Condé Nast marketing leader shares her framework for destroying your imposter syndrome

When I spoke to this week’s master in marketing, I was surprised at how seamlessly she had combined her two professional loves, digital marketing and life coaching. I’ll admit to having been skeptical about life coaching in the past, but this conversation changed my mind. As a life coach, she developed a framework she calls the Three See’s — more on that below — that can help any marketer up their game.

Meet the Master

Sheena Hakimian

Senior director of digital consumer marketing at Condé Nast and certified life coach

Fun fact: Sheena’s journey to becoming a life coach began at her favorite NYC restaurant, Piccola Cucina, which led her to taking an eight-month certification course. “The best decision I ever made,” she says.

Lesson 1: Focus on what you can control.

“There’s just so much change,” Hakimian says, in what I would consider a gross understatement at the moment. “From the [shift in traffic patterns] to us not knowing exactly how AI is going to shape our jobs to things going on in the world.”

If you focus on all of that at once, it becomes clutter. (See: my brain.) And all these uncertainties just breed more anxiety. But “how do you build resilience to uncertainty?” Hakimian asks. “It’s by focusing on the things you can control.”

As a marketer, this might look like what your data is telling you, understanding your customer needs, or growing your email lists.

Condé Nast has a very diverse set of brands — Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair are just a few — so Hakimian really took the time this year to “slice and dice. Really understanding different segments of your website and how they respond to different parts of your funnel.”

“We know we can’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy on our website anymore,” she says. So about that slicing and dicing: She did A/B testing within just the politics section of Vanity Fair. And she found that allowing readers one free article before gating the content — i.e., requiring a subscription — led to a 20% increase in subscriptions in their test panels.

Hakimian and her team have taken a lot of time over the last six months to do this testing thoughtfully — because what you do with the data is something that you can control.

Lesson 2: Make your boss’ life easier.

“What [is my boss] talking about that might not be on the KPI sheet?” Hakimian asks. It’s not a rhetorical question: You can’t solve business problems if you don’t know what they are. “The mindset is, I’m here to make my boss’ life easier.”

That doesn’t mean Hakimian doesn’t care about herself — “it just means that I’m aligning [with] the people who are responsible for my career.”

She’s spent much of this year working on being a good communicator, even sharing her communication goal with her team and asking them to hold her accountable.

And that means being a good listener.

Wanna make an impact? “Actively listening — when you really listen,” Hakimian says, you’ll be able to ask better questions and find more clarity. Whether it’s a 1:1, a Zoom meeting, or even a company all-hands, Hakimian keeps her ears open for problems, complaints, or other bugbears.

“And then I can just shift my mindset — and solve for that.”

Lesson 3: Build a strong in-person brand.

As both a life coach and a digital marketer, Hakimian sees her own personal growth — particularly unlocking her self-confidence — as essential to her marketing career.

“A great tangible way to actively pursue building more self-confidence — and ultimately self-worth — is by building a strong in-person brand,” she tells me.

It’s not that your digital presence is less important — “we have to take control of how we’re perceived online,” she says — but Hakimian is “on a mission to remind people that how you’re perceived [in person] is important. Really important.”

So important, in fact, that Hakimian built a framework she calls the Three See’s: How you see yourself, how others see you, and how you see your future. She uses this proprietary framework in her life-coaching business to help other people build a strong, aligned personal brand.

But like any good marketer, Hakimian tested it out first — on herself.

“Getting super self-aware and honest with myself has released a lot of that imposter syndrome so that I could go in and take risks” in her job as a marketing leader at Condé Nast. And that, she says, will make you stand out.

Lingering Questions

This Week’s Question

Have you found AI making an impact on your work at Condé Nast? If so, has it been a net positive or net negative? In many ways, the proliferation of AI content is making creating quality content, especially educational content, more difficult so I’m always curious how this new technology is affecting other fields? —Max Miller, Founder and host, Tasting History

This Week’s Answer

Hakimian says: From a marketing and subscription standpoint, we’re excited to explore how AI can help us deliver more dynamic, personalized experiences on our sites. That said, the human touch is still the heart of our strategy, especially when it comes to brand voice and creative direction.

The rise of AI-generated content has actually made high-quality, thoughtful content even more valuable. It’s easier than ever to pump out content, but much harder to build trust, credibility, and originality.

At Condé Nast, our unique edge is still our storytelling and editorial integrity. AI, to us, is a tool to scale our voices around that, not replace it. So overall, I’d say it can be a net positive when used with intention. But like anything, it depends on how thoughtfully it’s integrated.

Next Week’s Lingering Question

Hakimian asks: [Our next master in marketing has] built an incredible reputation for understanding Gen Z behavior and creating authentic, community-first content. In a world that’s constantly chasing virality, how do you balance consistency with creativity, and what advice would you give to brands trying to build genuine relationships over time, not just reach?