Confidence at Work Was Never Meant to Be Constant
There is a quiet assumption running through workplaces that people who perform well feel confident all the time. They walk into difficult meetings settled, take criticism in their stride and never lie awake replaying a conversation with their manager. It is an appealing picture, and in my experience it is almost never true. Confidence at work rises and falls with circumstances, in much the same way leadership does. You adapt, you realign and you grow, and along the way there will be stretches where your confidence sits well below its usual level.
After fifteen years of working with professionals at every stage of their careers, I have stopped asking people whether they are confident. The more useful question is what has been affecting their confidence lately, and whether they have noticed. Those two questions lead to very different conversations. The first invites a verdict on your character. The second invites an investigation, and an investigation is something you can actually act on.
Why Confidence at Work Fluctuates, Even After Years of Experience
Over the last three years I have worked with a considerable number of clients whose confidence had been worn down rather than never built in the first place. The causes varied considerably. Some had experienced bullying or a working culture that had turned toxic. Others were dealing with sustained pressure, a move into a new environment or an organisational change they had not chosen.
Confidence follows context more closely than ability
What struck me in nearly every case was that the person's ability had not changed. Their skills, their judgement and their track record were the same as they had been a year earlier. What had changed was the context around them, and that context had started sending them a different message about their worth. This distinction matters because people rarely make it for themselves while they are in the middle of it.
When confidence drops, the natural instinct is to look inward and conclude that something is wrong with you. Sometimes that conclusion is partly fair, and there is a skill to develop or a gap to close. Far more often, in my experience, the drop is a reasonable response to an unreasonable set of conditions. Treating it as a personal failing simply adds a second problem on top of the first.
Moving into a new organisation is one of the more predictable triggers, and I have written separately about building confidence in a new job. The harder situations are often the ones where you have not moved at all. The role and the work stay the same while the environment changes around you.
When a New Manager Arrives and Everything Is Wrong
One client came to me at exactly that point. He enjoyed his job, and at the heart of it he genuinely liked the work he did. Then a new manager arrived, and from his perspective nothing he did was right any more. Everything was wrong, and everything needed to be changed. By the time we met he was finding the situation close to unbearable and was on the verge of leaving.
What frustrated me was not the manager so much as the prospect of someone walking away from work he enjoyed. One relationship had become difficult enough to outweigh everything else about the role, and I see that more often than people might expect.
His situation is far from unusual. Research by the Chartered Management Institute and YouGov, published in 2023 as Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc needs better managers, drew on more than 4,500 UK workers and managers. It found that half of workers who describe their boss as ineffective plan to leave their organisation within the next year.
That figure is usually read as a retention problem for employers, and it certainly is one.
Read from the individual's side, it says something different. A large number of people are making significant career decisions in response to a single working relationship, often at the lowest point of their confidence. Some of those decisions will be made to escape a feeling rather than to move towards something better, and those tend to be the ones people regret.
What assertive communication looked like in practice
We had three sessions together. We explored how he could challenge the manager through more assertive communication, which meant saying clearly what he thought and what he needed without either swallowing it or turning it into a confrontation. We also worked on setting clearer limits around what he would accept and how he would respond when those limits were tested. The aim was not to win an argument but to give him a voice in the relationship again.
By the third session he was feeling noticeably better. He was also realistic about something important. He did not expect this manager ever to see his work as perfect, and he was not going to receive the validation he had been used to. So we turned our attention to resilience, building his ability to keep performing and keep his footing without relying on the manager's approval to tell him he was doing well.
A professional relationship, not a friendly one
He decided to stay in his role, and he kept plodding on. The friction with his manager did not disappear, but it became bearable, and he told me that learning how to speak up and set those clearer limits had made the real difference. Today he describes it as a professional working relationship. It is not a friendly one, and it may never be. He kept a job he enjoys, and to me that is what matters.
I share this because popular career advice tends to treat a difficult manager as a straightforward reason to leave. Sometimes leaving is the right call, particularly where there is bullying or the situation is affecting your health. But leaving is not the only form of success. A working relationship that is respectful and functional, rather than warm, is a legitimate outcome. It lets you keep the parts of the work that matter to you while you decide, on your own timetable, whether you still want to be there in two years.
