Why Confidence is Not a Personality Trait and How to Rebuild It During a Career Disruption
- May 26
- 9 min read
Anne-Sophie Gossan, founder of Inner Spark Coaching, supports individuals going through career transitions so they find meaningful direction, reignite their spark, and thrive. She brings calm, clarity, and deep empathy, and asks the questions that unlock their truths while holding space for both vulnerability and growth.
Most professional women don't lose confidence all at once. It gets lost in the background, in the small hesitations and avoided decisions, until a career disruption forces them to face it. Here's what's really going on, and what to do about it.
There's a moment most of us recognise but rarely admit to. You're staring at an email you've been meaning to send for three days. It's not complicated. You know what you want to say. But something keeps you from pressing send, and it's not the email.
I had that moment recently. One task, sitting in my inbox like a judge. When I finally stopped to ask myself what was actually going on, the answer surprised me: I'd attached a story to that email. “If I send this, everything changes.” That's not a productivity problem. That's a confidence dip, the kind that shows up weeks or even months before a big career decision forces itself onto the table.
This article is about that gap, the space between where you are and where you want to be. The small hesitations signal that something bigger is on its way. Most importantly, what confidence actually is, because I'd argue most of us have been thinking about it wrong.
What the research tells us about women and confidence at work
Before we talk about the solution, it's worth looking at the scale of the problem.
According to a 2024 study by HiBob, only 65% of women report feeling confident in their professional abilities, down sharply from 86% just two years earlier. Meanwhile, research published by employment site Indeed found that only 43% of women globally have ever asked for a pay rise, despite more than half believing they are underpaid. The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2024 report (the tenth anniversary edition) found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women are, a structural reality that chips away at confidence across entire careers.
These aren't numbers about incompetence. They're numbers about a confidence gap that is real, persistent, and costing women opportunities every single day.
Yet, and this is the part that matters, confidence is not fixed. It is not a personality trait you either have or don't. It is a practice, a series of small, consistent actions that build on each other over time, which means it can be rebuilt, but only once you understand where it went.
The confidence dip nobody talks about
Career disruptions (redundancy, a career change, returning after a break, a promotion that doesn't come, etc.) are often discussed as events, something that happens to you. But in my experience, both personally and in the work I do with professional women, the disruption almost always starts long before the event itself.
It starts with a small wobble. An avoided decision. A meeting you over-prepared for because you weren't sure you belonged in the room. A project you stayed on too long because leaving felt riskier than staying. A perfectly reasonable question you didn't ask because you didn't want to look like you didn't know.
These are not signs of weakness. They are signs that your confidence has begun to crack and that something in your career is asking for your attention.
The problem is that we tend to ignore these signals. We're busy. We push through. We tell ourselves we're fine. By the time the disruption becomes impossible to ignore, we've lost months, sometimes years, of time and potential.
What I want to offer you is a different way of reading these moments, not as failures, but as useful information.
Confidence isn't performative, it's consistent
We have a cultural image of confidence that does most of us a disservice. It tends to look like someone striding into a room and commanding it, certain, unwavering, never second-guessing themselves. That's not confidence. That's performance.
Real confidence is more ordinary than that. It shows up as the small decision to send the email, the moment you ask for clarity on a project you've been struggling with, the morning you say no to something that doesn't fit anymore, not with a speech, not with a big announcement, just simply because you trust yourself enough to choose differently.
I said no to something recently that a year ago I would have automatically said yes to. The difference wasn't indifference. It was finally trusting my own instincts enough to recognise it wasn't the right fit. That felt like nothing from the outside. From the inside, it felt enormous.
That's what confidence actually looks like in real life, not a reinvention, a decision. A small one, repeated often enough that it becomes a pattern, then a practice, then, eventually, a foundation.
Courage isn't the big move, it's what comes before it
What I've noticed in the women I work with is that we tend to wait for courage to arrive before we act. We imagine it will feel like certainty, like boldness, like knowing.
It almost never does. A client said something to me recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about: "I didn't feel brave. I'd just had enough."
That is courage, the real version, not the picture-perfect one. The kind that shows up when you've finally stopped going back and forth with yourself. When the cost of staying the same has exceeded the cost of changing.
Every meaningful career move I've ever witnessed, in my own life and in the lives of the women I coach, has started with that sentence, or one very much like it. This isn't working anymore. It's rarely obvious or sudden. It's usually said to yourself or an empty room. But it almost always gets things moving.
The research backs this up. A study in Frontiers in Psychology found that career adaptability (the ability to handle transitions and cope with change) is built not through grand gestures, but through accumulating small acts of agency: making decisions, taking responsibility, trying things. Courage is a muscle. You build it in the small moments, not the big ones.
So if you're waiting to feel ready, to feel brave enough, certain enough, prepared enough, the wait itself might be what's holding you back. The act of courage often comes before the feeling of it.
