Episode 24: Confidence vs. Competence: Managing Imposter Syndrome in Your Practice with Haley Moore

Kayla: Welcome back to Your Clinical Supervisor’s Coach podcast, and I’m your host, Kayla Das.

In today’s episode, Haley Moore, Registered Social Worker and clinical supervisor, will share strategies for managing imposter syndrome in your private practice.

Hi, Haley. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today.

Haley: So glad to be here, Kayla. Thank you so much for having me.

Kayla: Haley, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself. And tell us a little bit about you, your practice and clinical supervision journey.

Haley: Absolutely. So I am a registered social worker. I live in Toronto and I work with clients virtually across Ontario. I started my private practice in solo practice in 2021 and expanded to a group practice in 2023. I’ve been a clinical supervisor for the last few years and discovered a new passion and teaching the thing I love to do, which is working with clients.

So our clinic has a focus on helping adults through individual therapy, couples therapy, group therapy, and workshops, as well as life coaching services. And I’m really excited to continue to grow our capacity to support others moving forward.

Kayla: I love that. So first of all, what is confidence and competence, and how do they differ? And I do want to say that I think this is a really important topic to discuss because sometimes we confuse the two.

Haley: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m actually going to start with the definition from Oxford Dictionary about competence. So “competence is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.” So in therapy, this really means consistently being able to support clients with our best practice skills and modalities to meet their desired goals in an ethical, empathetic, and compassionate way. So essentially, your ability to perform your responsibilities as a therapist effectively and with positive result.

Whereas confidence is really your belief and your ability to perform competently. They’re super connected, absolutely. But confidence really comes from a commitment to doing that skill or repeated action that you’ve committed to doing, which eventually creates competence, which then of course leads back to more confidence. So it’s really a triangle effect where you actually get more confidence, repeated success and competence building.

So just to kind of go off that for a minute, sometimes our ego can be mistaken as confidence. So sometimes I have a belief that I’m actually better than other people and I’m confident in something when actually I’m not that competent. So our ego can sometimes be mistaken as confidence. Our ego can have this belief that we are better than other people, and feel confident when really you’re not that competent. So our ego can actually get in the way of us building competence if we already think we’re good at something when we really haven’t built that skill.

Similarly, our self-efficacy can also be mistaken as confidence. So self-efficacy is a belief that no matter what, I possess the skills and abilities to figure something out, which is super positive, but it’s not necessarily confidence or competence. It’s just a belief that you will figure it out, not necessarily that you actually currently possess those skills.

Kayla: That’s a really great way to look at it. And you know, I used to tell my clients in my therapy sessions is that confidence is often, like you mentioned, it’s built by taking the action over and over again. And usually there’s fear before we get there. And I often get clients saying, when I feel confident, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z. And I always say to them, well, you’re gonna be waiting a long time because it means you need to take those actions before you start feeling that confidence.

Haley: Yeah, absolutely. You’re totally right, Kayla. I mean, we can’t do something for the first time without feeling some kind of fear. That’s super normal. And obviously we’ll talk about imposter syndrome, which is a heightened version of that fear. But you’re right, we won’t ever be able to do something if we’re waiting to feel no fear in doing it. So, yeah.

Kayla: Yeah. I like to give an example. When I first started the boosting business Facebook community. So right now it’s not the biggest Facebook group for therapist, but it’s quite big. It’s over 7,000 people. However, when I first opened it, I had it for two months before I invited anyone in because I was so fearful that no one would join. I was like, who wants to be the

first person to this group? and I had a little email list at the time, it was about 250 people. And I wanted to send it out to my email list, but I was like, oh, they’re going to see that I’m a nobody. They’re going to not want to join my group. So it took me two months and then I finally said, you know, and I’m going to send an email. I’m going to ask them to join.

And I’m not going to lie, when I sent the email, I was shaking in my boots for about an hour. I was looking at the screen, seeing if people were going to unsubscribe and not join my Facebook group. But the funny part is the opposite happened. Almost everyone that I sent it to joined that Facebook group. And not only that, they actually told other people, I felt more confident in being able to put it in other communities and that’s how I grew it. And right now it’s like I said, 7,000 people or more. And I would’ve never been able to get there if I just allowed my fear of people are going to think I’m a nobody if I didn’t do it.

