Capability vs. Belief: The Con Your Brain Runs on Your Own Competence
You can be doing the leadership job well before you believe you're the person doing it. 'Believe in yourself first' is the wrong direction.
I was the contractor on a document management system, and I’d been arguing with senior engineers for the better part of an hour about what should live in the document indexes. I wanted them lean; they wanted each document type carrying its own expansive set of attributes, with the source system responsible for keeping it in sync. They weren’t budging.
So I played the contractor card. I told them: I’m a contractor, I get paid either way — but when I come back in 12 months because you need to synchronise 300-400 source systems and shard the indexes because they’re duplicating huge amounts of data, I’m going to charge you double.
The room shifted. I’d just told a room of senior engineers they were going to pay me to fix their mess, and instead of pushing back, they started asking clarifying questions.
Capability arrives before you see yourself as someone who has it. This latency is where imposter syndrome lives. The con your brain runs is to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit your current identity, no matter how much of it there is. Piece by piece, your brain starts to accept each new success and internalizes it into your identity. But if the success isn’t consistently experienced, it’s hard to shift the embedded view.
In From Senior to Staff I argued promotion is a two-player game — you change how you work, and your org has to actually have the role for you to step into. I left out a third player: the part of your brain that decides what counts as evidence about yourself. That’s the third person in the room, and it controls how quickly you can advance.
Failing to recognize the capability and internalize it makes you less likely to be seen as exhibiting that capability.
What the Standard Advice Gets Right
The traditional advice — ‘fake it till you make it’ — isn’t wrong. It rests on a premise: belief precedes capability. Visualization, rewriting failure into lesson, working with a coach who shows you what you got right and what to do about what you didn’t — all of it slowly shifts your identity toward what you want to become.
When the Bank Handed Me Fifteen Reports
When I converted from contractor to Senior Director of Engineering, I was handed a team of 15 in August — two months before the year-end performance management process. I had never officially managed a team. I had to learn fast, people’s careers were in my hands. I had to manage expectations tied to emotionally charged stakes. Tenure, confirmation-bias and in some cases complete delusion about one’s own capabilities all suddenly became things I had to care about and navigate.
Those two months were absolutely brutal. I read everything I could about performance management and leadership. I spoke to colleagues and sought out different approaches to talent management. I didn’t get everything right, but where necessary I apologized and made good and moved forward.
I got a couple of VPs promoted that year, and the feedback in the promotion forums praised how prepared I was. The panel felt connected to the people I presented; I’d put time into developing a story they could follow. It took me a while to realise I was an Engineering Manager responsible for other people’s careers. I had to live it before I believed it.
Why Belief Can’t Run Ahead
Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who realised, after enough patients had walked out with new faces and the same old problems, that the face wasn’t the part doing the work. Maltz called that part the self-image — what we’d more naturally call our identity.
Your brain can’t differentiate between a fake success and a real one — the chemical responses are identical. Belief isn’t experience, real or otherwise. Your brain must ‘feel’ the sensation while the belief is active. The chemicals released by the sensation reinforce the pathways in the brain associated with the belief. The stronger the connection, the more it becomes part of our identity. These load-bearing pathways form the identity — the default we revert to when the brain is idling.
This is why ‘belief precedes capability’ is only half-right. Belief without sensation stays intellectual — the identity never receives the signal it needs to change. Only experience — or imagination vivid enough to feel like experience — reaches the pathways. Which is why the bank handing me fifteen reports did what no amount of pep talk could — the role generated the sensations the identity needed, and the pathways had no choice but to change.
If No One’s Handing You the Role
No one is going to hand you the role you want. You need to put it on. This isn’t the ‘visualize success’ cliché. You need real sensations — the kind that come from doing the work.
That sounds like it rules out doing anything in your head — until you look at what Maltz cited from Research Quarterly. Three groups of students, twenty days, basketball free throws. The first practised 20 minutes a day and improved 24%. The second did nothing and didn’t improve. The third spent 20 minutes a day imagining themselves shooting — picturing the throw, the miss, the correction. They improved 23%. The brain doesn’t audit where the sensations came from.
I use the 6 Phase Meditation, popularized by MindValley’s Vishen Lakhiani. Two of those phases matter here: Gratitude, and the Ideal Day / Ideal Future visualizations. The gratitude piece primes my mind with feelings of success before I launch into the ideal future, then finish with how my ideal day moves me toward it. Those visualizations are drenched in the brain chemicals that reinforce who I want to become. That’s how I shift my identity towards what I want every day. Whether you try the 6 Phase like me or find your own version, the move is the same: surface past wins (no matter how small), link them to your current aspirations. Try it, live it, watch how quickly things change.
If You’re on the Other Side
If you’ve shifted from IC to Engineering Manager, your job is to identify what kind of support someone needs. Are the capabilities present? If they are, the problem is belief — and this is where engineers sabotage themselves. Your job is to coach them. Don’t just point out the evidence — lead them to it through questions. Their brain won’t accept the raw evidence — it creates cognitive dissonance because their identity isn’t congruent with it yet. The brain just discounts it.
My manager did exactly this to me, recently. I was pitching my CIO for funding to buy a new solution that would transform how we manage code change at scale. For the most part I was hitting all the right points, but a couple were missing the mark. My manager was in the room — he didn’t correct me, he rephrased a couple of the CIO’s questions in ways that hinted at what he needed to hear. I adjusted, and we moved forward. I walked out of that meeting feeling capable and like I was finally operating at a different level.
If they’re not demonstrating the capability, your job is to give them the opportunities to build competence. Work with them to acknowledge the gaps and find tasks that let them safely stretch themselves and build the skills. Again, this has to be done with a coaching mindset. You can’t tell them what to do; they need to figure it out alongside you.
Last cycle I represented an Engineering Director in the promotion forum. He’d been passed over the year before and came to me asking for sponsorship — he wanted the role, he could see himself doing it, but no one had taken his case to the room that decides. This is what I called active sponsorship in From Senior to Staff: putting your weight behind someone the room would otherwise pass over again. I made the case; he did the work that landed it; my job was to get him in the seat — the identity catches up after. Because the lag isn’t in wanting the role — it’s in being the person who does it. I knew that lag was coming; it’s the same one I’d been in when the bank handed me 15 reports. So I’ve been coaching him through it. He’s trying to hold onto everything and not delegating as much as he should. I’m coaching him to trust the delegation, and helping him navigate the two scenarios above with his own team — he has engineers in both camps, so he’s running the same heuristic on them that I’m running on him. Slowly I’m seeing agency bloom in the team, and he’s starting to scale out. He has the capability but hasn’t quite internalized the Engineering Director role yet.
The Audit, Not the Answer
The honest version: I grew into one role; the next ceiling is still in the way. I’ve missed MD more times than I’d like — but that’s a different scar, for a different essay.
What I’ll leave you with is the audit, not the answer. The gap that matters isn’t between what you can do and what you can’t. It’s between what you’re already doing and what you believe you are while doing it. Where’s the seat you might already be ready for? And whose “just the contractor” voice is your brain running about it?