When did you stop trusting yourself?

If you can't answer straight away, you're in good company. Most people can't point to a moment that they started losing confidence in themselves. It was likely a gradual shift over a prolonged period. Maybe you had a new manager, and a restructuring, followed by a stretch of relentless pressure and a few years of adjusting who you are and how you show up to fit in. Nobody decides to stop trusting their own judgement, it just gets harder to find when you’ve left it for too long.

So when the doubt arrives, we do what feels easiest. We look at ourselves and decide something is wrong with us. Which is what happened to Sarah.

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What Sarah found

Sarah came to coaching at a career crossroads, feeling lost. Her career plan she’d designed years ago no longer felt right, but she didn't know what she wanted instead, and she'd started to wonder whether she could even do anything else.

However, before we talked about what her future direction might be, instead, we looked back. She drew a timeline of her roles, her promotions, the difficult periods and the moments she felt most confident and enjoyed her work.

She expected the pandemic to be the turning point. The pressure had been relentless and she remembered being exhausted, but as she looked further back, something else stood out. Years earlier she had worked somewhere she never felt she fitted in, where she often felt unheard, and where she began to doubt whether she could do her job at all. So, she left, and joined a company that suited her better. For a while her confidence came back. She was soon promoted and then the leadership team changed.

That was when she started to change too. She didn’t notice it at the time, but looking back she could see that it was then that she started to adjust her leadership style, said yes to look dependable and capable, and hid her uncertainty because she believed senior leaders were meant to have all the answers.

The timeline showed her what she hadn't seen; she had been adapting for years. She had once been someone who made decisions and used her judgement without questioning every move. That person hadn't disappeared, years of pressure and adaption meant that she had drifted from her. For the first time, Sarah believed there was something about her she trusted, someone to get back to.

Sarah is a fictional character, a composite of real experiences I had myself and hear frequently in my coaching conversations with leaders.

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Why am I sharing this?

Persistent self-doubt isn't always evidence that your capability has gone. Sometimes what changed was the environment, who was around you, the support you had, or how much of yourself you could bring to work. But if you can't see that, it’s natural that the only explanation you have is that it must be you who’s to blame.

I once walked away from my job and career believing that feeling like I wasn’t good enough was because the problem was me. It took me years, and a coaching qualification, to see what had actually changed around me. I talk about it in my conversation with Kirsty Baggs-Morgan, founder of Evolving HR for the "In Conversation With" series, which goes live on 14th October:

In Conversation With: Niki Corbishley, Noo Coaching

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Try it for yourself - look for the shift

Draw a horizontal line and mark the key moments in your career: roles, promotions, difficult periods, and the times you felt most confident and like yourself. Then, for each key milestone, ask:

• What was different about the environment?

• Who was around me?

• What strengths was I using?

• How much freedom did I have to be myself?

• What did that moment feel like?

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Look for patterns rather than a single cause. You aren't looking for someone to blame, you're gathering evidence of when your confidence moved and what moved it.

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If you develop leaders

This pattern often follows a change that is happening around a person for a prolonged period of time. It could be a restructuring, a new leadership team, shrinking support, uncertainty or anything that stops people being free to be who they are. They usually keep delivering, so nobody worries about them, but many leaders are privately struggling with the pressure, navigating uncertainty and feeling less and less capable in their abilities.

If you develop leaders, try asking them to map out their career and identify when things began to feel different for them. This will help them to remove any self blame if they're privately struggling with coping.

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Join me on Tuesday 20 October

I'm running a free one-hour online masterclass, Exhausted, Not Broken - when did you stop trusting yourself?, at 6pm UK time on Tuesday 20 October.

In the session I will help you to build your own timeline and leave with a one-page map that turns "what's wrong with me?" into "what changed around me?" and give you the tools to help you run this exercise with your own leadership team if that’s more relevant for you.

Register here.

If you can't attend, still register to get the recording.

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If this sounds like your story

This is one of the topics I explore in my book, Exhausted, Not Broken, which publishes soon. You can pre-register here and get early access as well as some bonuses.

If it’s not for you then please share this with other leaders it may help – some of the people you think are coping, will be privately struggling.

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