Confidence returns, when clarity returns

What if the thing you’ve been calling a confidence problem… is actually a clarity problem?

In this episode, I’m unpacking one of the biggest patterns I see in women navigating career change, burnout, redundancy, leadership transitions, and periods of feeling professionally “stuck.”

So many women tell me:

•  “I’ve lost confidence.” 
•  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” 
•  “I feel behind.” 
•  “I just can’t seem to move forward.” 

But after more than 20 years in recruitment and nearly 7 years coaching women through career transitions, I’ve learned this:

Lack of confidence is often the symptom - not the root cause.

Because when you’re disconnected from what you want…
 When you’ve been surviving for too long…
 When you’ve built a career around proving, performing, adapting, and coping…
 Of course you start second-guessing yourself.

In this conversation, we explore:

•  Why clarity changes everything in your career 
•  The hidden link between burnout and “low confidence” 
•  Why busy doesn’t always mean aligned 
•  How over-functioning impacts career decisions 
•  The difference between panic applying and intentional job searching 
•  Why so many high-achieving women feel disconnected from success 
•  How to reconnect with yourself before making your next career move 
•  Redefining success on your terms 
•  Career coaching insights for women in transition 
•  How to stop outsourcing your self-worth to external validation 

This episode is for women who are:

•  Feeling stuck in their career 
•  Navigating redundancy or career transition 
•  Questioning what they want next 
•  Experiencing burnout at work 
•  Struggling with confidence at work 
•  Rebuilding after a difficult season 
•  Wanting more alignment, clarity, and intention in their career and life 

If this resonates, the Career Clarity Form is the best place to start.

It helps me understand where you are now, what’s feeling difficult, and what support might help you move forward with more confidence and clarity.

✨ Complete the Career Clarity Form here:

And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with another woman who needs the reminder that she is not behind — she may simply need space to reconnect with herself again.

#CareerClarity #WomenInBusiness #CareerChange #CareerCoach #WomenInLeadership #BurnoutRecovery #CareerTransition #FemaleLeadership #WomenAtWork #Confidence #MindsetShift #LeadershipDevelopment #CareerDevelopment #RedundancySupport #JobSearchSupport #PersonalDevelopment #WomenEmpoweringWomen #SelfLeadership #ProfessionalWomen #ResetAndRise

