That Imposter Feeling: How to Own Your OBM Expertise (Even When You Feel Like a Fraud)

Welcome back to the OBM show. I'm Serenokeh, your host and today we're opening the door on a topic that runs rampant in the high-achieving OBM community. But yes, so few of us are willing to say out loud, we are talking about imposter complex. It's that nagging feeling in the back of your mind. Right after you send a big proposal to a dream client, it's that voice that whispers, "Who are you to be charging this much?" Or when you're on a discovery call with the seven-figure CEO who seems to have it all together, it's that wave of anxiety that hits when a client asks a question that you don't immediately have the answer to. And for a split second, you, my friends, feel like a total fraud. You are in the trenches managing six-figure launches, leading teams across multiple time zones and building complex operational systems from the ground up. By all accounts, you are an expert, but you secretly feel like you are just one mistake, one mist detail, one I don't know from being completely found out. So if you've ever felt like you are just playing the part of a leader, if you've ever downplayed your success or felt your stomach drop, when someone calls you an expert, this episode is your permission slip to finally truly own your expertise. Welcome to the OBM show, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to thrive as an online business manager and help businesses scale without burning out. I'm your host, Sarah No Ked, agency owner, OBM mentor and founder of OBM school. I've been working in the back end of online businesses since 2009, building systems, managing remote teams and mentoring OBMs who make businesses run like clockwork. Now, I've seen what works, what doesn't, and the messy middle that no one talks about. Here, we get real about the tools, strategies, and stories that drive sustainable success, plus the tech mishaps, growing pains, and lessons learned along the way. If you're ready to stop spinning your wheels, step into your leadership role, and see what actually happens behind the scenes of thriving businesses, you're in the right place. Let's get started. All right, let's get this one thing straight right out of the gate. Feeling like an imposter doesn't mean you are one. In fact, I believe it's a sign that you're doing something right. It means you're pushing your own boundaries. It means you care deeply about the quality of your work, and it also means that you have a high standard for excellence. But yes, there is a dark side, and we cannot deny it. If you let that feeling drive the car, it will keep you playing small. It will convince you to keep your prices reasonable. It will make you over-deliver to the point of burnout to prove your worth. And it will stop you from sharing the strategic insights your clients are paying you for because you're second-guessing the value of your own thoughts. And that's not leadership, my friends. That is self-sabotage. And we all know we're good at that, right? So the imposter complex or imposter syndrome thrives in isolation. It wants you to believe you are the only OBM who feels this way that everyone else has it figured out. But I can tell you, I've coached hundreds and thousands of OBMs inside and outside of OBM school. And this is one of the biggest and most common mindset hurdles we see our students overcome. The most successful OBMs you admire, they felt this too. Hey, I feel this all the time. The difference is they've learned how to manage the feeling instead of letting it manage them. So how do we do that, you ask? How do we combat it? It's not about some finding some magic bullet of confidence that definitely doesn't exist. It's about building a toolkit of practical strategies. I'm a damn practical person. So the first strategy is become an evidence collector. Your feelings of being a fraud are just that feelings. They are not facts. Your job is to build a case file of cold, hard evidence that proves your feelings wrong. If you want to start a wins document today, by all means, I am totally serious. After this episode, open a Google doc or a notebook and title it my professional wins. And your first assignment is to list at least 20 pieces of evidence of your expertise. What does that look like? It could be a successful project like I managed the Q2 launch for client X, which generated X amount of revenue. It could be a systems that you built that helped your client automate client onboarding, which saved them five hours per week. It could be a problem you solved like identifying a bottleneck in their content creation process and implementing a new workflow that got them back on schedule. Now positive feedback, copying and pasting those slack messages or that email where the client said, I don't know what I do without you or you're amazing. It could be like a skill that you mastered, right? I became proficient in clickup, dupsado, whatever sass you want to put in there, whatever service does a software you're thinking about. This is not an ego exercise, my friends. This is an evidence gathering mission to be used in your own internal court of law. And it's not a one and done task, okay? Make it happen to keep that list of wins updated. Set a reminder every Friday to add at least one win from the week. When the imposter feeling creeps