Haley: Thank you for sharing that, Kayla. I think that’s a pretty common experience for a lot of us, right? So you taking that leap of faith to say, okay, well no one’s going to join in if I never invite them, right? You miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don’t take. We need to really believe that without this action, nothing happens. Nothing changes. If nothing changes. And taking that first step takes a ton of courage and strength, but it’s obviously it can pay off and sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay too.

If that Facebook group had been a total flop, you would’ve redirected into something else. And that’s also a part of the process of learning and growing and building capacity to be a more competent person, whatever you are pursuing. So yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Kayla.

Kayla: Yeah, absolutely. So what is imposter syndrome and how does it show for therapists and new practice owners?

Haley: Yeah, so imposter syndrome again is essentially what we’ve been talking about, that fear, but it’s in a heightened way. It’s in a extreme case. So it’s really when those insecurities manifest into the conclusion that I don’t belong here. I can be found out at any time for being a bad fit or inadequate or underqualified for this role or this thing I’m trying to do.

It’s really the discrepancy between your perceived required competence to perform that role and your confidence that you can actually do it. So imposter syndrome can look like consistently doubting yourself, triple checking your work. Asking for copious amounts of validation from your supervisor, or even worse, your clients, right?

Saying something to your clients along the lines of, how did this feel for you? But on repeat every single session, every single intervention, right? A check-in now and again is obviously great, you know, and making sure your clients are on board and they. Enjoying what you’re doing with them, that’s awesome. But asking every single time you intervene, whether or not they think it’s okay, is a part of that imposter syndrome.

Other things that can come up as ignoring evidence of success or competence and invalidating your successes, right? You can experience these one-off successes instead of noticing a pattern over time where you have this validation coming in again and again, but instead you invalidate it completely.

You can have an inability or extreme difficulty to take positive feedback from clients, from peers, from coworkers, from supervisors at the face value. Or you actually just have a fear of being seen as incompetent. You expect people to see you as incompetent. You may actually overwork to make up for any perceived lacking, and this really leads to burnout over time.

So I really want to just normalize that most people feel some degree of insecurity in any new role. Do I really know what I’m doing? Do I know that I am actually capable of doing this thing? Can I do the thing I’m supposed to be doing? Am I really cut out for this? Do I need more training first? Especially as therapists, a lot of us came from a background where we didn’t get a lot of training hands-on.

We had a lot of theoretical knowledge, and we really practically put that in place ourselves through additional trainings or supervision or seeking out resources that we didn’t necessarily get in grad school. And this is a huge reason why we often feel this imposter syndrome when we’re first starting out. Because we haven’t had as much practice as we might think we’re supposed to have by some magical standard to be able to do this work. And it’s really hard work.

So another piece of this is that when we look around at our colleagues who have been doing this for longer than we have, or we look at our supervisor who has 30 years of experience, we often feel really inferior to that. We judge ourselves unfairly comparing our novice skills to someone of a skilled practitioner with years and years of experience, and we make this conclusion that we’re just not good enough.

So it certainly shows up for new therapists and new practice owners, but really shows up in anything we do that’s new. If you’re trying out a new sport that you’ve never played before, imposter syndrome can come up there too. What if they kick me off a team because they realize I really can’t do this? So learning new therapeutic techniques, new marketing avenues, new personalities of our clients and new hires, and navigating those.

Every time we’re thrown into the deep end of something new, we’re really susceptible to feeling imposter syndrome all over again.

Kayla: I love that you connected getting significant amount of training. And I think this goes back to the confidence versus competence piece is that sometimes when we’re like, oh, I need to get so much training. Like you have 50 trainings under your belt and now you feel even less confident. One, you haven’t put in all those trainings into practice. You’ve learned them, but you haven’t practiced them. Two, now, there’s so much information, it actually becomes so overwhelming that you feel less confident. So sometimes going down this rabbit hole of, I need more training. I need more training, I need more training. One, you never take the action on those trainings. But two, it just becomes so overwhelming that it’s like, okay, where do I start?

Haley: Exactly, yes. It’s kind of like that saying, Jack of all trades, master of none. If you’re getting a little piece of each training, that can be really helpful and great when you’re first starting out. But really it’s to try to figure out what do I like? What do I think will work for my clients? What do I think I want to learn more about? And then diving a little deeper on those things. If you have a surface level understanding of each of those training modalities, that’s awesome.

