Impostor syndrome: why is this sustainable fashion's (and my) reality?

A year on from what should have been my greatest sustainable fashion career high, I sat down with career coach Penelope Jones to understand why my impostor syndrome took over.

Me on stage launching the Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen in 2023 - impostor syndrome hits!

Last year, I launched a piece of work in my sustainable fashion role at the UN Environment Programme that had been several years in the making. Blood, sweat and tears had gone into it, and quite honestly, I’ve never been prouder. I thought publication day was going to be the biggest high as a result; that we would all finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief that it was out in the world. While there was always going to be a certain amount of apprehension as to how it was received, that ended up being, thankfully, absolutely true. What I hadn’t accounted for, however, is how I would personally feel alongside.

Aside from the combination of both elation and exhaustion, suddenly I felt overwhelmingly as though I was an utter fraud. That it wasn’t good enough, and that people were going to call out all the things that were wrong with it. As I went on the promotional trail - from stage to press interviews, webinars to podcasts - impostor syndrome hit hard.

The content of it is punchy - in an appropriately ambitious kind-of-a-way - but that wasn’t the part I was worried about. If anything, that excited me; I knew it needed to be said and I was thrilled at the way the media picked it up and carried it forward. But the technical aspects I felt perhaps I hadn’t done enough justice to or that I’d missed things about, and that essentially it was all going to fall apart at the seams because of me and my lack of expertise.

For context, it’s perhaps worth knowing that this was a document that had been consulted on by hundreds of industry professionals, gone through a peer review with experts from around the world, and had managed to successfully work its way through the UN publishing board process (believe me, that’s no small feat).

And yet I felt like I lived in a cold sweat for days. Truthfully, I still have some of those feelings about it now. It’s not the first time for me, of course. Previous versions of impostor syndrome throughout my career - and especially in sustainability - have also always surrounded the idea of not knowing enough (and are often what have driven me to go and do another course so as to buffer my knowledge and quell those feelings), but this time round was certainly the most public version of it.

So I messaged Penelope (Penny) Jones, founder of My So Called Career - a friend and the woman I have worked with for several years as my career coach (and recommend every other woman I know to also) - to ask her why the heck I was feeling like this when surely I should have been experiencing the purity of my greatest career high?

Her response was so helpful at putting my mind at ease at the time, that I got back in touch with her on this again recently to ask her to dig into it in more detail with me here.

Impostor syndrome is something so many of us experience at some point in what we’re doing - whether in interviews, in specific tasks and projects, in deliveries and launches, or just generally in our everyday. The fact this field of sustainable fashion is so nascent, also makes me feel as though it’s even more likely to occur - we’re forging new ground as we go, meaning there are lots of unknowns and greater room for error, but also huge responsibility and often accountability as it becomes more important within the industry.

Read on for the very wise words of the incredible Penny about what it is, why I felt like it, and her view on whether sustainable fashion is indeed all the more ripe for such feelings…