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Imposter syndrome happens when we have the feeling that we do not deserve what we have achieved, fearing that we’ll be discovered to be fakes or frauds. Our successes, we tell ourselves, were achieved not through our actual abilities and talents, but through some combination of luck, timing, and mistakes others made that allowed us to slip through the cracks. Nobody is immune to this feeling, and it affects all segments of the publicfrom leaders, artists, actors, and the people we see as high achievers. Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard grad and former Facebook COO, wrote in her 2013 book Lean In: Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I didnt embarrass myselfor even excelledI believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up. Sandberg is joined by a long list of well-known people who have readily admitted feeling this way. But emotional intelligence offers us help and direction in overcoming this pervasive yet very common problem. Commonly understood as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions, emotional intelligence gives us the ability to understand ourselves and others in ways that increase our ability to work through our unpleasant thoughts and feelings. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, I have written extensively on the topic. When we experience imposter feelings, they provide us with guidelines and tools that will help us to release the negative impacts that come with them. Instead of experiencing self-doubt, we will move toward welcoming our success. Self-awareness, the root of emotional intelligence, is a powerful aide in determining how we relate to self-doubt and our inner voice. When we are self-aware, we learn to create space between how we are feeling and what we know to be facts. We can choose to feel fear and self-doubt without accepting them as being based in reality. This allows us to choose thoughts that support that we have genuinely earned our achievements. People with strong emotional intelligence have the ability to relate to and connect well with others. When sharing their doubts, they soon become acutely aware of how common this problem is, allowing them to normalize their feelings around the issue. This provides them with relief that what they are experiencing is nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be feared and overly stressed about. Knowing that there are many others who experience the same thing takes a lot of the sting out of our feelings that we are alone with this experience. One of the characteristics of people who struggle with imposter syndrome is that they tend to be very hard on themselves. This was true for Suzanne Smith, a college professor and the CEO of the nonprofit management company Social Impact Architects, who describes herself as a recovering perfectionist. As Smith tells her entrepreneurship students: Imposter syndrome isnt proof youre unqualified. Its often evidence that youre growing. She has spent the last decade becoming more emotionally aware of that tendency and intentionally practicing positive self-talk. And now she shares that journey with her students and clients and the readers of her weekly Substack newsletter, helping them differentiate between perception and reality in order to build healthier habits. Often, when we’re being hard on ourselves, it means that we are giving little attention to our strengths and instead are amplifying our weaknesses. Empathy, a major aspect of emotional intelligence, helps us not only to see others strengths more clearly but also to acknowledge our own abilities and treat ourselves with compassion when we fail to reach our goals. It helps us to recognize that we are a work in progress, and to understand that setbacks and failures are a normal part of the learning process. It allows us to see our achievements, not with arrogance, but as a result of our determination and ongoing growth. One of the skills of emotional intelligence is the ability to regulate our emotions. Imposter syndrome can bring up strong feelings of anxiety, causing us to overprepare or avoid so that we dont have to deal with strong feelings. People who know how to regulate are able to keep thoughts and feelings from overwhelming their ability to think rationally and logically. They have developed the ability to remember times that they successfully overcame stressful times and to think of situations that ended well. Emotionally intelligent people use setbacks and failures as learning opportunities rather than taking them personally as indicators that there is something lacking in them. They understand that oftentimes, very successful people have failed multiple times. This way of thinking becomes useful once imposter syndrome takes hold. But when it does, we can look back and see that our progress indicates a persistence, determination, and ability that, over time, end up showing resultsrather than internal doubts about our success.
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In 2013, when Meredith OConnor was 16, the music video for her debut single “Celebrity” went viral. Afterward, she channeled her own stardom into championing childhood mental health: As a hyperactive kid, OConnor says she was often the subject of bullying, and when her music career gave her a platform, she was eager to use it to advocate on behalf of other victims. I knew my fan base was younger, but I didn’t know how many people would resonate with mental health challenges, she says. I realized there were millions of gifted people that are being marginalized, and that’s when I really wanted to start the mental health study. Since blowing up YouTube over a decade ago, OConnor earned a masters degree in mental health counseling and cofounded the Mental Health Counseling Services of Manhattan in 2024. In working closely with public schools, OConnor says she was struck by the many ways in which standardized tests disadvantage neurodivergent students. That observation led me to speak directly with leaders across law, advisory firms, and business about how hiring and evaluation systems might evolve in an AI economy. OConnor explains that the more she spoke with AmLaw 20 firms and Fortune 500 executives, the more she realized that the kinds of skills they desired from graduates were not the skills that were measured and rewarded on standardized tests. Thats especially true for those like herself with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who have many natural advantages, but often struggle with memorization and sustaining focus. Before age 23, the ADHD brain is gifted in many things. But one of the areas of slower development is executive function, she says, explaining that the limitation affects short-term memory, concentration, and impulse control. By the time [those with ADHD] are 18, you’ll have taken all these aptitude tests that are studying parts of the brain that have not developed yet. Those with ADHD, however, often excel in areas like abstract thinking, creative problem-solving, resilience, and empathyall of which are seeing heightened value by employers in the age of artificial intelligence. Its better than humans at many of the tasks that people who are neurodivergent struggle with, OConnor says. Skills that are aligned with being an entrepreneur, skills that align with communication, skills that align with problem-solvingthose are the things that AI can’t do better than humans yet. People with ADHD often demonstrate certain natural strengths and challenges. By sheer coincidence, many of the challenges can now be mitigated using AI tools. And at the same time, many of the ADHD advantageslike