You have not got a confidence issue and I'm here to tell you why!

You Have Not Got a Confidence Issue

What if the thing you've been trying to fix... isn't actually the problem?

So many women tell me they've "lost their confidence."

They question their abilities, start considering roles below their capability, wonder if they've lost their edge, and quietly convince themselves they're no longer the person they used to be.

But what if that's not true?

In this episode, I'm sharing one of the most powerful coaching conversations I've had this year (shared anonymously, of course). Together, we unpack why confidence is so often the presenting problem, while the real issue lies somewhere much deeper.

If you've spent years working in an environment where you've been overlooked, dismissed, underestimated or constantly adapting just to survive, this episode will help you understand why you feel the way you do—and why there's absolutely nothing "wrong" with you.

We'll explore:

• Why confidence is often a symptom, not the root cause.
• The difference between confidence and self-worth—and why confusing the two keeps so many women stuck.
• How toxic or misaligned workplaces slowly chip away at your sense of identity.
• Why feeling out of your depth is often a sign of growth, not proof that you're incapable.
• The hidden cost of staying in environments that can never recognise what you have to offer.
• Why so many successful women remember the fear far more vividly than the evidence of what they've achieved.
• How to separate who you are from what your environment has made you believe about yourself.

One line from this conversation has stayed with me ever since:

"She wasn't failing. She simply wasn't being allowed to succeed."

Sometimes coaching isn't about helping someone become somebody new.

Sometimes it's simply about helping them remember who they've always been.

If you've ever found yourself saying:

"I've lost my confidence."

I'd love you to listen to this episode with one question in mind:

Have you really lost your confidence... or have you simply spent too long somewhere that made you forget your worth?

Ready to stop doubting yourself and start taking control of your career?

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to my free Taking Control of Your Career webinar.

We'll explore why so many capable women feel stuck, overlooked or disconnected from their careers—and, more importantly, what to do about it.

📅 Tuesday 14th July | 7:00pm (UK)

LINK TO BOOK

It's completely free and packed with practical coaching, mindset shifts and career strategies to help you move forward with clarity and confidence.

And if you can't wait until then, come and connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram where I share daily insights, career coaching and honest conversations for ambitious women who know they're capable of more.

If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd be incredibly grateful if you could follow the podcast, leave a review and share it with another woman who needs to hear this message.

Because I promise you...

