What If You've Lost Confidence in a Place Where You Used to Feel Capable?
It can happen so gradually that we don't immediately notice it.
You're sitting in a meeting and have something to say, but instead of saying it, you wait. Someone else speaks. The conversation moves on. Later, you find yourself thinking that you should have contributed, that what you were going to say was useful, perhaps even that somebody else eventually made much the same point.
Or you write an email and read it back several times before sending it. You prepare more than you used to for conversations you would once have walked into without thinking very much about them. You begin checking your judgement with other people, not because you particularly need their input, but because somewhere along the way you have become less certain of your own.
Maybe you've noticed you've becoming quieter, which is particularly disorienting because you haven't always been like this.
You know you are experienced. You know you have done difficult things. There have been other organisations, other roles, other teams where you barely thought about confidence because you were simply getting on with the work. You contributed. You made decisions. You trusted your judgement. You knew what you knew and, equally importantly, you were comfortable saying when you didn't.
But somehow, here, something feels different.
And after a while, it can become very easy to turn that experience inwards.
What's happened to me?
Why am I not as confident as I used to be?
Why am I suddenly questioning everything?
We begin looking for ways to rebuild our confidence, as though we have misplaced something that used to belong to us.
But maybe there is another question worth asking first.
What was happening around the time I began to lose it?
Confidence doesn't exist in a vacuum
We often talk about confidence as though it is a personal characteristic.
Someone is confident. Someone else lacks confidence. We admire people who appear naturally self-assured and can easily conclude that they possess something the rest of us need to acquire.
But confidence doesn't behave like a fixed characteristic.
Most of us can probably think of situations where we feel really confident and others where we don't. We can speak with complete authority about something we know well and feel much less certain when we move into unfamiliar territory. We can flourish in one team and begin questioning ourselves in another. We can feel expansive around some people and strangely diminished around others.
We haven't necessarily changed.
The context has.
And that matters, because when our confidence begins to fall, our instinct is see the problem as us.
We tell ourselves we need to be more assertive. Speak up more. Stop overthinking. Believe in ourselves. Develop greater resilience.
And sometimes those things are useful.
But before we begin fixing ourselves, maybe we should start by being curious about the relationship between who we are and where we are.
Sometimes a loss of confidence is information
Imagine spending several years in an environment where your contribution is regularly overlooked.
Your ideas are rarely acknowledged until someone else repeats them. Decisions are made around you rather than with you. The strengths that were valued in another role have very little currency here. You have a manager who continually questions your judgement, or a culture where there is little psychological safety and mistakes are remembered far longer than successes.
Or maybe nothing is that obvious.
The environment simply wants a version of you that takes considerable effort to maintain.
You find yourself monitoring how you speak, how much you say, how direct you are, how enthusiastic you appear, which parts of yourself are welcome and which are better kept out of sight. You become increasingly attentive to the room and decreasingly attentive to yourself.
Over time, that has an effect. Not because you have become less capable, but because the environment you are operating in is giving you very different information about yourself.
That distinction is important.
Feeling less confident is not always evidence that we have become less capable.
Sometimes it's information about fit, recognition, belonging, safety, or whether the environment allows us to use and experience our capabilities fully.
And if we don't examine that possibility, we can spend an enormous amount of energy trying to repair something in ourselves that wasn't our problem in the first place.
The environments that once fitted us can stop fitting too
There is another version of this that can be harder to recognise.
Nothing about the environment has necessarily changed.
We have.
A role that once stretched us in interesting ways now feels constraining. A culture we once tolerated quite comfortably has become increasingly difficult to be part of. The things we are valued for may still be things we do extremely well, but they are no longer the things we most want to spend our time doing.
That can affect confidence too.
Because confidence is not simply about whether we can do something. It is also affected by the relationship between what we are doing and who we understand ourselves to be.
We can be extremely competent at work that no longer excites us.
We can hold considerable seniority and still feel increasingly disconnected from ourselves.
We can be surrounded by evidence of our external success while privately wondering why we've stopped feeling like the person who achieved that success.
And this is one of the reasons I think it is so important, that when our confidence begins to change, we don't rush immediately to the question of how we get it back.
First, we need to understand what has changed.
There is a difference between confidence and certainty
There is another assumption about confidence that I think makes life unnecessarily difficult.
We imagine that confident people feel certain.
They know what they are doing. They walk into the room without doubt. They take the opportunity because they know they are ready. They make decisions because they know they will work.
