Capable, experienced leaders rarely lose trust in themselves overnight. In this post I share what I didn't notice happening to me, why the problem is so often what has changed around you, and a career timeline exercise to help you see when and why your confidence shifted.
You've spent years building your career. You've worked hard, developed your knowledge and experience, taken on more responsibility and probably dealt with some pretty difficult situations along the way. So why is it that you can get to a point where you start questioning whether you're actually good enough to do your job?
Perhaps you've noticed that decisions you used to make quite easily now take much longer. You find yourself overthinking things, preparing more than you need to for meetings or replaying conversations afterwards, wondering whether you said the right thing. You might even be looking around at other leaders and thinking they seem to have it all together, so perhaps you need to be more like them.
And yet, from the outside, everything looks fine. You're still turning up, supporting your team, making decisions and delivering what the organisation needs from you, but privately, you're not feeling quite so sure of yourself anymore.
This is something I've spent a lot of time exploring, both through my own experience and through the work I do with experienced leaders who've lost trust in their capability. It's also what I explored in my first Exhausted, Not Broken masterclass on Tuesday 20 October.
Nearly five years ago, I was called into a meeting at work where a decision had been made that affected my role. I remember standing in the car park afterwards, crying on the phone to my husband, who simply told me to come home. That was a Friday, and on the Monday I handed in my notice. I'd spent over 20 years building my HR career and I walked away without a plan, genuinely believing that I wasn't good enough to do my job anymore.
At the time, I thought that meeting was what had broken me. Looking back, I now know it was simply the final straw. I'd been getting more and more tired, crying privately, questioning my capability and working harder and harder to be the leader I thought I needed to be. What I hadn't noticed was how much I'd been changing myself to fit the environments I was working in.
After leaving, I even enrolled on an HR course because I thought I needed to improve my knowledge. It was only when I started studying that I realised I already knew what I was being taught, because it was the work I'd been doing for years. I hadn't suddenly lost my capability. I'd lost trust in it, and it took me a good couple of years, and my coach training, to really understand what had happened.
One of the things I've realised, through my own experience and from coaching other leaders, is that losing trust in yourself is rarely the result of one event. It often starts with something changing around you. Perhaps a new manager joins the organisation, or the leadership team changes. There might be a restructure, fewer resources or increasing pressure to deliver more with less. You start adapting to those changes because that's what experienced leaders do: you find solutions, support your teams and keep things moving.
But somewhere along the way, you might start adjusting how you show up as a leader too. Perhaps you're naturally quite thoughtful and reflective, but you're working with a leadership team that values people who are much more assertive and outspoken, so you start trying to be more like them. Or you find yourself saying yes to more things because you want to be seen as dependable and capable. You stop challenging decisions as much as you once did, or spend far too much time preparing for meetings because you're worried about being caught out.
None of these things necessarily feels significant at the time. They're just the little adjustments you make to get through the day and do your job, but over time they can take you further and further away from the leader you naturally are. And the longer it goes on, the more you start believing that the problem is you.
During the masterclass, I asked everyone to imagine a glass slowly filling with water. Every change, every difficult situation, every additional responsibility and all the other pressures from work and life add a little more water. If you're constantly moving from one meeting to the next, one problem to another, without any opportunity to reduce that pressure, the glass keeps filling.
When we're under sustained stress, our brains become more focused on identifying threats and protecting us from them. That can affect how clearly we think, how we make decisions and how we respond to situations, and things that wouldn't previously have bothered us can suddenly feel much more difficult. We might start playing safe, avoiding difficult conversations, over-preparing or looking to other people for reassurance. These behaviours make sense when we're trying to protect ourselves from something that feels threatening, but when they become our normal way of working, they can gradually undermine our trust in our own judgement.
The difficult part is that many of these behaviours look like someone who's working really hard and being conscientious. Because you're still delivering, nobody necessarily notices that you're struggling. In fact, they might be telling you what a great job you're doing, whilst you're privately wondering how much longer you can keep it all going.
When I started coaching, I noticed that many of the experienced leaders coming to me were feeling very much like I had. Some had already left their jobs because they'd reached a point where they couldn't carry on, while others were still working, delivering and appearing perfectly capable, but privately questioning themselves. Almost all of them believed the problem was something about them: they needed to be more confident, more resilient, more assertive or better at managing their workload.
But what if the first thing they needed to do wasn't to improve anything about themselves? What if they needed to understand what had changed around them? This is one of the biggest things I wanted people to take away from Tuesday's masterclass. Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?", start asking "What's changed around me?"
