Do you remember the day you got promoted?

Not the celebration, if there was one. The exact second. The message lighting up your phone, the director reaching across the table in that glass-walled room, the “you’ve earned this” delivered with the hurried sincerity of someone who has another meeting in ten minutes. Do you remember what happened in your stomach?

Plenty of people describe joy. The honest ones describe something else. A chill that rises right alongside the smile, and a calculation that starts running on its own somewhere behind the eyes: how long until they figure it out?

I have heard that question, in those words or close to them, from executives in charge of hundreds of people. From a director who had just closed the biggest deal in her company’s history and spent the celebration dinner working out what would happen if the client walked away. From a manager who, the night before taking over an entire division, stayed up until dawn rereading old emails, hunting for the mistake that would unmask him. None of them was incompetent. Every one of them felt like a debtor.

Debtor.

*

These days it goes by the name impostor syndrome, and in leadership circles the label has stuck, even though it is not a diagnosis of anything, and it does help people find the subject in a search bar. The name is misleading, though. “Impostor” suggests someone pretending to be what they are not. The person who feels this is not pretending at all. They are paying.

Look at the internal bookkeeping of someone who lives this way. The promotion does not arrive as payment for work already done. It arrives as a loan. Credit extended in good faith by someone who, poor soul, has not yet looked closely at the numbers. And every loan accrues interest.

Each compliment in the quarterly review does not reduce the debt. It adds to it. Now there is a new expectation, a bigger one, and the gap between who others think you are and who you think you are has grown wider. The year-end bonus becomes an advance installment on some future collection. The invitation to speak at the leadership offsite becomes one more guarantor who will be disappointed alongside you, in front of everyone, lanyard and microphone included.

The higher you climb, the steeper the rate.

Some people find it strange that the feeling gets worse precisely as success grows. To me it makes perfect sense. In this economy, success is borrowing. Someone who never climbed owes nothing. Someone who climbed a long way owes the whole company, the shareholders, the team, the family that celebrated on Sunday, the father who told the neighbors.

Oddly enough, the debtor is not afraid of bankruptcy. The debtor is afraid of the audit. The day someone sits down with the spreadsheets, opens the drawers, cross-checks the data and discovers that the balance never existed. Failure, when it comes, is almost a relief, because at least it confirms something. What tortures is the interval, that suspended time between the achievement and the discovery, which can last an entire career without the discovery ever arriving.

You can spot the debtor by their habits, even when they smile well. The one answering emails at eleven at night so nobody notices any delay. The one who says yes to every extra project because saying no would mean admitting a limit. The one who cannot delegate, since delegating means letting someone get close enough to see how things are done on the inside. The one who, when praised in public, hands it back instantly: “it was the team.” It looks like generosity. Often it is just a way of declining the credit before it hits the account and pushes the balance owed a little higher.

And then there is the exhaustion. Not the kind that comes from the work itself, the kind that comes from vigilance. Performing ease while monitoring every sentence, every reaction from the boss, every silence on a video call, drains more energy than any spreadsheet ever could.

*

In 2024 I wrote about a manager I worked with. He carried exactly this weight, and I described, with some pride, the path we built together. Among other things, we put together a meticulous record of achievements: positive feedback, delivered projects, targets hit. We agreed to celebrate wins, big and small. The logic seemed flawless. If he doubted his own competence, let him look at the evidence.

It worked. For a while.

What I did not write in that piece, because I had not yet seen it, was what happened months later. The evidence file grew thick. Very thick. And the fear did not shrink in proportion. In one of our conversations, he opened the spreadsheet on his laptop, scrolled for what felt like far too long, and said, almost apologetically, that something was still missing.

I asked him who he was building that case file for.

He took his time. Then he answered: for myself.

That was when I understood the mistake. Mine, not his.

Bringing receipts to a creditor is an acknowledgment of the debt. Every document submitted to a court confirms that the court has the right to judge. I had helped that man defend himself better, with more paperwork, more witnesses, more arguments. And without realizing it, I had handed the judge more work and more power.