creative problem-solving, abstract thinking, and intuitionare seen as increasingly valuable in an AI-enabled world. AI Excels Where ADHD-ers Often Fall Short Those with ADHD often struggle with routine processes, time management, and processing large volumes of information. But AI tools are proving effective in helping them overcome those gaps. Rather than sitting still and paying attention for long periods in an academic lecture or a meeting, for example, AI software can now record that information, transcribe it, and highlight key points in a more condensed format. Traditional environments are not designed for them; they are designed for the neurotypical person. And I think AI can help level the playing field, says Rebecca Koniahgari, the founder of Bryge AI, a tool that helps neurotypical people better communicate with ADHD-ers (or “bridge the gap,” the inspiration for the product’s name). The New York-based engineer says she developed the product to better communicate with colleagues and friends who have been diagnosed with the condition. Instead of asking people with ADHD to adapt their communication style, Bryge AI is intended to be used by those who love, live, or work with someone who has ADHD. Im neurotypical, and the burden of communication has always been on the other person [with ADHD], so lets meet them halfway, Koniahgari says. The online app allows users to input a message and then translates it into a more ADHD-friendly structure that emphasizes clarity, brevity, and emotional intelligenceflagging potential issues, such as language, that might trigger anxiety, lack clarity, or use negative framing. After launching the prototype she developed at a hackathon event hosted by AI coding platform Bolt, Koniahgari was awarded a silver medal for Bryge AI at the 2025 Stevie Awards for Women in Business. Now, Koniahgari says shes looking to integrate the technology into other AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude AI, and eventually into workplace communication platforms like Slack, to make it even more accessible and widely available. ADHD-ers Often Excel Where AI Falls Short Just as the technology can help fill the gaps where ADHD-ers struggle the most, ADHD-ers seem well positioned to fill the gaps where the technology often struggles, like with creative problem-solving, out-of-the-box thinking, and adaptability. According to a recent study conducted by researchers at Drexel University, those with ADHD tend to solve problems using insight rather than analytical skills. Instead of working out problems in steps, their brains often make subconscious connections that result in an aha moment of insight. We hypothesized that people who have stronger ADHD symptoms would solve more of these puzzles with an a-ha moment, with insight, and that turned out to be true, explains John Kounios, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University, and one of the papers coauthors. The thing that was surprisingalthough, in retrospect, it makes perfect senseis that the people who solved the most puzzles were the ones who were lowest in ADHD symptoms and [who were] highest in ADHD symptoms. The study asked participants a series of questions that are commonly used to screen for ADHD symptoms, and only included participants who had not been diagnosed with, or weren’t taking medication for, a cognitive disorder. Kounios explains that those who demonstrate more ADHD symptoms excel at solving problems using insight, those with the fewest symptoms also tend to excel by using analytical reasoning, while those in the middle arent particularly good at either. The chatbots do not do this kind of spontaneous cognition that humans do, so human creativity sets the agenda, Kounios says. What people who have ADHD are good at is coming up with solutions to problems that no one knew they had. A Team Effort Between the Neurotypical, Neurodivergent, and AI Kounios warns, however, that like other technology tools, there is a fine line between assistance and distractionand AI could pose challenges to those who are already struggling to maintain focus. It would require the person with ADHD to have the discipline to use chatbots n [a productive] way, he says. Certainly, it can be a rabbit hole that people can fall into. That is why Kounios believes that people can best leverage their unique strengths and limit their natural challenges when they solve problems using the latest AI tools alongside teammates who think differently. There’s research literature on the benefits of having sort of diverse teams,” he says. “You want to have some people who are older and some people who are younger . . . male and female . . . all kinds of different people. Kounios adds that similar research is proving the same for neurodiversity. I think it’s also good to have a mixture of cognitive profilessome people who are going to be more scattered, less focused, maybe more creative, along with people who are much more analytical, focused, and systematic.
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Three AI companiesOpenAI, Google, and Perplexityare on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a low impact and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security reviewsincluding Microsoft, Palantir, and Amazon Web Servicesto host their chatbots for federal users. In the early days, these partnerships made it easier for AI labs to quickly get their tech in front of government officials, but also meant ceding at least some control over when and how their AI was made available. The downside of that kind of dependence is now playing out in the brewing feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which appears to have been fueled, in part, by its partnership with Palantir. The Defense Department is threatening to cancel a $200 million contract after Anthropic requested limits on the use of its AI for certain applications, including autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Anthropics Claude model was made available to military officials with the help of Palantir’s systems and was even used in the U.S. operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to reports. According to Semafor, tensions mounted after an Anthropic official asked a Palantir executive how Claude had been used in the operation, prompting concern inside the Pentagon about the companys willingness to support military applications. This is all to say that not relying on a company like Palantir makes selling to the government far less complicated. In pursuit of that independence, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google applied for, and received, expedited review of their cloud systems last year under a federal security initiative called FedRAMP 20x. Now, Fast Company can report, theyre almost certain to be approved. These approvals are separate from any decision by a specific federal agency to purchase their products, but they show the companies have taken concrete steps to engage the government on their own terms. Anthropic, by contrast, has leaned heavily on partners like Palantir to help sell its technology to government customers. The company does not appear to have participated in FedRAMP 20x, though its not clear why. Still, the question of independence is one Anthropic has publicly acknowledged. We would also like to be able to directly provide services to governments and not necessarily go through a partner at all times, Michael Sellito, the companys head of global affairs, told FedScoop in 2024. Neither Palantir nor Anthropic responded to Fast Companys request for comment.
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E-Commerce
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