Self-discovery is not indulgent, it's protective
Here's a question I ask myself regularly: What have I learned about myself so far? My honest first instinct is usually to ignore it and find some chocolate instead. But when I face it and really think about it, the answers are usually the ones that matter most to how I work, how I rest, and how I make decisions for the rest of the year.
This year, I've learned that overwhelm is my first burnout signal. Not exhaustion. Not frustration. Overwhelm. It shows up as noise in my brain and a sudden urge to reorganise my entire life at 10 p.m.
Once I could see that pattern clearly, I could catch it early. Now, when the 10 p.m. reorganisation urge hits, I don't push through it. I pause and reset. I don't wait for the crash.
This might sound like small self-knowledge, but it has changed how I manage my time, my energy, and my boundaries in ways that add up fast.
Research strongly supports this kind of self-awareness practice. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich's study of nearly 5,000 people found that while 65% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. That gap, between the self we think we're managing and the self we're actually running on, is where burnout breeds and confidence slowly erodes.
Research published in Burnout Immunity (Harper Business, 2024) found that self-awareness works as an early warning system: people who learn to recognise their own early stress signals are significantly better placed to step in before those signals get out of hand. Self-discovery, in other words, is not a luxury. It's a professional strategy.
Every time I've handled a career disruption well, the turning point wasn't a sharper strategy or a better CV. It was understanding what I needed, what I'd finally let go of, and what I was actually ready for before I had all the evidence lined up.
Confidence grows when you stop taking your cues entirely from everyone around you.
What real confidence looks like (not the Instagram version)
Let me tell you about a client. I'll keep her anonymous, as I always do.
She came to me feeling stuck. She'd been in the same role for two years longer than she'd intended. She was good at her job. Her colleagues respected her. On paper, nothing was wrong. But she'd been silently struggling with a project that had no clear brief, no real feedback, and no way of knowing whether she was succeeding or failing. She'd told herself she should be able to figure it out. That asking for clarity would make her look like she didn't know what she was doing.
We worked together on one thing first: just asking the question. One honest conversation with her manager. She came back the following week and told me it had changed her entire workload. The project didn’t suddenly become easy, but she had stopped pretending she was fine with the ambiguity, and in doing that, she'd taken back some authority over her own experience.
That's it. That's the real version of confidence. Not a reinvention. Not a big pivot. One honest conversation she'd been putting off for months.
I've had my own version of this too. There was a period in my career where I kept trying to push through a project that was draining me. I kept telling myself I could handle it. The truth, which I knew but wasn't saying, was simpler: I'd changed, and the work hadn't kept up. The moment I said that out loud, to myself first and then to the people who needed to hear it, things got clearer fast.
Confidence is built in moments like these, not in the transformation, but in the honesty that makes the transformation possible.
Your confidence check-in
We're far enough into the year now to know what's working and what isn't. Most of us won't stop to ask.
Here's a simple check-in: five minutes, no overthinking:
What feels certain? Where in your work or life do you feel settled, clear, capable? These are the areas where your confidence is being practised. Notice them.
What feels unstable? Where are you second-guessing yourself, avoiding decisions, or over-explaining? These are the areas asking for your attention, not your judgement.
What's one thing you're avoiding? Not the task itself, but the story underneath it. What does it mean to you if you do it? What does it mean if you don't? That's where the real information lives.
What have you learned about yourself so far this year? Not about your work or your results, but about you, the you doing all of this. What do you know now that you didn't in January?
These aren't performance review questions. They're self-knowledge questions. Self-knowledge, as we've seen, is the foundation that real confidence is built on.
The first step is simpler than you think
Confidence doesn't require a plan. It doesn't require certainty, the right moment, or a significant move. It requires one honest answer to one real question. What's dimming your spark right now?
Just say it, to yourself, to someone you trust, or to me. Because in my experience and in the research, saying it out loud is almost always where things start to move. Saying it won’t solve it, but it means you've stopped pretending. And stopping the pretending is the first act of courage, every time.
If you're a professional woman navigating a career change, rebuilding your confidence after a disruption, or simply sensing that something needs to change, I'd love to have a conversation.
I offer a free 30-minute First Spark Session: no pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and what might be possible. You'll leave feeling heard, clearer, and with at least one concrete thought about your next step.
Read more from Anne-Sophie Gossan
Anne-Sophie Gossan, Transformational Career Coach
Anne-Sophie Gossan spent 25+ years in the corporate world navigating high-stakes environments and career transitions. She spent years building a career and a home, juggling the demands of raising two boys while holding down a very demanding job. When redundancy struck, it shook her confidence and identity in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She decided to qualify as a coach and to create Inner Spark Coaching: Reimagine Your Story, a safe space where her clients can reclaim the unstoppable version of themselves that’s always been there. Through coaching, conversation, and deep transformation, she guides individuals into their next chapter with clarity, confidence, alignment, and renewed purpose.
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