in, when you're about to send that proposal, you're feeling you're not worthy of, you open that document and you read it out loud. You read those facts. Those facts will ground you when your feelings are trying to sweep you away. Now the next strategy I want to tell you about is reframing, right? We've all heard about reframing, but it really is about reframing your role from expert to leader. So often the imposter feeling stems from a limiting belief, right? That as an expert, you must have all the answers all the time. And that, my friends, is a truly impossible standard. A true leader's job isn't to personally know everything. It is to lead the process of finding the right answers and implementing the right solutions. So the most powerful and confidence building phrase that you can learn to use with a client is that's a great question. I don't have the answer right now, but I will find out and I will come back to you with a recommendation by the end of the day. Let's break this down for a second. It doesn't make you look incompetent. It makes you look honest, organized and resourceful. It demonstrates that you are in control of the process, even if you don't have the specific data point in your head. It builds trust far more than fumbling for an answer or making something up. So practice it. Say it out loud. You are not an encyclopedia. You're not chat GPT. You're not some AI tool. You are the lead researcher and strategist. That's who you are. The third strategy is defining your zone of genius, right? If you head on over to obamschool.com/read, you will find my recommended obam school book list. Now there is a book there by Gay Hendrix called the big leap. This book is going to be pivotal if you struggle with this next piece, which is defining your zone of genius. The imposter feeling loves to flare up when we are stretched to thin across many areas. You cannot be a world cost expert in copyrighting, graphic design, tech integration, financial forecasting and team management at all at once. When you are trying to be a generalist, you feel like a master of none. And I want you to get really clear on what your specific obam zone of genius is. Is it launch management? Is it team operations? Is it HR? Is it building out the tax stack and systems for service-based businesses? So when you know your specific area of mastery, two things happen. First, your confidence naturally grows because you are operating from a place of deep knowledge. And second, it gives you the freedom to say that's actually outside of my scope of genius. But I can help you find a specialist for that. That is a power move. It shows that you know your value and respect the expertise of others, which in turn makes your clients respect you even more. So let me tell you about one of our OBM accreditation students, Maria. So Maria is brilliant and she's brilliant at creating workflows and she's also terrified of being seen as a leader. And she told me that she would literally feel sick before client meetings. I was like, I know what they're feeling. But she avoided leading team meetings because she was afraid of being asked something that she couldn't answer on the spot. During one of our hot seat coaching calls inside of accreditation, she admitted to me and to everybody that she had a major recommendation that could save a client thousands of dollars, but that she'd been sitting on it for a month, yes, because she was scared to bring it up. So we all worked together to coach her because that's how we work in our community. And we helped her to reframe her role for the next meeting. She wasn't an attendee. She was the meetings facilitator. And her job was to guide the conversation. And that included presenting strategic recommendations armed with this new framework in her mind of how to present herself. And her wins document that document we talked about at the beginning where you list all your wins open on a second screen of her computer. When the client asked a complex technical question about the migration, she was proposing she took a breath and instead of panicking, she calmly said, that is the exact question we need to answer to make this seamless. My plan is to consult with the tech team, map out two potential paths forward, and I'll present you with a clear recommendation by the end of day on Thursday. For now, she said, let's focus on the operational goals. Now, naturally, the client was blown away. She didn't need her to be a tech guru, my friends. What that client needed was to know that the OBM was owning the process of getting the answer. And that single shift unlocked a new level of confidence for Maria. She got the proposal approved and she went on to raise her rates by 30% that same quarter because she was finally charging for her strategy and not for her just task implementation. So if you are tired of letting that imposter voice dictate your value, it's time to take action. If you are just getting your business started and leaving a whole bunch of practical easy to use resources, link below this video and in the podcast show notes, or you can head on over to obmschool.com/resources. Thank you so much for tuning into the OBM show. If this episode resonated, please share it. You never know who else needs to hear that they are not a fraud, that they are a leader in the making and I'll see you in the next episode.