Larry Broughton gave a webinar a little while back called "How to Slay the Imposter Syndrome Dragon in the Age of AI." I sat with it for a few days after. He named the dragon better than I could have, and it got me thinking hard about how I actually fight the thing myself.
First, what are we even talking about here?
Imposter syndrome is that nagging fear that sooner or later somebody figures out you don't really measure up.
Imposter syndrome in the age of AI is that same old fear with a fresh coat of paint on it. Now it sounds more like this:
"It only took me five minutes to work that out with AI, so why would anyone pay me for it?" "They'll think the machine did the work, not me." "I've barely touched this stuff and everybody's already so far ahead that I'll never catch them."
Call it AI imposter syndrome if you need a name for it. Either way, you can slay it. I do, most days. Here's how.
Oh, before we move on, one caveat: you'll need to slay the dragon repeatedly. Sometimes every day, so it's important to have many tools in your toolbelt.
Why it feels worse right now
None of this is new, by the way. Every time some big piece of technology shows up, people feel this exact thing. Computers did it. The internet did it all over again, then smartphones, and I'd bet somebody felt it the day the first spreadsheet landed on their desk. We're wired to look at the new thing and wonder if it's here to make us unnecessary.
And it isn't even always about technology. Plenty of us lie awake over the idea that somebody who costs half as much could walk in and do the job. Or someone younger. Or someone else out there can do it better.
So the fear is just about as old as time. However, what's different today is the volume, pace, and methodology.
Older tools took tasks off your plate. AI reaches past the tasks and starts doing some of the actual thinking, at a level we never expected a machine to touch. That's the part that gets under the skin. A spreadsheet never really made anyone feel like a fraud.
But AI can.
The question sitting under all of it is blunt: is AI going to replace me?
And the headlines aren't helping. Companies are cutting people and saying the quiet part out loud, that AI is the reason. Oracle just did it.
Here's the thing we all need to realize: Hiding from it is the one move that actually gets you replaced!
Think back to the accountant who wouldn't touch a computer. He didn't lose his job to a computer. He lost it to the accountant down the street who learned to use one. Same story now, just swap in AI. So no, we don't really get a vote here.
Staying relevant in the age of AI comes down to one choice: you use it, or you get passed by the person who does.
Now if you're not the one signing the checks, if you're somewhere on a team and this fear is even more intense, sitting right in the middle of your chest, this next part you really need to listen to...
The people who do well with AI won't be the fast typists or the ones who memorized every formula.
They'll be the ones who bring judgment.
Some of that judgment comes from years of doing the work. Some of it comes from relationships, knowing how a certain client thinks or what a teammate needs before they ask for it. Some of it is just being able to sit with a messy, abstract problem and reason your way through.
That's the stuff AI can't hand you. Pair it with AI and you don't shrink, you grow, because now your brain spends its hours on the thinking that matters instead of running spell check or fighting a formula in a spreadsheet cell. You'll therefore bring MORE to the team, not less, meaning you'll bring more to the company.
Only if you lean in, though. And hard. That part's on you.
Let me give you a real one. Sales has never been my thing. Never. So a while back I built myself an AI sales coach, and it checks me almost every day, little nudges, little corrections. And I'm feeding it constantly to help me get better.
It didn't take my job. It made me better at the one part of this business I've always been the least confident in, and in reality, where I'm the weakest.
Start with who you are
The thing that keeps the dragon quietest, for me at least, is being clear on who I am underneath all of it. Not what I do. Who I am. And you want that anchored to something that doesn't move.
For me, that anchor is Jesus Christ.
Most of us tie our identity to our output and don't even notice we're doing it. What we produced this week. What the bank account says. Trouble is, all of that can dry up or shrink overnight, and if that's where you've planted your worth, you go down right along with it.
So plant it somewhere it can't be taken.
Then there's the escalator concept, which I'm borrowing from Nathan Ingram, the man who runs my AI mastermind and coaches me.
Pick any skill you're trying to build. At any given moment there are people ahead of you and people behind you. When you're brand new, sure, everybody's ahead. That's just day one. But it's an escalator, and it's going up. You get on at the bottom, you keep riding, and one by one the people who used to be ahead of you end up below you.
The climb looks long from the bottom. It always does. You step on anyway.
And then it's just as important that you celebrate that you're moving. This one's hard for us entrepreneurs. We're built to chase the next thing, the next fire, the next unchecked box, and the progress we've already made just blows right past. So I make myself stop.