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello. Now I have been wanting to record a whole pod on Clarity for a while now because to me it is the holy grail, okay? And honestly, without it, we are shooting in the dark. And the reason I wanted to come and do a pod around this is because everyone thinks that they have got a confidence issue, right? Which they haven't. If I had a pound, literally if every time a woman started working with me because they felt like they lacked confidence, I would be a millionaire. I'd be a really unhappy one, right? Um, but I'd be a millionaire. And is this, I don't know, is there such a thing as an unhappy millionaire? I think there is because I think the reason I would be unhappy is because if the women I work with never realize that it wasn't a confidence thing, they would continue to go through their lives with this kind of undercurrent of simply like I'm not good enough, which I'm here to tell you simply and implicitly isn't true. Okay. What I do know to be true is the lack of confidence, and I'm saying that in kind of inverted commas, right, is a symptom, right? It's the feeling that has been created by something going on, like a few layers deeper, right? And it also kind of becomes this like low-level part of your personality, and it's something that we, you know, by all intents and purposes, like attach part of our identity to, right? It comes becomes the way we speak about ourselves, um, it becomes really, really deep rooted in our belief system, and I really want to kind of center this conversation around careers and the impact this has on careers because this is the work I do, right? It's the work I specialise in. And we when we move through this in this kind of context, it will become kind of clearer, right? But this is something I see in my work genuinely every single day. So when we mistaken this, you know, this mistaken kind of personality trait, which is like I'm not confident, when it gets hold and grabs hold, it has a huge impact, right? Especially with us in terms of our careers, because it makes us freeze, it makes us feel stuck, um, we don't take action, we stay in roles far longer than we should do, we work for companies and for bosses and in environments that no longer serve us, we become underpaid, we then become really unfulfilled, and it kind of feeds, if you like, this kind of perpetuating cycle of then thinking that the career journey that we want and the aspirations that we want simply aren't there for us, okay? They're not in reach. And we then start to think the opposite is true. So you can see why this is an issue, right? So it starts off with essentially not being aligned to the environment or the role that you're in, then you thinking, well, I'm not good enough for anything else, which then makes you think, oh my goodness, I couldn't possibly do anything else, which then kind of makes you stay, right? So if you can imagine, I'm like doing this with my hand as if I'm talking. I talk a lot with my hand for someone who records podcasts, but it is this cycle, right? And the cycle keeps perpetuating, perpetuating, perpetuating. And the more disaligned you get, the more you lack confidence to do anything else, it the more resentful you get, the more you lack confidence, which means that you're then even less likely to go and make a move and do something else. Okay, so this cycle just keeps going round and round and round. And this cycle is really, really difficult to break, okay. And if you want me to be brutal, the reason it's so difficult to break is because it is far easier for us to accept this as the reality, right, than to do the work to unpick and choose a different path. It is a lot simpler to do that, right? Now, I also want to kind of point out that I'm not saying that your feelings of like low confidence aren't validated, right? But what I am here to kind of challenge you on is they're actually not true, right? They're just thoughts, they're not fact. And essentially, once we, you know, once we get into the work, you could only see that it's only a couple of layers down where you can actually really figure out what the root of the cause is, right? So we're not trying to, you know, um put a plaster over the symptom here. We are here to do the work to figure out what the stuff you know is happening at kind of the root cause. But where how this then kind of manifests, if you like, in terms of careers, is a few things normally happen next, right? So we've got this kind of feeling of like, oh, I'm not good enough, or uh, you know, I haven't got any confidence, right? Or oh, this doesn't feel right in terms of what I'm doing in my career right now, or what I have a lot of um what I call mid-career women experiences, like, oh my goodness, I've got as long left in work as I've had in my career. Is this really what I want to be doing for the rest of my time, right? Now, a couple of things happen when we're kind of confronted with these feelings, right? Number one is that we try to push it to the back of our minds, okay. So even though we've got this kind of current or this undercurrent of like dissatisfaction, resentment, frustration trying to like surface itself almost daily, we we push it to the back of our minds, okay. Second thing is we go on this quest, if you like, to become more confident, right? And women at this stage often go and get a new qualification or sign up to a new course. They busy themselves with productivity and hope to get noticed, right? Um, what else happens? We all we just avoid it at all costs, okay, and tell ourselves that we haven't got time or the headspace or the bandwidth to even think about it. I was working with someone a couple of weeks ago who literally took six weeks to book in from the original, like, you know, DM me clarity, DM me clarity. Six months it's taken for her, right? Because all she kept saying to herself is I haven't got the headspace for this now, I haven't got the headspace for this now, right? Where she was so unhappy, right, in her job and her current situation, you know, she'd already reached breaking point when she reached out to me six months ago. So let's not faff around that and just get on with it, right? But we also actively avoid going for new roles because we're too scared about swapping like for like, right, and jumping from the fire pan in the fire. And all of these, like I said, just solidify these feelings and the loop and the cycle never, never breaks. And this is where so many of us get trapped, okay? We no longer understand what it is that is going to help us break that cycle, right? And the longer we kind of stay disconnected from that, whether that be through avoidance, whether that be through, you know, telling ourselves that we haven't got the time and capacity, um, you know, distracting ourselves with different qualifications, etc. etc., the more we stay disconnected, connected from what we actually want, the harder it becomes for us to kind of hear ourselves clearly. So I'm here to tell you, you know, as this very empathetic, you know, human-led, heart-centered coach, who's also really, really brutal, right? That if you think you've got a confidence issue, trust me, we can work on that and quite easily, right? And one of the one of the first things we do is get to the bloody root cause of what's going on and stop trying to solve, you know, solve the symptom, right? But what I'm here to tell you and show you and guide you through is that once you have the clarity, right, of what that next step looks like, everything else follows, right? And what you have been experiencing is conditioning, right? Mid-career