Because the judge, in this case, has no interest in reaching a verdict. The judge lives off the trial. Declaring the defendant innocent would mean losing the job. So there is always a missing exhibit, an unreliable witness, a merit that might have been luck, a compliment that might have been mere politeness, a target that was perhaps too easy that year. The file is never complete, because completing it would close the case, and the case is the only thing keeping that judge in the chair.

The more evidence, the longer the trial.

*

Where does this debt come from?

Not always from a terrible childhood. Sometimes that childhood was not even hard. It was just transactional. It may well have been a loving home, where affection arrived a little warmer on good report card days and where the silence at the dinner table grew a little heavier after a bad grade. Nothing dramatic. Nothing anyone would call a wound. Just a lesson learned early and learned thoroughly: belonging is credit. Granted. Revocable.

Whoever learns that does not learn to be. They learn to deserve. And deserving is a strange currency that never accumulates. It has to be earned again every morning, as if yesterday’s balance had been wiped overnight by some system nobody controls.

From then on, every new place is a new bank. College, the first internship, the first team, the first management role. In each one, the person opens an account asking for credit, receives it, and starts living to justify it. Nobody ever asked for that justification. It was offered before any question was raised, the way someone holds out their license to the officer before being pulled over.

I wonder how many people, in any given boardroom on any given Tuesday, are sitting there paying off a debt they took on at nine years old.

*

And here I want to challenge the way this subject is usually handled.

The standard line says that whoever feels like an impostor is seeing things wrong. Distorting, minimizing, in need of a lens correction. Maybe. But what if, in part, they are seeing more clearly than everyone else?

A conference table with twelve people around it. Slides on the wall, charts trending upward, someone saying “strategic” for the fourth time in twenty minutes. Every one of those twelve people is, to some degree, improvising. Deciding with half the information. Defending numbers they do not fully master. Nodding at things they did not understand so as not to look like they did not understand. The title is a costume. Every title is. Stitched together from the expectations of those who appointed you, those who report to you, those who watch from the outside and quietly root, just a little, for the fall.

Whoever feels the costume itching against their skin is perceiving something true: there is a gap between the person and the role. The error is not in that perception. It is in the conclusion that follows right after, that the other eleven do not feel the same. That only they are in costume, and everyone else was born dressed that way.

The impostor may be the only honest person in the room. The trouble is that they believe their colleagues’ performance.

I have watched this moment unfold in a group, and it is almost beautiful. Someone, in a closed conversation among leaders, admits to the feeling. Silence. Then another says: me too. And another. And suddenly that room, which looked like a gathering of confident people, turns out to be a meeting of debtors who spent years hiding their wallets from one another. It does not quite amount to comfort. It is more like a reality check in reverse. The fraud each of them feared was collective, and precisely because it was collective it stopped being fraud. It became simply the condition of anyone sitting in a chair too big for any human being.

*

There is one more layer, and this one makes companies uncomfortable.

Who promised you would feel ready?

Leading is, at its core, deciding without knowing enough. If you knew enough, nobody would need a leader; a procedure would do. The management seat exists precisely for the moment when the manual runs out, the data contradict each other, and someone has to choose anyway, heart racing, team watching. Part of the feeling of not measuring up is not a misreading. It is an accurate reading of the size of the task, which is bigger than anyone who takes it on. The slippage begins when that perception slides from the work onto the person, and “the task is too big” quietly becomes, without anyone noticing the swap, “I am too small.”

What do most organizations do with that truth? They hide it. They demand from their leaders a permanent performance of certainty. “I don’t know” gets punished with looks, with shrinking influence, with that comment in the annual review about “executive presence.” Doubt becomes weakness. And so the company takes a feeling that signals clarity and turns it into a secret. Secrets, as everyone knows, carry the highest interest rates on the market.