You have not got a confidence issue.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Hello, ladies. Welcome back. You are going to want to listen to this one because it is going to hit like a sledgehammer, but you're going to thank me for it, okay? Um, seriously, though, this is how strongly I feel about the subject of lack of confidence, right? So much so I'm actually even thinking about getting some t-shirts printed. On the front, it would simply say, you have not got a self-confidence issue. And on the back, let's figure out what's really going on. Now, before I completely offend you, what I'm not saying is how you feel isn't validated. Okay, confidence takes a battering. Sometimes we lose sight of it, but much more often, right, confidence is simply the presenting problem. The real problem, and I want to see some nodding heads here, right, is usually one of these. Firstly, you've spent years in an environment that has slowly eroded yourself worth. Uh, it could be that you have adapted for so long you've completely lost sight of yourself. Maybe you've experienced burnout and are interpreting that exhaustion as your own inadequacies. Um, it could be that you are no longer measuring yourself by your own standards, or you're trying to grow sunflowers in soil that only grows daffodils. And we're going to come on to that a bit later on. And today's podcast comes from exactly one of those coaching conversations I have. So I've had the pleasure of knowing this incredible human for about a year. We first met when she saw me speak at an International Women's Day event in Birmingham last year, and she reached out to me afterwards to say how seen she felt from the session. So we stayed in touch, we went out for dinner in London, and when I knew she was having a tough time at work, I invited her to one of our taking control of your career um daily workshops. And she is just one of these women who lights up a room. She's so articulate, she knew she had to get out, and she came to the workshop saying that she wanted an epiphany, so no pressure, right? Oh my goodness. But guess what? She did. So much so it shook the whole room. She had this huge wake-up call that her definition of success had fundamentally changed. And she was staying in her current role to prove a point, right? And to satisfy her ego, not because she wanted to. So after that, aha light bulb moment, she reached out to join Reset and Rise. Um, and this session was session one, right, that we had. And it's really interesting because it wasn't actually supposed to happen this week. She originally wanted to delay the session until later in the summer because she was exhausted and she had resigned from a really, really difficult role. She was trying to hold everything together, including a handover, and she felt emotionally drained. So burnout is real. Okay, so before coaching begins, I always ask clients to complete an onboarding form before we meet because we need a before and after, right? And one of the questions is what strengths do you know you bring even though they're being overlooked? And this is how she described herself, right? Versatile, great energy, knowledgeable, empowers people, passionate, gets things done. Does that sound to you like someone who doesn't know who she is? No. Yeah, she arrives at my door saying she's lost confidence and it's impacting her ability to make a decision about what to do next. Okay, so she's questioning her own abilities, she's feeling like she's lost her edge, she's diagnosing it and misdiagnosing, I hasten to add, that I just haven't got this energy or drive anymore. And this is where coaching gets really, really interesting. Because if I just accepted her diagnosis, right, I need more confidence, we would have coached the wrong problem. So I instead started my mild interrogation and we started exploring the environment that she'd been working in. Now, she had been hired into this role because she is exceptional at diagnosing business problems. That is literally why they brought her into the business to challenge, to improve, to identify what wasn't working. And every time she did exactly that, she was ignored, right? Every recommendation, every observation, every piece of expertise she had been hired for, dismissed. And over time, that doesn't just frustrate you, it changes the way you see yourself. So I offered her another lens, okay, that she was in fact wasn't failing. She just wasn't being allowed to succeed, she wasn't being enabled. And I honestly think that is one of the strongest things that we need to take away from this. So we took a few steps back. I asked her what lit her up and what she was doing when she was in flow. And then one of these things I've realized that, you know, and she then was able to kind of reconnect with is that every role that she's gone into, right? And to be successful started from exactly the same space, right? So every role that she'd gone into and then subsequently been successful in role had started from her feeling deeply uncomfortable, right? Loads of self-doubt, all the imposter syndrome thoughts like coming at her, like whack-a-mole, right? And her thinking, I can't do this, why are they giving me this job? I'm not qualified. And one example that stands out was when she was 26, she ended up somehow becoming this employee communications manager for a Fitzy 250 organization. And if you looked at her CV on paper, she wasn't qualified to do that role at all. And she was remembers thinking, you know, why on earth is someone giving me this job? And seven days after she started, the CEO resigned, and suddenly she was then responsible for communicating that to like 44,000 employees, right? And she had no idea what she was doing. She remembers feeling physically sick, she didn't sleep, she thought that, my goodness, they're gonna find me out, I haven't got a clue, right? But despite feeling all of that, she kept going. She learned, she asked questions, she put herself in uncomfortable situations, she figured things out, right? And fast forward less than a year, she was writing comms for the new CEO, right? And so she was so confident in one announcement that she's having to put together, that she had to say to the HR director, if it's wrong, you can sack me, right? And the following morning, the CEO simply walked into lift, looked at her and said, Nice announcement, nice announcement. And she