But if you don’t go any deeper, you’re right. Yeah. I’m not actually putting this in practice. I don’t actually understand the bigger picture of how this modality actually works with clients, and therefore I’m not building that competence to be able to feel confident. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. Kayla.

Kayla: So when it comes to feelings of imposter or imposter syndrome, from your experience, where do you think this really comes from for most therapists.

Haley: So I like to think of imposter syndrome more as an indicator that you are new, that you care about your work and want to do well, that you are humble enough to know that you aren’t a pro yet. And none of these things are actually negative. This is self-reflection, this is humbleness. This is just an experience of self-reflection that is essential to being an ethical and competent therapist, and knowing your gaps is actually really helpful.

So there is a line in the sand where positive reflection becomes harmful criticism, and that’s what we want to actually get away from. So imposter syndrome is not a conclusion of you actually being incompetent. It’s just your own perceived judgment of this, and it’s actually really trying to protect you from potential failure. So if we’re doing something new, we actually do have a risk of failure. It’s dangerous, and our brain and body know that at an inherent level, that we could fail in this thing, which could lead to feelings of not being good enough or feeling unworthy or feeling incompetent, and our brain and body wants to protect us from that.

So imposter syndrome is a really great indicator that there is something you are feeling not quite confident in, and it gives you a bit of information about how to calm yourself and ground yourself.

So I think that therapists are more likely to be empaths. We like to have deep feelings about things, and we are mostly more emotionally in tune with ourselves and others, and this increases the likelihood that we’re actually noticing and paying attention to these feelings of imposter syndromes when other people might just dismiss it or push it down. So I think we’re actually more likely to experience imposter syndrome. Partly because of what you said earlier, Kayla, that we have so many trainings that we could do and there’s just a huge breadth of knowledge that we could continue to learn forever and we’re never going to be able to tackle it all. And I think that can sometimes lead to a bit of overwhelm and fatigue.

But there’s also that idea that we actually feel things more deeply than other people might. There’s also just the perfectionism and people pleasing tendencies that are more common in our helping profession as well. So we believe that therapists never make mistakes, and perfection is the goal and every client who reaches their goals, and that’s just not a reasonable goal to set for ourselves. So when we actually look at these goals and reflect on them, we can understand, okay, that’s actually not reasonable and I need to consider that failure is a part of this too. When we help clients to fail effectively and then pick themselves back up. We need to do that same thing with us. We need to let ourselves fail and learn from that failure and actually redefine what failure even means and continue to move forward to learn.

The other thing that therapists or helpers often have is that our identity is usually that we put other people’s needs first and neglect ourselves, and this usually leads to seeing ourselves as less than we really are because we’re consistently overshadow by someone else’s needs.

So if we already think lower of ourselves than we do of other people, when we’re doing this new thing that we already feel out of our comfort zone, in it’s way more likely to, again, lead back to that imposter syndrome. The client’s needs are super complex and it’s challenging and this is normal and there’s a spectrum of capacity for any therapist, but just because you’re at your limit doesn’t mean you’re out of range. It really just tells you that you’re learning something new and you may need a bit more support to be able to feel more comfortable doing that thing.

Kayla: I love that, and you mentioned it earlier, imposter syndrome is a type of fear and often fear shows up when we truly care about something, right? We want to succeed or we want to be quote unquote competent, or we want whatever it is that we want, and that fear of failure or not being good enough can be scary.

But going back to my example earlier is if we don’t actually try, then we never have the opportunity to be able to get to the other side, which is really what we truly want. Success or feeling confident in a specific modality, approach, business practice, so forth.

Haley: Exactly. Again, you can’t build competence if we aren’t doing the thing and we can’t build confidence if we’re not competent. So it’s all this interconnected system, but it does start to some degree with imposter syndrome. When you actually care and when you actually want to do well, it’s normal to have an experience of no, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’m not good enough.

I think pushing through that is what we’re trying to teach our clients too. We’re trying to tell people, you can do this thing that feels hard, and if we’re not doing that for ourselves. Then that’s a bit hypocritical.

