part most people never get to. It's much easier to hand someone a script for sounding sure of themselves than it is to sit with them while they figure out where the unsureness actually started.
I don't know what your version of the junkyard is. Maybe it's a room where you've been underestimated so many times you stopped noticing it happening. Maybe it's one specific person whose face you still brace for before you've even opened your mouth. Whatever it is, the fix was never going to be a better opening line.
You need a space to figure out where that unsureness started, and some focused time to rewrite it. You need your own version of the junkyard, a place to do the unglamorous, foundational work so that when you walk into the next high-stakes meeting, you are undeniable.
I spent a summer covered in exhaust dust before I understood that. I'd rather you got there faster.
If you do want to get there faster, this is exactly what we are doing in UNIGNORABLE.
It’s a 3-part workshop series starting September 22 where we strip down performed confidence and build actual inner authority. Three days, real tools, and the reps you need to stop second-guessing yourself in the rooms that matter.
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