remembers thinking, I did that. So looking back now, right, she now realizes from me asking her one simple question that the feelings that, you know, the things that she enjoyed isn't walking into something feeling confident, right? It's proving to herself that she can do something that she genuinely didn't believe that she could do. And I think that is where, you know, we've got to really kind of take a step back, right? And think about where we are able to give example after example after example of being extraordinary, having this extraordinary capability, right? Because every single one of these stories started in the same place. I don't know what I'm doing, I don't feel qualified, someone's gonna figure me out. And I just think genuinely it's fascinating, right? Because I don't think she's describing that she has a confidence problem at all. I think she is describing what growth feels like, right? And this is so common with women, right? Every promotion, every new leadership role, every business, every career change, we mistake novelty for incompetence. We feel like we're out of our debts, right? Therefore, I must be out of my debts. And they're not the same thing. Feeling uncomfortable is often the evidence that you're stretching into something bigger than you've done before. And if that evidence, you know, if it isn't evidence that you that shouldn't be there, but then I want you to question can you think of some, you know, can you think of, you know, the last time you did something for the first time and really, really think about it? You know, the first time you managed a team, the first presentation, the first interview, I don't know, the first time you became a parent, the first time you started a business, right? Were you confident or were you just courageous enough to keep going despite feeling completely out of your depth? And I think this is it. This is something that we need to really, really hone in on, right? Every time this client was talking to me about success, she started with how terrified she was. Only afterwards, right, she was then mentioning the achievement, and this is what we do. So we so we so commonly remember, right, the fear more vividly than the evidence of them and what followed, right? So I can hear what you're saying, right? Every, you know, every story you've told or every story I'm telling you is evidence that you are underneath it, exceptionally capable. And this is what I pushed back on, right? Because what we choose to focus on is not what we should be focusing on, right? And I think what I loved about this session is when we reconnected her basically with her genius. She knows, right, in her hearts of hearts, hearts of hearts, she knows in a heart of hearts how bloody amazing she is, right? And it was my role then to kind of challenge her, right? And look about what is going on at an identity level. At an identity level, she knew she was exceptional, right? And in this kind of short space of time, you have proven that you thrive when you're thrown into these, you know, deep ends, right? So we now need to figure out where the gap is. In her heart of hearts at an identity level, she knows she's the bomb, right? And everyone else knows that she's the bomb, because otherwise, would they, why would they hire her into this job, right? But what is showing up for her right now is I feel like I've lacked, I've lost my confidence, I don't feel confidence. And it's the gap that we now need to try and close. And in her experience and her, you know, um, what's going on for her right now, that gap has been created by the environment that she's in, right? And I was seeing someone whose self-worth had been slowly chipped away by an environment that couldn't make use of what she had to offer, right? The gap, the difference is the work, right? Is the work that we do, right? Confidence is how you feel about your ability. Self-worth is how you value yourself regardless of the environment that you're in, right? And somewhere where you have potentially spent years somewhere where you've been overlooked, right? You could be in an environment where you're questioned or dismissed, or simply, right, not set up to succeed, right? And when those things become really tangled and intertwined, you start saying things like, I just don't feel like I've got my confidence anymore, right? When actually what you mean is I don't recognize myself or anymore. And that distinction, ladies, is the power move. So I talked to you um about sunflowers and tulips, which probably sounds a bit woo. But when we started talking, she said something really beautiful. And those of you who know me know I tear up at bloody everything, right? But she said, I need tall sunflowers, right? And this is a daffodil environment. Did I say tulips earlier? I meant daffodils. And that was something that really, really stayed with me, right? She knows and she recognizes number one, she's a sunflower. She knows and recognises that she wants to work with other sunflowers, and she realizes that she's been like pissing around with the daffodils, right? And coming to the end of this session, she says something else to me. And she said, I'm so glad I didn't wait for this call, right? Because she had assumed that she needed to feel better before that she could think clearly. So she's just really glad that, and actually, we're not going to meet now for another kind of six to eight weeks. So, like now, go off, enjoy the summer, right? Do all the things you want to do, knowing that you've already kind of made and had this big shift along the way. So, my challenge to you is this, right? Perhaps the problem isn't us at all. Perhaps we are simply planted somewhere that was never capable of growing what we have to offer. So this is it. Short and sharp for me today, ladies. I am off to take myself to the nearest t-shirt printing shop, right? Coaching for me isn't about helping someone become someone new, right? It's about helping you see yourself clearly again, helping you separate who you are from the environment that's made you feel and believe something about yourself that we know in our heart of hearts isn't true. So if you are telling yourself you've lost confidence, I want to ask you one question. Have you really lost your confidence? Or have you simply spent too long somewhere that has made you forget your worth? You have not got a confidence issue over an hour.