I would venture that many companies manufacture impostors on an assembly line. Not out of cruelty. Out of the vanity of appearing to know where they are headed.

And at that point it gets hard to separate someone’s insecurity from an accurate reading of the environment. In a place where admitting doubt costs you a promotion, hiding doubt is neither a character flaw nor fragility. It is survival. People learn that showing the inside seams has a price, and they start paying in advance, every month, before any bill arrives. Calling this a purely individual problem is very convenient for whoever wrote the rules of the game.

And the most dangerous figure in this story is not even the leader who feels like a debtor. It is the other one. The one who has never felt anything of the kind. Who walks into every meeting without the slightest chill in the stomach, who has never once wondered whether they deserved the chair, who owes nothing to anyone because, by their own accounting, everyone owes them. That one frightens me more. Someone who carries no doubt at all rarely finds a reason to listen to anyone.

*

So what is the way out?

For a long time I would have answered with a technique. Today I am wary of techniques that try to pay off this debt, however well designed they may be. Rewriting thoughts, collecting evidence, celebrating wins: all of it can bring relief, and relief has value; nobody should dismiss it. The problem was never the technique itself. It lies in the function the technique ends up serving. A record of achievements can help someone see their own work more clearly, or it can become one more petition filed with the court. Same notebook, two destinies. When the tool is used to win an acquittal, it keeps operating inside the same bank and keeps accepting the premise that there is a balance to be settled.

The turning point I saw happen, in that manager and in other people after him, did not come from paying more. It came from a question that sounds almost naive: who signed this contract?

It sounds simple. It is not. When people go looking for the signature, they cannot find it. Nobody, at any point, handed them a document stating that the position was a loan. Nobody set a term, a rate, collateral, late fees. The director who promoted them was not extending credit. They were noticing something. The team that follows them is not waiting for a default. It is working, worried about its own deadlines, its own kids, its own bills, not about theirs.

That manager, one Thursday afternoon, staring at the same enormous spreadsheet, said something I have never forgotten. He said he had never applied for that loan. And he laughed, a little embarrassed, because he realized he had spent years paying installments on a debt recorded nowhere but in his own books.

A debt with no creditor is a strange thing. It weighs as much as any other. It just cannot be collected.

*

I would love to say that, after this, he never felt the chill in his stomach again. It would not be true.

The collector still calls. Usually on Sunday night, when the week has not yet started and the mind has too much room. It calls before an important presentation. It calls when someone younger and brilliant joins the team and everyone talks about it over coffee. The voice is the same as always, polite and firm: we need to talk about that balance.

The difference is small and enormous at the same time. He now knows he can let the phone ring.

He does not need to argue with the collector, or produce receipts, or renegotiate terms. He does not need to prove he is good. He can recognize the call, know where it comes from, remember that the account was opened by a child who only wanted to stay at the table without that silence, and go back to what he was doing. Doubt stops being a verdict and goes back to what it could always have been: a working tool. That pause before deciding that forces you to hear one more person, reread one more time, ask the question nobody in the room had the nerve to ask.

The leader who doubts without owing is, perhaps, the rarest of all. Carrying the clarity of someone who sees the costume and the lightness of someone who does not have to pay for it.

*

I go back to that glass-walled room, to the “you’ve earned this” said in passing.

What if you had heard it differently? Not as a concession, not as a bet, not as credit to be honored. Just as the sentence of someone who saw your work and said what they saw. No contract behind it. No fine print.

How much do you still think you owe for the position you hold?

And to whom, exactly?

Tomorrow morning, in the lobby, you will tap your badge on the turnstile. It will beep, the light will turn green, the gate will open. Nobody will ask for proof.

Nobody ever did.

*

If this piece touched an old account of yours, keep the conversation going at marcellodesouza.com.br. You will find hundreds of articles on human and organizational cognitive-behavioral development, leadership, and healthy, evolving relationships, written for those who prefer questions that unsettle over answers that settle.

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