How do I build confidence at work?
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash;
You worked hard for the promotion. When it came through, you were excited and pleased.
Pleased with the recognition, the step up, and that your hard work had paid off. Then settling into the new role, your excitement wears off and a different feeling arises: the sense that you now have to deliver.
In theory you're qualified, afterall you got the job. But in practice you don't feel it.
So you sit in a meeting holding a view you're fairly sure is right, but you wait for someone else to go first, just in case.
Or you say your piece and then carry it around for the rest of the day, mulling it over, wondering if it landed alright. Then the results come in and the feedback is good, but somehow it still doesn't quite sink in.
And if you've come back from parental leave there may be the odd feeling that you're starting from scratch, feeling you've lost a bit of yourself while you were away.
If any of that sounds familiar, the question isn't whether you're capable. It's working out what's actually getting in the way.
At Turnaround Practice, we work across three pillars of confidence: skillset, mindset, and implementation.
Knowing which one needs attention is the first step to building confidence that holds up under pressure.
Each section below breaks down one pillar with a practical step you can take and a short video walking you through it.
What do I do when I feel underqualified for my role?
Sometimes there is a real gap. You've moved into a role or taken on responsibilities where you don't yet have the knowledge or experience of the ins and outs to do the job the way you'd like to.
That isn't self-doubt, but a skills gap, and naming it is the start.
The catch is that this pillar is often less straightforward than it looks. Some people can point to exactly what they're missing. Many can't. They feel behind without being able to point at what they are missing, and that vagueness is its own kind of pressure.
One person I worked with knew something wasn't working in her new role but couldn't identify what she actually needed to learn, because she didn't yet know what she didn't know. Working that out took time and a proper process, not a quick list.
So the step is to start mapping it:
Where do you get stuck?
What slows you down?
What do you find yourself avoiding?
Patterns surface once you look. From there you can work out what closes the gap, whether that's mentoring, collaboration with a peer, a formal course, a qualification, coaching or a conversation with someone who has already done what you're trying to do.
Sometimes the hardest part is seeing the gap clearly in the first place, which is exactly the work worth doing with help.
Once you start closing it, the confidence follows, because it's based on skills and experience as a sound foundation.
Why do I keep second-guessing myself at work?
This is different from a skills gap. When self-doubt is the issue, you already have the skills but something pulls your attention away from using them when it matters.
You overthink decisions or tasks you're perfectly qualified for, hold back in moments where you know you could contribute, or filter out your own good work while amplifying everything that didn't go perfectly.
This is a mindset pillar issue, and the important thing to understand is that self-doubt is a pattern, not a personality trait. It's something you do, not something you are.
It's also far more common than it feels from the inside. A 2020 KPMG study found that 75% of executive women experience impostor feelings at work despite clear evidence of their success. And if you've assumed everyone else is steadier, the numbers say otherwise.
There's the part that rarely gets said: this is not a women's problem. When Korn Ferry surveyed 10,000 professionals worldwide, 49% of men reported impostor feelings, slightly more than the 44% of women who did. Self-doubt under pressure is close to universal.
What differs is who admits it. In my practice, and at the coaching organisation I work alongside, women name a mindset issue early and ask to work on it. Men tend to take far longer to say it out loud, if they say it at all.
So the story that confidence is something women lack and men simply have is not what the evidence actually shows. The feeling is shared. The willingness to name it and do something about it is what varies.
That matters for you, because it means the issue isn't a flaw in your wiring as a woman or as a leader. It's a pattern, a common one, and patterns can be worked with.
A practical starting point: notice when your attention shifts from the task in front of you to the doubt about yourself. That shift is the pattern.
Once you can spot it, you can practise bringing your focus back to what you're actually doing. With practice the redirection becomes more automatic, and your presence changes because your attention stays where it belongs.
How do I stop feeling like I'm faking it in a new role?
Feeling underconfident when everything around you is unfamiliar is completely normal. New team, new dynamics, new expectations. This is the implementation pillar, and it's where skillset and mindset come together through action.
The step to take here is to focus on what you already know rather than what you don't yet know about this particular environment.
Set realistic goals, execute on them, allow yourself time to learn and adapt as you walk along. Each completed cycle provides feedback and insights you can't design on a whiteboard.
It builds real evidence that you can perform in this context, and that experience creates the subconscious belief confidence is built on.
This kind of confidence can't be coached or studied into existence. It only comes from doing the work, gaining experience, and moving ahead. And learning to live with imperfection and experimentation.
How do I build confidence when I don't know where to start?
Go back to the first question: when you feel underconfident, is it because you don't have the skill yet, because self-doubt gets in the way of skills you already have, or because you haven't had enough experience in this particular context?
Most of the time it isn't a single global thing called confidence at all. It's one of three pillars out of alignment.
You can be perfectly steady in yourself and still get insecure when your skillset, mindset, and implementation fall out of step in a new context.
That's not a diagnosis of you as a human or an assessment of you as a professional, but useful information telling you that confidence isn't static but situational, and showing you where to put the work.
The answer points you to the section above that will help most.
For a practical technique to build the foundation for a confident mindset, get the free audio here.
About the author
Sabine Lehner is an executive coach and hypnotherapist who works with female leaders and professionals ready to step into confidence and stop managing self-doubt, by changing what's actually driving it.
With a background of more than a decade leading large-scale organisational transformations across Australia, Europe, Asia and the US, and executive coaching since 2014, she brings corporate context from lived experience.
Through Turnaround Practice in Sydney, she combines strategic coaching with deep mindset work that enables the most effective solutions, because you can't think your way out of a subconscious pattern, and mindset work alone won't build your strategy.