It's a different way of looking at things, and it can help you recognise the circumstances that may have contributed to how you're feeling. When you understand what's changed, you can start making more informed decisions about what you need now.
One of the exercises I use in my coaching is something I call Look for the Shift, and it's also included in my forthcoming book, Exhausted, Not Broken. It's a career timeline exercise that helps you look back over the last five to ten years and notice where your confidence and self-trust may have changed.
I used my own timeline during the masterclass, and even after spending several years reflecting on my experience, I realised something new. I'd always thought my confidence had started to decline around the pandemic, when the leadership team changed and the pressures of my role increased. But when I looked further back, I recognised that I'd been adapting myself to fit different leadership environments for probably eight to ten years before I left.
Then I remembered something from my first leadership role, when my manager told me that I needed to be a bit more corporate. At the time, I took that to mean that I needed to change how I naturally showed up at work, and I started trying to fit an idea of what a leader should look and sound like. That was in my mid-thirties. I'm now 55, and it's only recently that I've recognised just how long I'd been making these adjustments.
So I'd encourage you to try this exercise for yourself. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a line across it representing the last five to ten years of your career. Start by marking the significant moments, perhaps where you changed jobs, were promoted, took on more responsibility, experienced a restructure or worked with a different leadership team. Then go back over each period and think about what was happening around you. What was your manager like? What was the culture like? Did you feel supported? Were you able to be yourself? Were you enjoying your work, feeling challenged in a good way, or were you constantly under pressure?
Now look at the timeline as a whole. Where were the periods when you felt most confident and capable, and what was different about those environments? And where did you notice your confidence or enjoyment starting to dip?
You might find that there wasn't one significant event, but a series of changes and adjustments that gradually affected how you felt about yourself as a leader. You might also recognise that the times you felt most confident weren't necessarily when you had the least responsibility, but when you were in an environment where you felt supported, valued and able to lead in your own way. The point isn't to find someone or something to blame. It's to understand what's been happening so you can start thinking about what needs to change.
There's another side to this that I think we need to be paying more attention to. Many experienced leaders are very good at hiding how they're really feeling. They're still delivering results, attending meetings, supporting their teams and doing everything that's expected of them, but behind that, they may be exhausted, overthinking decisions, working late into the evening and quietly losing belief in themselves. Because they don't talk about it, their organisations don't necessarily recognise what's happening, and we can easily interpret some of these behaviours as a performance or confidence issue without considering what might have contributed to them.
So if you're responsible for supporting or developing leaders, perhaps there's a different conversation you could be having. Rather than immediately focusing on what someone needs to improve, ask them when they last felt most like themselves at work, and then explore what's changed since then. It might open up a conversation about workload, leadership styles, organisational culture or the support that's gradually disappeared. It could also help you identify something that needs to change in the organisation, rather than expecting the individual to keep adapting.
I wish I'd understood all of this when I was still working in my corporate role. I spent so much time believing I wasn't good enough, trying to improve myself and working harder to prove that I was capable, yet I'd already spent more than 20 years demonstrating that capability. What I needed was to recognise how the environments I'd been working in, the pressure I'd been carrying and the ways I'd adapted myself had gradually affected my self-belief. That understanding didn't change everything overnight, but it helped me stop questioning everything I knew about myself, and it's now a big part of the work I do with other experienced leaders.
If you've recognised something of yourself in this article, I'd encourage you to spend a little time looking back at your own career, not to dwell on what's gone wrong, but to understand what's changed and what you might need to do differently now. You might discover that you haven't lost the ability to be the leader you want to be. You've just lost some of the trust you once had in yourself.
On Tuesday 20 October, I hosted the first of my Exhausted, Not Broken masterclasses, When Did You Stop Trusting Yourself? We explored why capable leaders can lose self-trust, how sustained pressure and organisational change can contribute to this, and how to recognise the shifts in your own career. There's also a guided career timeline exercise to help you reflect on your own experiences.
I've split the recording into four shorter episodes, so you can watch them when you have time rather than needing to set aside a full hour. Watch the replay and download the handout
I'd love to hear what you recognise when you start looking back at your own career, and you're welcome to get in touch through my contact page.
Watch my free masterclass, When did you stop trusting yourself?, in four short episodes and download the career timeline handout. Or pre-register for my book, Exhausted, Not Broken, publishing in January 2027.
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