women are some of the most conditioned people that I work with. And this is not because they lack capability, they're not intelligent, they lack ambition, it's because along the way, this kind of survival has become louder than the self-trust that we had earlier in our careers and earlier in our lives. Okay, so we become brilliant at functioning and coping and delivering and brilliant at being needed. But if we go underneath, like underneath this avoidance, underneath this kind of like non-confident personality trait, etc., we need to ask ourselves, is this actually what I want anymore? And the answer I can tell you how hardly is always gonna be no, okay, which is also confronting, right? But then it kind of begs the question of like, what do you want to do instead? And this does require you, shock horror, to put yourself first, okay? It's asking you to confront the okay, well, if I'm not putting my best interests at heart, whose am I? And that's a really difficult one for us to grapple with, right? We are strong, independent, decisive women. But when we're confronted with, like, oh my goodness, well, okay, well, if I'm not being putting myself front and center, then who is, right? And that question, honestly, is really humbling and very terrifying. But once you've allowed yourself to ask the question, right, you can't then unask it, right? And this is why we kind of stay busy, blah, blah, blah, you know, and this need to get through the next quarter, or we'll think about it after the next bonus, or after the kids are older, or after things calm down. We all know that things never, ever, ever calm down, right? And this is when your nervous system starts to kind of normalize this dissatisfaction, it then shows up as I don't feel confident. Okay, so we can see where we're going with this. I could honestly talk about this for hours and hours and hours, and I'm trying to make it as compact and concise as properly as possible in this pod um for you to be able to follow. So, anyway, where are we? So let's think about what this what this is happening, like kind of not dramatically, although I feel very dramatic when I talk about this, but what happens then and what is eroding like overnight. Okay, we start to feel our energy drop, we're starting to stop seeing the art of possibility, we lose perspective on our own values, we lose perspective on our own value, you know, and what value that we're bringing, and we start kind of mistaking this kind of emotional exhaustion for lack of capability. You it's incredible how many women opt out of the roles that are in so they don't feel like they're capable anymore, rather than addressing the fact that they're exhausted. And the reason they're exhausted is because they're completely unaligned to what they or misaligned to what they should be doing. And this is why genuinely clarity matters so much. Okay, it's not just about what job should I apply for next, it's like what do I actually want my life to feel like now? Who have I become? What matters to me at this stage? You know, what am I no longer available for? What kind of work enables me to thrive rather than kind of being in this kind of survival mode? And that is what helped women get clear on. And that is the most magical bit, honestly, about the work I do. Because once we've kind of gleaned that, once we've unable to identify what clarity is, even if it's a work in progress, right? Everything shifts. I call it this, it's the most amazing feeling when you're coaching someone and you see their shoulders just relax again. I'm kind of like acting this out, which is completely pointless because you can't see me. But just seeing that someone relax and just seeing, like, oh my goodness, like it was there all along, you know, everything shifts, right? Communication, decision making just becomes a lot clearer the way they show up at interview, you know. There's none of this kind of like weird pick-me energy, which you know I kind of you know, beat out of people with the stick. But everything changes, the way they show up for themselves changes, right? And this is where the confidence comes from because actually, you're not then seeking this validation or this acceptance from everyone else. You're like, this is what I'm gonna be doing, this is how I want to live my life, and that alignment that's when the confidence comes, right? And that is when this momentum comes. And what I find really interesting is, and we're terrible at this as women as well, like, oh, they're so confident. Oh God, look at them, right? But we're also like kind of weirdly attracted to these women. But I want you to really think about and really kind of catch what it is that you're attracted to because the women who kind of show up as these kind of like quote unquote most confident versions of themselves, right? They, you're not witnessing confidence, right? You're witnessing self-trust. It's alignment, it's decision, it's movement. And I also want to let you in on another secret, right? These women are not perfect, they're not fearless, they certainly haven't got it all figured out, right? It's just you're just witnessing someone who's stopped banning themselves long enough to hear their own truth, right? And it's so bloody liberating, right? And this, as you can hear, is why I get so, so passionate about the work I do, right? Because I've sat across from women who have bel who believe they have lost themselves completely, right? And within a few weeks of actually just carving some space and time out for themselves, they are able to think properly, unpack what's really going on, reconnect, build a plan rooted in them rather than everyone and everything else. And it's not from a place of kind of expectation or fear or proving. I literally watch them come back to life, and it's not about this kind of like mad, like Madonna reinvention, right? And becoming a different person, it's genuinely just coming back to yourself, and that is when the momentum starts to flow. And that doesn't mean that you then have to make a decision really, really quickly. It's not like you're gonna put a grenade in your whole life, it's just about like this is the beginning of the journey, right? So if you've got clarity, everything else follows, and you kind of stop sitting in this kind of limbo, um, and you start really reconnecting. And something else, which I think is really interesting as I watch women and help guide women through this process, is I want you to think about it, right, as this like your own like permission slip, which I know feels really, really weird, even saying it, but let's be honest, right? With our level of conditioning, we are waiting for someone to give us this permission slip. But it's like you are giving yourself the permission slip, which I believe is a much higher vibe than waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and say, I've got this most amazing job for you, right? So I'm here to tell you, you're not lacking confidence, okay? You're not, right? You are lacking space, perspective, self-trust, and clarity. So I want you to start thinking every time this little voice comes up in your head, which is how can I be more confident? I want you to ask instead, what would become possible if I got really, really clear on what I actually want? That's it. My goodness. I could have gone on for bloody hours on that. I feel really, really grateful to get to do the work I do. So I hope this has helped. Reach out and tell me if you had any shifts in this. I want to hear it. Um, and in the meantime, I want to go and record something else, and I'll see you again next week.