Adam Tallamy
Press & Media

It almost never comes down to talent, intelligence or opportunity. What separates the people who get there is their relationship with themselves, their sense of self-worth, their ability to handle discomfort, and their belief that what they want is actually available to them. I've worked with extraordinarily talented people who couldn't get out of their own way, and so-called ordinary people who went on to do remarkable things. The difference is always internal.

Imposter syndrome is a feeling, not a fact. And like any feeling, it can be changed, not managed, changed. The typical advice is "fake it till you make it" or "just take action anyway." That can work, but sometimes the fear or resistance is just too much and we end up staying stuck, playing small or self-sabotaging in any of a million ways.

What actually works is changing the underlying belief driving the feeling. Once that shifts, using the Feel It Process or similar deep emotional work in a life coaching context, the imposter syndrome doesn't get managed. It dissolves. I've seen this happen repeatedly in my coaching practice in London and with clients worldwide, people who looked completely confident from the outside and were quietly riddled with imposter syndrome on the inside.

Not only is it possible, it's the only sustainable option. People who are doing work they genuinely love outperform, out-endure and out-create people who are just showing up for the salary. The challenge is that most people have been taught to treat that idea as a luxury rather than a priority. It isn't. It's the foundation. Career coaching built around this principle is some of the most rewarding work I do.

In truth, the best career coaching is life coaching. You can't fully separate the two. Your career doesn't exist in isolation from who you are, what you believe about yourself, what you think you deserve or what you're afraid of. A career coach who only looks at CVs, job titles and strategy is working at the surface. The real work, the work that actually moves people, is always deeper than that.

When I work with someone on their career, we're inevitably working on their confidence, their self-worth, their relationship with money, their fear of being seen, their patterns around success. That's life coaching. The career is the vehicle. The person is the work.

Whether someone comes to me as a life coaching client or a career coaching client, the process is fundamentally the same. And I can honestly say that the same is true for my clients in London, LA or indeed anywhere else around the world.

Most people who come to me for career coaching already know, somewhere deep down, what they really want. The problem isn't usually information or even strategy. It's the gap between knowing and doing. That gap is always emotional, fear, self-doubt, old beliefs about what's possible for someone like them, or what they're allowed to want.

What career coaching does, when it's done properly, is close that gap. Not by giving you a plan, but by changing the internal conditions that have been keeping you where you are. Once those shift, the practical stuff, the decisions, the conversations, the moves, becomes far less daunting and far more obvious. I've watched people go from completely stuck to completely transformed in a matter of months. The career change was almost the easy part.

A few things. The quality and relative number of my reviews. I have over 50 five-star Google reviews from real life and career coaching clients whose lives and careers have genuinely changed. The fact that I've coached dozens of other coaches and mentored them 121 over the years, which tells you something about the level I work at. And the results. Not the promise of results, the actual results, evidenced by real people talking about their real experiences on my podcast, my YouTube channel and in those reviews.

I was also the active founder of a recruitment consultancy with offices in London and Birmingham for 14 years. In that time I coached many thousands of people around a multitude of career challenges including finding their next job, wholesale career changes, getting a promotion, dealing with difficult bosses and one of my favourites, how to impress your new boss in the first 100 days. We made coaching our interviewees and sometimes even our clients a unique differentiator, so I have a wealth of lived experience of what works and doesn't work in the real world.

But if I'm honest, what I think makes the biggest difference is that I've done the work myself. I came to it through my own breakdown, my own reinvention after finally leaving my own business and career in recruitment, and fifteen years of the most intensive personal development work you can imagine.

I know what it actually takes to change direction and build something that means something. That lived experience is in every session I do, with every client, whether they're sitting across from me in London or on a call from the other side of the world.