Losing Confidence at Work Is Rarely About Ability
When someone contacts me about their confidence, it’s very rarely because their skills have suddenly gone. Something around them has changed. The workload has crept up, the role has grown without any extra support, or the job they’re doing now looks nothing like the one they signed up for. They usually start by telling me their confidence has gone. Only when we talk it through does the change behind it come out.
Over the past year, I’ve had four teachers get in touch with me, which surprised me a wee bit. Nearly all of them were thinking about leaving teaching altogether. The teaching itself wasn't the problem, because they all knew they could do it. It was the workload that had grown around it, and the feeling that they were carrying far too much on their own. I hear the same from people in other jobs too, not as often, but usually when the work has piled up and burnout is starting to creep in. Whatever their situation, they tend to ask me the same question. Is it me, or is it the job?
It’s an important question when you’re losing confidence at work, because how you answer it shapes what you do next. If you decide the problem is you, you’ll put your energy into fixing yourself. If the problem is really the situation you’re in, that energy won’t get you very far.
Why Losing Confidence at Work Usually Starts With the Situation
When you’re under pressure for a long time, you start noticing different things. Your attention goes to what’s late, what’s gone wrong and what you haven’t managed to get done. After a few months, that becomes the evidence you judge yourself on. The things you still do well stop registering, partly because they come easily to you and partly because there’s no time left to notice them. So people end up deciding they’re not as good as they thought, when really the conditions around them have changed.
I can understand why people take it personally. Work tends to reward the person who copes, and saying a role has become too much can feel like admitting you were never up to it in the first place. So people keep going, take on more, and quietly think less of themselves. They don’t often stop to ask whether the job they’re measuring themselves against is still the job they were hired to do.
In my experience, it’s very rarely that people lack the skills or the experience. The situation puts pressure on them, and they stop seeing who they are. Feeling less confident doesn’t mean you’ve become less able, even though it can feel exactly like that from the inside.
What It Looks Like in Practice
I’ll call her Niamh, though that isn’t her real name. Niamh graduated, spent a couple of years in interim posts, and eventually got a permanent job in a secondary school. Two years in, she contacted me. She wasn’t quite in tears, but you could feel the stress in her from the start of our conversation. The job she’d imagined and the job she was actually doing were very different, and she felt she was carrying most of the pressure on her own.
We sat down and talked through where her strengths really lay. Niamh was involved in a lot, both in school and outside it, and as we talked it became clear that the things she did outside school were giving her far more satisfaction than the work inside it. We looked at those interests and what kinds of careers they might lead to. About three weeks later we met again for a more structured session. By then she’d thought hard about the roles she was interested in and had made a decision. She liked parts of teaching, but a lot of what came with it wasn’t what she’d expected and wasn’t something she wanted to keep doing.
Niamh had a degree in computer science and wanted to build on that background. She was considering becoming a trainer with an IT organisation, drawing on both her teaching experience and technical knowledge. At the end of the session, we looked at how she might approach employers and what they’d be looking for, and I emailed her some strategies afterwards. I don’t know how far she’s taken it since.
What I do know is that you could see the difference in her by that second session. The overwhelm had eased. Nothing about her ability had changed in those three weeks. She had the same degree, the same classroom experience and the same strengths she’d always had. The difference was that she’d stepped back far enough to see herself properly again, and that gave her something solid to make a decision from.
The Hidden Cost of Carrying It Alone
Mental Health UK’s Burnout Report 2026, based on YouGov polling of more than 4,500 adults, found that 35% of workers didn’t feel comfortable telling a manager when they were experiencing high or extreme levels of pressure or stress. That figure has gone up by three percentage points since the charity’s 2025 report.
It’s about stress rather than confidence, but in my experience the two tend to go together. When people don’t feel able to say the load has got too heavy, they carry it quietly, and they usually come up with their own explanation: that something must be wrong with them. Keeping quiet protects their reputation for a while. Over time, though, it wears away at how they see themselves.
The cost often shows up as a poor decision made at the worst possible time. When people lose sight of what they’re good at, they tend to either stay put far longer than they should or leave suddenly without a clear idea of what they’re moving toward. Both decisions come from an inaccurate picture of themselves. The skills that would help them choose well are still there, but they can’t see them clearly enough to use them.
What Managers Can Miss
When someone who has always been reliable goes quiet, contributes less or starts missing deadlines, it’s easy to see it as a performance issue and respond with closer checking or a conversation about what they need to improve. That can confirm the very story they’ve already started telling themselves.
A better starting point is to ask what has changed in their role, and whether the support around them has kept up. Sometimes the most useful thing a manager can do is notice that the job has grown, and say so out loud. That simple acknowledgement can take a lot of weight off someone who has been quietly blaming themselves.
Why “Just Push Through” Can Make It Worse
The usual advice on confidence is to act before you feel ready. Speak up sooner, take on the stretch project, back yourself and let the feeling catch up. In the right circumstances, that works well, and I’ve written about confidence in that context before in Confidence at Work Is Not the Same as Fearlessness. When the challenge is something new, like a first presentation or a step up in responsibility, doing the thing builds the evidence, and the evidence builds belief.
When you’re already overloaded, though, the same advice can make things worse. Pushing through just becomes another thing to do when you’re already carrying too much. And when it doesn’t give you the lift it’s supposed to, it becomes one more sign that you’re falling short. You end up working harder on the wrong problem, trying to fix your confidence when the thing that needs attention is the situation that wore it down.
So I’d always ask whether a confidence problem is really a confidence problem. If someone has been coping with a growing workload for a long time, courage usually isn’t what’s missing. What they need is a bit of distance, a fresh perspective and an honest picture of what they bring.
What to Do When Pressure Is Clouding the Picture
There’s no single right answer here, and what helps will depend on your own circumstances. But there are a few things worth trying if your confidence has dropped and you suspect your situation has played a part.
Start by separating the job from everything that’s built up around it. It can help to write down what the role was supposed to involve, and then what it actually involves now. The gap is often bigger than people expect, and seeing it written down makes it easier to stop treating it as your own failing.
Then notice where your energy still goes. For Niamh, the clue was in what she was doing outside school. For you, it might be a particular kind of project, a part of the job you’d happily do more of, or something people come to you for that never appears in your job description. Where your energy goes is useful information, because it usually points to what you’re good at rather than what you’re lacking.
It’s also worth asking which parts of the role you’d keep if you could. Niamh didn’t reject teaching completely. She liked parts of it and was clear about the parts she didn’t want, and that gave her options. Without that, the choice can look like staying in something that’s wearing you down or walking away from everything you’ve built, and neither is a good place to make a decision from. If you’re already weighing up a move, my piece on facing a career crossroads looks at that in more depth, and if you’ve recently started somewhere new, Building Confidence in a New Job covers those early months.
Finally, talk it through with someone who isn’t part of the pressure before you make any big decision. It sounds simple, but people are often surprised by how much changes once they say it all out loud. Sometimes just stepping back and having a proper chat with someone does more than any strategy.
A Different Question to Ask Yourself
If your confidence has taken a knock recently, try putting aside the question of what’s wrong with you. Ask yourself instead what has changed around you, and how long you’ve been carrying it. The skills and experience that got you this far haven’t gone anywhere. The more honest question is whether you’ve stopped being able to see them, and who might help you see them again.
If you’d like some space to step back and get a clear picture of what you bring, a Career Positioning Consultation is a good place to start. We’d look at your strengths, where they fit best and what your next step might be.
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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