Every evening I do "an end of day", usually with Claude, though ChatGPT or Gemini would do the job fine. I tell it what happened, it helps me sort out tomorrow, and somewhere in there it asks me the same question every single time: what's one thing you can celebrate today?
Sounds small. It isn't.
Build real competence
Plain truth: confidence follows competence, not the other way around. You don't think your way out of feeling like a fraud. You work your way out.
So the real question isn't whether to use AI, it's how to use AI in your business in a way that makes you better instead of smaller. Larry made this point about competence in his webinar and he's dead right about it. The application I'm about to hand you, though, that part's mine.
Number one, get into an AI mastermind. It's done more for me in three months than a year of poking around on my own would have. Mine's run by Nathan Ingram, who stays maybe three to six months out ahead of the rest of us, which turns out to be the perfect distance, close enough that whatever he's doing still applies to me.
Every other week we hop on and compare notes on what we're each trying. I usually leave with ten things I want to test, way more than I can get to, so I hand the list to AI and let it help me rank them by what'll actually move my business and my life.
The other big one is case studies, and this is that application I mentioned, the piece that's mine. Nothing shuts up the imposter voice like proof, and a good case study is proof with data bolted to it, which is hard for anybody to argue with.
Now there's a right way to do them:
- You want the before, the during, and the after.
- You need to be clear on what actually changed for the person or company you helped. Get their permission, obviously.
- And nail down which numbers you're tracking up front, so you're not stitching them together from memory at the end.
Alex Hormozi says the same thing. If you want to see one of ours, here it is: our Website Makeover Results case study. We've got more in the works right now, built around a company's brand foundation, its authority engine, the website itself, and the AEO and SEO that gets the whole thing found, in search.
Last piece: keep asking how to do it better. Every time I wrap up something with AI, I run it through three questions Nathan handed me.
- How do I automate this further so it's faster next time?
- How do I turn it into a repeatable process, an actual SOP?
- How do I make it better on the next pass?
Do that enough and you end up with what we're building in the mastermind, a kind of company brain and personal brain that gets a little sharper every time you touch them.
Do it every day
wo habits hold all of this together for me, day to day.
The first is more mindset than habit: use AI to outsource your brain, not to replace it.
I picture it as 10:80:10, which I got from Dan Martell and then bent to fit how I work and this particular subject.
The first ten percent is you and nobody else, your thoughts, your experience, your take, your authority. The middle eighty is where AI earns its keep, shaping what you gave it, pushing on it, adding to it, going back and forth with you. The last ten is you again, polishing, and here's the bit most people skip, you feed that polish back in so the thing gradually learns how you actually think.
Here's a quick hint: that opening ten percent is everything. Hand the blank page to the machine and, yeah, you'll get something that reads like a machine wrote it. Keep that ten percent truly yours, with some directions on your voice, and the entire thing still sounds like you.
That's the whole trick to using AI without losing your value: the machine speeds you up, but the thinking stays yours.
Which means you've got to keep filling yourself up.
So read. Real books. Follow a few people worth following and go deep with them - I keep a short list on YouTube and just work down my subscriptions, and I almost never slide into the doom scroll.
The second habit is almost too simple, and it changed everything for me: quit typing at AI and start talking to it.
So get a dictation tool. Nathan got me onto it, Martell beats the same drum. You talk at least 3x faster than you type, which means the stuff in your head actually makes it out before it slips away.
I use Wispr Flow (yeah, that's my affiliate link). It tidies your words up as you go, but don't sweat that part, because AI understands you fine even when it comes out messy.
Give yourself some time to get comfortable with it.
I go way back with computers, and the first one I ever touched was a mainframe in college when I was around twenty-two, and I'm sixty-four now, so call it better than forty years of typing everything out by hand. Thus, talking instead felt strange at first. Of course it did! But, escalator again, you stick with it and it turns easy.
Where I'll leave you
So here's where I'll leave you. Two things, this week. That's it.
Get on the escalator. TODAY, not once you feel ready, because ready isn't coming. You start before you're ready. Everybody does.
And quit staring straight up the whole time. Turn around once in a while, look at how far up you already are, and let yourself feel good about it.
One more thing: all of my ideas in this post, almost all of the back and forth, got dictated out loud, using the exact process I just walked you through, the ten, the eighty, the ten, with Wispr Flow catching all of it.
The ideas are mine. AI just helped me shape them into something you'd actually want to read.
That's the whole game.
Used right, AI won't replace you. It's an accelerant, not a replacement. It clears out the busywork so you can pour your time into the part only you can do, and you still come out the other side sounding like yourself.