Kayla: Well, I like to bring CBT. So cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, one of the approaches or techniques that’s used in CBT is exposure therapy, and that is literally just a fancy word of facing your fear. And it’s no different with impostor syndrome. It’s no different with perfectionism. It’s no different than any other type of fear that might show up. And you need to face your fear.

Even when, going back to my example, when I was feeling like shaking in my boots. So everyone’s going to unsubscribe, no one’s going to join my group. And once that’s over and you actually prove to yourself that the worst didn’t happen. And even if it did happen, it’s usually not as bad as you hadn’t anticipated it in your head. Then you start building that confidence.

Haley: Exactly. We’re always more hard on ourselves. That whole saying of you’re your own worst critic. It rings true for most of us, and this is something that we’re trying to model for our clients. So when you actually take these leaps of faith, your clients notice. Since I’ve grown into my group practice, some of my clients have specifically told me like, Hey, this is awesome. Like I love the work you’re doing. This is so wonderful. And on my end I was like, you notice, wow, I didn’t even think anyone would care. Or I didn’t think anyone would like proud of me, but my clients are actually seeing that I’m taking these risks, and that’s actually wonderful for them. They see that I’m doing hard things and that actually shows them that I’m not just preaching to them, I’m actually practicing what I preach. And that is an encouragement all in itself.

Kayla: I love that. So when feelings of imposter show up, what can we do to mitigate or manage it within a therapeutic setting?

Haley: Great question. So we feel this thing, I don’t want to feel this thing. How do I get rid of this thing? Like this is often where we start, and most people would probably say the solution is to do more training and absorb everything you can from books and podcasts and webinars until you’re an expert. But this actually won’t work, not by itself.

Again, having training and continuing to update your knowledge is necessary to being a competent clinician. And of course, it’s very Important to continue to make sure that you’re doing what you need to do to make sure you’re bidding within your regulatory college standards and all of those things, but it has to be more than that.

One of the biggest factors to continue educating ourselves is that it takes a lot of time, and really we need to also be reflecting on ourselves and learning to show up and be humble when we realize that we just don’t know everything and that we won’t ever know everything. So a couple of things that I really encourage clinicians to do when they’re feeling this imposter syndrome is to be transparent to some degree with clients about what is outside of your scope and when you need to refer out.

But it is malpractice if you take on a client that you are not competent to work with. Again, like I said earlier, if you’re at your limit, that does not mean you’re out of your capacity, but if you go past that limit and work with someone who you don’t know how to work with that kind of presenting concern, or you do feel like they would require somebody who has more years of experience or a different modality to really be effective care, that is your responsibility to refer that to someone else. That it does have that scope of practice.

Now competent client care is not to fake it till you make it, but to some degree you do need to push yourself to that limit of capacity to make sure you’re really putting those trainings in place. Like we said, if you’re not practicing these new skills that you’ve developed, then how are you going to become more competent in doing them? But we do need to kind of straddle that line and know that people’s lives and wellbeing is on the line. And if we are doing something where we feel we really do not have a clue what is going on, we do need to either pause and seek clinical supervision or gather that training or do some self-reflection. Or we do need to refer to someone else who can support this client better.

Now, on the other end, admitting to yourself and your career is partly the process of creating realistic goals, seeking supervision, not comparing to other people, instead comparing to your younger self and where you used to be compared to where you are. It can be really easy to overlook the process and progress that we’ve already made in learning and growing and really downplay our successes.

So part of something that I encourage all of my supervisees to do is really continue to reflect on the ways that they’ve grown, the ways that they have already learned so many skills, and really just be more competent in noticing your successes, your strengths, your skills.

I think the other thing is normalizing, right? We kind of mentioned that earlier, so normalizing imposter syndrome. Most people experience this. Even experienced clinicians will have tough sessions and walk out and have moments of doubt and think, oh my gosh, am I really competent to be managing this? Should I be the supervisor in this room? Like we all have these moments and it’s part of the experience of doing hard work with complex clients and that’s wonderful.

I mean that recognizing that you will build the confidence and competence over time, but you can’t spontaneously combust that. It has to happen through repeated exposure like you were talking about earlier, Kayla, to these situations where you can actually apply the skills and apply it in the moment to be able to become more competent in it.