The Colleague Who Always Seems to Be Doing Better
Comparison is one of the quieter ways confidence at work gets eroded. You notice the colleague at the next desk, or the person in the office round the corner, who always seems to be delivering. They present well, they appear unruffled and they look a wee bit shinier than you feel at that moment. It is easy to conclude they are simply better at the job.
What you are actually comparing, though, is your private experience with their public performance. You know about your own bad days in detail, including the email you rewrote four times. You see none of theirs. In my experience, the people who look most composed are often working just as hard to hold things together, and some of them are struggling far more than anyone around them would guess.
Someone looking more polished on a given Tuesday does not make you any less competent, and it does not change the value of what you bring. A far more useful measure is your own progress against your own starting point. Are you handling this situation better than you would have a year ago? Are you giving yourself credit for what you have actually done?
How to Rebuild Confidence at Work When It Dips
Work out what is actually affecting it
The first step is diagnosis rather than reassurance. Ask yourself what has changed recently, whether that is a new manager, a restructure, a heavier workload, a culture that has soured or a move into unfamiliar territory. Then separate what happened from the conclusion you drew about it. A manager rewrote your report, and that is what happened. The thought that you are no longer good at your job is a conclusion, and the evidence may not support it at all.
Give yourself credit, with evidence
Professionals whose confidence has dipped are usually very poor at crediting themselves, remembering the criticism in detail and forgetting the problem they solved last month. Write down specific things you have done well recently, the kind of examples a fair colleague would recognise. Credit grounded in evidence holds up under pressure in a way that general reassurance does not, which is why I often argue that confidence is rarely missing, but evidence often is.
It is also worth noticing how your strengths behave under pressure. The qualities that serve you well in normal conditions can be overplayed when you feel under threat. Someone strong in collaboration may start accommodating every demand to keep the peace. Someone with high standards may begin treating each correction as proof of failure. Recognising this allows you to dial a strength back rather than conclude you have lost it.
Prepare the one sentence that matters
Assertive communication is much easier when you have decided what you want to say before the difficult moment arrives. You do not need a script for the whole conversation, only the sentence that matters most. That might be "I want to get this right, so can you show me which part needs to change and what good looks like to you?" It might equally be "I can take this on, but something else will need to move, so which would you like me to hold?" Sentences like these keep the conversation on the work rather than on you.
Decide what you need from the relationship
With a difficult manager, it helps to be honest with yourself about what you are actually trying to achieve. If the goal is approval, you are depending on something outside your control. If the goal is a workable relationship in which you can do good work and be treated with respect, you have far more influence over the outcome. That single decision can lower the temperature considerably.
What Organisations Often Miss
Organisations frequently overlook how much a change of manager can cost them. New managers are often appointed with a mandate to improve things, and sometimes change is genuinely needed. What gets missed is the effect of signalling, week after week, that nothing the existing team does is good enough. People who enjoy their work and want to stay can be pushed to the edge of resigning, and the organisation may never connect the departure to the way the change was handled.
The fix is rarely complicated. New managers benefit from understanding what is already working before deciding what needs to change. Existing staff benefit from seeing that their experience is valued even while things are being reshaped. Supporting both sides of that relationship costs far less than replacing someone who never wanted to go, and much of our work with organisations begins at exactly this point.
If your own confidence has dipped and you want to understand why, the Career Confidence Strength Programme is built for experienced professionals in that position. It works through the real situations happening at work as they come up, rather than hypotheticals, over three months.
A Different Question to Ask Yourself
Confidence at work was never meant to be a fixed setting. It moves with the people around you, the pressure you are under and the changes you did not choose. The professionals who make the strongest progress are not the ones who never feel doubt. They are the ones who notice when their confidence has dipped, take the trouble to understand why, and keep doing good work while they rebuild it.
So the next time you find yourself wondering whether you are confident enough, try asking a different question. Ask what has changed around you, and what is still true about what you bring. The answer to the second part is usually far more substantial than the dip would have you believe.
By Paula Donnan
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
If this is affecting you, book in for a free 30-minute initial briefing to discuss the way forward.
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