Building Confidence in a New Job: Why Curiosity Works Better Than Certainty
The question nobody raises at induction
Somewhere in the first week of a new role, a quiet question tends to surface. It is rarely about the systems, the parking or whether the team will be friendly. It is closer to this: what if the person who did so well at interview does not turn up on Monday? Experienced professionals feel this as sharply as anyone, and sometimes more so, because they have spent years being the person others relied on.
I have spent over fifteen years supporting people through career moves, and I would not read that question as a sign that someone has made the wrong decision. It usually reflects something more practical. Your skills, your judgement and your strengths travel with you into a new job, but the proof of them does not. The track record, the colleagues who knew what you could do and the reputation you built over years all stay with the old employer. You arrive with everything that made you good at the work and very little of the evidence that told you so.
That is why building confidence in a new job is often harder than people expect, and why the standard advice so often misses the mark. You are told to project confidence until you start to feel it. My own experience of starting a new role points somewhere quite different. Confidence came later, and what got me through the early weeks was curiosity.
Why the first months carry so much weight
McKinsey's HR Monitor 2025, which surveyed organisations and employees across Europe and the United States, found that 18% of new hires leave during their probationary period. The survey does not attribute those departures to any single cause, and it would be wrong to put them all down to confidence.
What the figure does show is that the early months are a consequential part of the employment relationship, both for the organisation and for the person starting the role. That is often the period in which you are still finding your footing while colleagues and managers are also beginning to form an impression of how you work.
Much of that uncertainty comes from losing your reference points all at once. In your previous role you knew who made decisions, which battles were worth having and how your contribution landed. In a new role those have to be rebuilt, and until they are, your own judgement can feel less reliable than it actually is. Your new colleagues seem to move through the day with ease, but that ease comes from time in the organisation you have not yet had, not from ability you lack.
This is easy for organisations to miss. Induction often gives considerable attention to systems, policies and processes. What can receive less attention is how the new person does their best work, what information they need early and how they prefer to learn. A new starter who goes quiet in the early weeks can sometimes be misread as lacking confidence or ability when they may simply be short of information, and first impressions inside a team tend to form quickly.
What it looked like for me
The move I remember most clearly was going from training administration into a training role. I had worked around training for several years but had never delivered it myself, so it was quite a jump up for me. It also meant going from sitting at a desk to standing at the front of a room. To be honest, it was terrifying. I did no real preparation beforehand and simply waited for the first day to arrive.
That first day was about fact-finding. I wanted to understand what the role involved, when I would be expected to start delivering and what the move meant in practice, because it was quite different from anything I had done before. I was handed a massive manual. I was fortunate that another trainer took the time to walk me through how she worked, and that four of us were starting at the same time, which really did help.
I had six weeks before I would be delivering a full week-long course. Being me, I went through the materials several times and started planning sessions in my head long before I needed to. What I could not prepare for were the people. You can read every resource available, but you do not know how a group will respond until they come through the door and you start working with them. What I wanted was enough ready to work with whoever came through the door and help them, rather than trying to predict every situation beforehand.
For the first two days of delivery, my stomach was in knots. Suddenly there was a room full of people looking at me. I got there, though, and part of getting there was giving myself a bit of a break. I got through day one, then day two, and I counted each of those as a win. That same move taught me something else about recognising strengths I had never valued, which I have written about separately.
Looking back, I would do one thing differently. I would try to get down to see the place beforehand and meet a few people, so that the first day was not my first contact with everything at once.
Curiosity did more than confidence
What strikes me now is that curiosity did more for my nerves than any effort to feel confident. Fact-finding gave the fear somewhere useful to go. Each question I asked about the role, the resources or the people replaced a vague worry with something concrete I could work with, and the more I understood, the less there was to be anxious about.
The pressure to appear confident works against this. If you believe you should already know the answers, asking questions feels like admitting a gap, so the questions go unasked and the uncertainty stays where it is. The longer a question is left, the more awkward it becomes to raise, even though the answer would have taken a colleague a minute to give. Treating the early weeks as a period of finding out, rather than proving yourself, can reduce some of that pressure.
Curiosity about people matters as much as curiosity about the work. If you are naturally shy, the early weeks will ask more of you, and that is worth acknowledging rather than hiding. The answer is not to perform a personality you do not have. It is to break the ice gently, with small questions about what people are into or how they spend their time outside work. I nearly always ask about pets, because people generally love talking about them. Those small exchanges can help you begin to understand how your new colleagues communicate, what matters to them and how relationships work inside the team.
Where preparation helps and where it stops
Preparation matters, and I would not have wanted to walk into that first week of delivery without having gone through the materials. It gave me something solid to work from. The difficulty is that preparation has a ceiling. However many times you read the resources, they cannot tell you how a group will respond, how a stakeholder prefers to receive difficult news or which of your ideas will land. Those answers only arrive once you are in front of the people.
The useful question is what you are asking your preparation to do. Used to get you ready to respond, it is valuable. Used as a way to remove all uncertainty before you start, it will always fall short, because the uncertainty that matters sits with people you have not yet met. The aim is not to have every answer ready. It is to have enough in hand that you can work with whatever actually happens, which is what I was trying to do with those materials.
What building confidence in a new job actually depends on
A new role will often stretch you in some way, and the useful question is what kind of stretch you are experiencing. A productive stretch develops something new while still drawing on the strengths you brought with you. Persistent friction deserves a closer look. It may mean the role is asking you to work against your strengths, perhaps because you have tried to copy how everyone else operates. It can also point to unclear expectations, missing support, a skills gap or simply a working environment that does not suit you.
Some adaptation to a new workplace is sensible, because every team has its own rhythms and learning them is part of settling in. But if you find yourself drained by the core of the job rather than by its newness, it is worth working out which of those causes you are dealing with. The answer affects what you do next, whether that is asking for different information, changing how you approach a task or having a more candid conversation with your manager. If the new role is also your first time managing people, the stretch is larger again, and I have written separately about what to do in your first 90 days as a manager.
Confidence becomes more durable when it is supported by your own evidence, rather than relying only on reassurance from other people. Praise from a credible manager is welcome and can genuinely help, but on its own it rarely survives the next difficult week. What holds is what you have seen yourself handle. I always say to people, celebrate the wee wins. Getting through a first presentation, resolving a problem nobody else had picked up or simply surviving a demanding week all count. Noticing them is how you start to rebuild the evidence you left behind, and starting from strengths rather than gaps is also the basis of my Internal Development work.
The signs that this is working are quieter than people expect. Questions that once felt urgent start to sort themselves into the ones that matter and the ones that can wait. Decisions you would have checked with someone in the first month become ones you simply make, and you find yourself knowing who to involve before anyone tells you. None of this feels dramatic at the time, which is why it is worth stopping occasionally to notice it.
A question worth asking this week
Think about the first weeks of your current role, or the one ahead of you. How much of your energy is going into looking as though you belong, and how much into finding out? Looking certain can feel safer, but it gives you very little evidence to rely on when a harder week comes. Finding out can feel slower and more exposing, but every question answered, decision made and small problem handled begins rebuilding the record you left behind. Your strengths came with you. The real question is whether you are giving yourself enough opportunity to see them working here.
By Paula Donnan
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
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