So most colleges require education credits. So we do actually get to track our competence. We get to track that skill that we’re developing over time. We get to actually make sure that we are reviewing the information that we need to be doing, our renewal of our registration will tell us what techniques we’re practicing more and more, and we can have that moment, that ingrained moment to really reflect on the things we’re doing really well.

So part of imposter syndrome is really building that belief in yourself. Registration time or renewal time is a great time to really do that reflection for yourself too in your own practice of what you’re doing and how you’re doing better than you were this time last year. We can also ask clients for some feedback so we can ask clients to just tell them how they feel or doing.

So we can ask clients for feedback once in a while. Again, I said in the beginning, we are not asking clients after intervention. How’d that feel for you? How am I doing? What do you think we could do better? But at some point in the process, you’re certainly able to ask for some feedback about how the client feels they’re progressing or what they think could be done better, or what they think is missing in the process.

So I encourage our, my supervises to do this every six months or so with a client, if they continue to come back, if they are a long-term client, then that might be a good time to kind of check in. If you are doing an eight-week group or something like that. It’s also a good time to check in at the end of those groups to get some positive or negative feedback, constructive feedback.

I think it’s also just important for you to do that reflection on clients as you move through the process. Okay, this client came with this goal. So at six months am I looking back to their original goals and making sure that we’re still progressing on the treatment plan and the treatment plan still works.

And then of course, clinical supervision, maybe even therapy for yourself, right? If you have these consistent feelings of imposter syndrome, there’s probably something that you could do to take better care of yourself and show up for your clients better being a better support for them by not needing to prove your worth in every session. And that’s some personal work that can be done either through clinical supervision and or therapy.

Kayla: Those are such great advice. I mean, all of it was great, but I think I want to bring back that that’s why it’s so important to have clinical supervision because you can have all the trainings in the world, you can have all the years of experience behind you, but things are going to pop up at any given time that you haven’t done before, or you’re going to need kind of a second opinion on. Having that clinical supervisor can be helpful. Even if you are a clinical supervisor, it’s still important to have a clinical supervisor, and I think that that’s super important. Because that is really how we can combine the competence, the confidence, the action, instead of just faking it till we make it. But we have that ongoing mentorship and supervision to be able to say, okay, this is how I need to move forward. So this is where you’re doing it competently and building your confidence along the way.

Haley: Yeah, exactly. Kayla, I think that’s exactly it, right? We need to continue to reflect. Supervision can be so, so, so important to that. And if we aren’t reflecting, we aren’t growing, we can continue to move forward. But if we never notice where we’re coming from or what we’ve learned along the way, then we’re not really applying that knowledge. So very important.

Kayla: Absolutely. Haley, you offer affordable therapy options in your practice. Can you tell us a little bit about the program and how listeners can either access it themselves or how they can send a referral if they know a client who could benefit from your program?

Haley: Yes, absolutely. So we do have students on our team, student therapists, they’re doing their master’s level education, and they’re able to offer affordable rates of therapy from September till April of every school year. So right now we do have two students on our team that are available from now until mid-April of 2026.

These students are passionate about being able to serve a wider audience and our capacity as a team grows so much when we have these student clinicians available at lower rates that are more accessible to people all across Ontario.

These students are supervised very closely by myself and one of my other clinical supervisors on my team to make sure that they have the knowledge to be able to support exceptional services for clients and have every opportunity for their own growth and learning throughout the process as well.

So, our student therapists right now offer support in English, Spanish, and Japanese, and you can learn more about each of them on our website and find their specialties as well as book a free 15-minute video consultation to make sure they’re a good fit.

Kayla: Great. So to sign up or to refer a client to Haley’s Affordable Therapy Program with student therapists, head to therapyuninterrupted.ca/our-team.

You could simply scroll down to the show notes and click on the link.

Haley, thank you so much for joining the podcast today and providing strategies for managing imposter syndrome in private practice.

Haley: Thank you so much for having me, Kayla. I hope this episode can be helpful to normalize imposter syndrome and inspire folks to keep pushing forward and believe in themselves even when they feel insecure.

Kayla: Thank you everyone for tuning into today’s episode, and I hope you join me again soon on Your Clinical Supervisors Couch podcast.

Until next time, bye for now.