But the more unfamiliar the territory, the less realistic that becomes.
If we are doing something genuinely new, we won't know exactly how it will go.
If we are changing direction in our career, there will be things we can't predict.
If we join a new organisation, take on a larger role, start a business, have a difficult conversation or begin experimenting with a different way of working, uncertainty comes with the territory.
So waiting until we feel completely confident can become another way of waiting for uncertainty disappears.
And it probably won't.
So maybe a more useful way of thinking about confidence is something quieter.
Not I know this will work.
But:
I trust myself to deal with what happens.
That is a very different foundation from which to move.
I trust myself because I know myself
For me, this is where confidence becomes much more interesting.
The more clearly we understand ourselves - our strengths, values, ways of thinking, patterns, interests, needs and the environments in which we tend to thrive - the less dependent our entire sense of self is on whatever is happening around us at a particular point in time.
That doesn't make us impervious to our environment.
Nor should it.
Being repeatedly dismissed, undermined, excluded or undervalued will affect us. We are human beings, not sealed systems.
But self-knowledge gives us somewhere to ground oursleves.
When something unsettles us, we can draw on a much broader body of evidence than the response we received in that particular room on that particular day.
We know what we have done before.
We know what we have learned.
We know the strengths we bring.
We know what matters to us.
We know how we tend to approach problems and how we have navigated difficult things before.
And most importantly, we don't have to consciously remind ourselves of that evidence every time something happens, because over time, it has become part of how we know ourselves.
I trust myself because I know myself.
That doesn't mean I never doubt myself.
It means doubt doesn't have to completely distablise me.
And I can return to myself when it does.
We don't always think our way back to confidence
But, understanding ourselves is only part of the story.
Because confidence also grows through experience.
This is where I think we can get the sequence backwards.
We tell ourselves that when we feel confident enough, we'll have the conversation. Apply for the role. Explore the idea. Put ourselves forward. Try something unfamiliar.
But what if some of the confidence we're waiting for can only develop by doing those things?
Not necessarily the enormous thing we are most frightened of doing. Something smaller.
We have one conversation and discover that we can hold our ground.
We ask one question and realise the response wasn't nearly as frightening as we thought it would be.
We try using a strength in a different context.
We investigate an opportunity without committing ourselves to it.
We walk into a room where we don't know everybody and discover that we don't need to know everybody.
Every experience gives us information.
Some experiences will confirm what we thought.
Others won't.
Some will go well.
Some will be uncomfortable.
Occasionally we will discover that something isn't for us at all.
But all of it gives us evidence.
And gradually we begin to experience ourselves not as someone waiting to become confident enough to participate in our own life, but as someone capable of moving, learning, adjusting and deciding what to do next.
Maybe confidence was never the starting point
There are undoubtedly times when we need to work deliberately on our confidence.
But I wonder if we sometimes place too much pressure on confidence to be present before everything else.
Maybe it is not always the prerequisite we imagine it to be.
Maybe confidence is also an outcome.
It grows as we reconnect with ourselves. As we understand ourselves more clearly. As we recognise the environments we thrive in and the ones that diminish us. As we make small choices, gather evidence, discover what we can influence and see ourselves acting rather than staying completely powerless.
And I think that changes the question we need to ask.
Instead of:
How do I become more confident?
We ask:
What has been happening to my confidence?
What do I know about myself that I may have lost sight of?
Where do I feel most able to be and trust myself?
What small experience would give me some new information?
Because the goal isn't to reach some permanent state in which we never question ourselves again.
We will still enter unfamiliar rooms. We will still encounter people who unsettle us. We will still try things we have never done before and occasionally wonder whether we are capable of doing them.
Confidence doesn't have to mean eliminating those moments.
Maybe it just means developing a sufficiently grounded relationship with ourselves that, when doubt comes, we know where to return to.
And from there, we can take the next step.
Listen to the full episode
In Episode 28 of Proactive Empowered Careers® Podcast, I explore Confidence, the fifth dimension of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, and why confidence may be much less fixed, and much more relational, than we think.
🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️
Continue exploring
You can also continue exploring the wider ideas around identity, curiosity and career change here:
How reconnecting with ourselves begins with noticing our own signals again.
When Your Life Hasn't Caught Up With Who You've Become
What happens when what we understand about ourselves and the life we're living no longer quite fit.
An exploration of the relationship between who we are and the environments in which we work.
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