I spent that entire day saying thank you.

The promotion had landed. The one I'd spent a decade climbing toward. The one that, from where I started, was never supposed to be available to me at all.

So I thanked people. Everyone who'd taught me something. Everyone who'd opened a door, or put my name in a room I wasn't standing in.

One of them was among the most senior people in the organization. He'd sponsored me for years. I thanked him that morning. I probably thanked him twice more before the day was out.

Then, at the celebration dinner, I thanked him again. This time in front of another senior colleague.

He pulled me aside.

"Stop thanking me."

"You've done it."

"You've done it. Remember that."

I sat with that one for a while.

There Are No Gifts

Here's what he was telling me.

Appreciation is good. Keep it. But understand what actually happened.

Nobody is handed a seat at that level. There are no gifts in this business. You don't become a Managing Director in financial services on somebody's goodwill. You get there on years of production. On impact people could measure. On a credible case that you'd keep producing more of it.

He hadn't given me anything.

He had recognized something.

Those are two different acts, and I had them confused.

Doubt, Wearing Modesty’s Coat

I've thought hard about why the thank-yous poured out the way they did.

Some of it was real. I am grateful, and I always will be.

But some of it was the climb itself. Mine was improbable enough that I'd built a private story about it: this could only have happened with a lot of help. That's a lovely thing to believe. It's also a quiet way of saying I couldn't have done this myself.

Turns out I had company.

Psychologists have been studying this since 1978. They call it the imposter phenomenon: the habit of crediting your wins to luck, to timing, to other people, while filing every failure squarely under your own name. Seven in ten of us live there at some point. And it grips hardest exactly where you'd least expect it, on the high performers, on the first ones in their family to make it.

Read that again. The bigger the climb, the more convinced you become that the climb wasn't yours.

Researchers watched how people divide up credit after a team wins. We give it away. We keep less than we earned, unless our own role is so obvious that it can't be argued with. And the researchers went looking for the obvious explanation, that we're simply being modest.

They ruled it out.

What they found underneath was doubt.

The deflection needs two things to work. A quiet belief that you might not really be good at this. And somebody plausible standing nearby to hand the credit to. Remove either one and the behavior stops.

Three Things Your Deflection Is Actually Doing

If you don't sound like you believe it, why would anyone else?

Every time you wave away what you did, you're casting a vote against yourself, in public. People count those votes. They will not believe in your work harder than you do, and it's unfair to expect them to.

If you won't take the credit, check whether you're dodging the blame.

This is the uncomfortable one. Credit and accountability come from the same seat. If you're quick to say it wasn't really me, ask yourself honestly whether some part of you is buying insurance for the day it goes badly.

Humility is a virtue with a time and a place.

Generosity is good. Deferring is good. In the wrong moment, they read as a flinch, and a flinch is what people remember. The tell is the speed. Real modesty pauses. Flinching doesn't.

What To Do Instead

Say thank you once. Then stop.

One clean sentence, delivered while looking someone in the eye, carries more than five nervous ones. The repetition is the tell that you're uncomfortable holding the thing.

Split gratitude from accounting.

They're two separate sentences and they both deserve to be said. "I'm grateful you backed me." Full stop. "And I earned this." Full stop. Most of us say the first and swallow the second. Say both.

Rehearse the answer to "congratulations."

You will get exactly three seconds. Have the words ready before you need them. "Thank you. I worked hard for this." Practice it out loud until it stops feeling like a costume. It won't feel natural. Do it anyway.

Give credit with specificity. Take credit with specificity.

"Maria rebuilt the model over a weekend" is generosity, it names a person and a contribution. "It was a team effort" is a fog you hide in. The same rule applies to yourself. Vague is where credit goes to die.

Keep a written record of what you actually did.

The researchers call it attribution retraining. Write down the contribution, in your own hand, in plain terms. It sounds small. It corrects the ledger you've been keeping wrong for years.

Be the one who says it to someone else.

Somebody said it to me. Look around and find the person waving it all away, and tell them plainly: you've done it. You'll change something in them that a compliment never could.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Refusing your own credit feels free. It isn't.

It costs you the story. Careers are decided in rooms you're absent from, by people repeating a version of you they picked up secondhand. Give them a fog, and a fog is what they'll repeat.

It costs the people who back you. Your sponsor now has to argue for someone who won't argue for himself. You've handed them your discomfort and asked them to carry it.

It teaches the room what your work is worth. Say it was nothing often enough and someone will eventually agree with you, out loud, in front of everyone.

And it costs the people watching. Somewhere, at work or at home, someone is studying how you handle this. Teach them to apologize for arriving and they will.

You've Done It

There's a character in the book I've got coming out. His name is Tyler. Everything he's ever earned, he hands to someone else in the room.

Leadership at the Dinner Table comes out in September. The waitlist is open. Join it here.

Until then…

Say thank you. Mean it. Then stand up straight and take the thing you earned.

Nobody gave it to you.

You've done it.

Remember that.

With Absolute Sincerity,

Ed Clementi,

Founder & CEO of Inspired Fire, LLC

Make an Impact and Feel an Impact!