For the majority of my career, I was pretty confident in my ability to do my job. I loved my work, and I think that was partly why I did well. I enjoyed the challenges that came with leadership, trusted my judgement and was generally comfortable making decisions, knowing that if something didn't go to plan, I could look at what had happened and adjust accordingly.
I remember when I got my first role as a General Manager. I was in my early thirties and the only woman in my boss's leadership team, which was made up of men who all had significantly more years in business than I did at the time.
Looking back, it wouldn't have been unreasonable for me to question whether I was experienced enough to be sitting at that table, but interestingly, I don't remember ever feeling that way.
My role in the company was new, and I was introducing eCommerce and multichannel capabilities, so there was no shortage of people questioning what I was building. But despite that, my confidence held. I'm sure being part of a supportive leadership team played a role, but if I was ever going to experience a real lack of confidence in my career, I would have thought it would have been then.
Instead, it happened much later, when I was well established in the organisation I was working for.
I'd delivered strong commercial results, received great performance reviews, earned promotions and built highly engaged teams. I had plenty of evidence that I was capable and doing a good job.
And yet, over a relatively short period, I started questioning my abilities in a way I never had before. It felt as though I'd gone from being a confident and capable leader to someone who was constantly doubting herself almost overnight, and the hardest part was that I couldn't work out what had changed.
What I find interesting, looking back, is the contrast between those two points in my career. When I had relatively little evidence of what I could do, I felt confident. And when I had years of experience and achievement behind me, I didn't.
Which made me realise that my confidence couldn't have been coming entirely from the evidence in the first place. And that also helped explain why all the evidence in the world wasn't helping me get it back.
When losing confidence changes how you see everything
One of the things I hadn't anticipated about losing confidence was how all-encompassing it would become.
A question from my boss about a decision I'd made could send me into hours of overthinking. Feedback I would previously have seen as a normal part of doing my job suddenly felt like evidence that perhaps I wasn't performing as well as I thought.
But it went beyond questioning my ability.
I became increasingly negative, defensive and reactive, which wasn't at all how I'd been used to operating. Things that previously wouldn't have bothered me started frustrating me, and I found myself questioning other people's decisions and becoming mistrustful of their intentions.
And initially, much of that frustration felt justified. I thought the problem was what other people were doing, the decisions they were making or the way things were being handled.
But gradually I noticed that it wasn't just one person or one particular situation. I seemed to be having the same experience with more and more people, and that was when I started to wonder what was really going on.
Because while I was losing trust in the people around me, I was also losing trust in myself.
I remember sitting in a meeting and feeling myself becoming overwhelmed with emotion, which was something I hadn't experienced at work before. I was embarrassed by my reaction and immediately worried about what my boss might think. Would he see it as a sign of weakness? Would he start questioning my ability to lead?
What strikes me now is how quickly I'd taken one uncomfortable experience and turned it into something much bigger about my capability.
And that was happening in other situations too.
I'd hesitate over decisions I would previously have made quite comfortably, then become frustrated with myself for being indecisive. I'd react defensively to feedback and then worry about why I'd reacted that way.
Every time I noticed myself behaving differently, it gave me another reason to question whether I was as capable as I'd always believed.
What I couldn't see at the time was that my self-doubt was influencing how I behaved, and then I was using that behaviour as evidence that the self-doubt was justified.
I was starting to create the very outcome I was most afraid of, and because I could see myself changing, it became increasingly difficult to believe that my concerns weren't justified.
Why it's harder when confidence has always come naturally
Part of what made this experience so difficult was that I'd never really had to think about confidence before.
I'd always assumed it was simply something I had, rather than something I needed to know how to build and maintain.
So when it disappeared, I didn't have much to fall back on. And because I'd always considered myself a confident person, I found it difficult not to interpret what was happening as a sign that something fundamental about me had changed.
I've since come to understand that confidence isn't necessarily something we either have or don't have. It's something we can cultivate, and an important part of that is learning to recognise when our thinking is undermining our ability to trust ourselves.
I also now know that changes in confidence can occur during perimenopause, and that may well have played a part in my experience. But whatever initially contributed to how I was feeling, I'd developed a pattern of thinking that was keeping the self-doubt going.
And fortunately, that was something I could start doing something about.
The question that helped me rebuild my confidence
What eventually helped me was learning to ask myself one question.
What is actually true right now?
It sounds incredibly simple, and it is, but what made it so useful was that it helped me separate what was actually happening from the meaning I was giving it.
For example, if I received an email from my boss and immediately started worrying that I'd done something wrong, I would ask myself what was actually true in that moment.
And more often than not, the answer was simply that I'd received an email.
Everything else, including what I thought he might be thinking about me, was an interpretation I'd added.
That didn't mean there was never anything to be concerned about, or that every reaction I had was unjustified. But I'd become so accustomed to interpreting situations through the belief that I wasn't good enough that I was no longer questioning whether those interpretations were accurate.
The more I practised separating what had happened from what I was making it mean, the easier it became to look at situations more objectively.
And gradually, I started trusting my own judgement again, without constantly needing reassurance from the people around me.
Looking back, I think that's what I had misunderstood about confidence for much of my career. I'd always assumed that being good at my job was what made me confident, so when my confidence disappeared, I naturally questioned whether I was still capable of doing it.
But my experience had shown me something quite different.
I'd been confident when I had relatively little experience, and I'd lost confidence when I had more evidence than ever that I knew what I was doing.
My ability hadn't suddenly disappeared. What had changed was the meaning I was giving to the things happening around me.
And until I started questioning that, no amount of evidence about what I'd achieved was going to convince me otherwise.
