The More You Override Yourself, The Harder Confidence Becomes To Hold

15 Jun

A lot of women don't have a confidence problem in the way we usually talk about it. When something goes sideways, they're often the person everybody calls because they can read a situation quickly, work out what needs to happen and keep things moving while everyone else is still looking surprised. The difficulty isn't knowing what they think. It's trusting that response once it creates friction.

There's a version of confidence we talk about constantly. Speaking up. Taking risks. Asking for more. Those moments matter. But they're not where confidence actually lives day to day.

Confidence, at its quietest, is the ability to trust your own reading of your life. To let anger tell you something before you start arguing yourself out of it. To reach a clear answer and let it stand without immediately convening an internal committee to review it. This is the part that quietly unravels. In small, ordinary moments that don't look like confidence at all.

Women are genuinely good at understanding other people.

They can see why the colleague is under pressure, why the client is anxious, why the friend who only calls when she needs something has had a difficult year. That capacity is real and useful, right up to the point where it becomes a way of explaining their own experiences away.

She drafts a message naming the problem, then deletes it and rewrites it as "just checking in to see how you're going" and adds an offer to help. She tells herself she's being “collaborative”. What she's actually done is quietly transfer responsibility for a problem she didn't create onto herself.

Her partner assumes she'll rearrange her plans again. She's annoyed, but before that annoyance becomes a conversation, she's already calculating whether she can technically make it work. By the time the appointment is moved and the booking changed, the exchange that needed to happen has disappeared under the logistics.

She doesn't ask whether the assumption was fair. She asks whether she can justify resisting it.

She calls it patience. Flexibility. Being the bigger person. And sometimes it is those things.

But sometimes a woman knows exactly what she wants to do and doesn't want to deal with the reaction it might create.

So the decision gets reopened. Another opinion is gathered. The message is softened. The compromise is offered before anyone has asked for one. Every time that happens, her own first response loses a little authority.

The cost shows up in the texture of everyday life.

At work, it's the forty-minute email that only needed to say "I'm not available to take this on." It's leaving the meeting having said half of what she meant because the other half needed more softening than the moment allowed.

In business, it's the service she's outgrown but keeps repackaging, or absorbing the consequences of someone else's poor performance rather than naming the problem and calling that generosity.

At home, the pattern becomes visible when something finally gets dropped. The school form, the appointment she only notices because the reminder flashes up ten minutes before she's meant to leave. Her first thought isn't "why was all of this mine to remember?" It's "what's wrong with me lately?" She trusts the conclusion that she's failing long before she considers the possibility that too much has been placed on her.

Repeated self-override doesn't remove a woman's ability to think or decide. It makes her suspicious of what she already knows.

Her irritation starts needing supporting evidence. Her exhaustion has to become extreme before she lets it count. Her desire to change direction needs a business case, a fallback plan and preferably written approval from an imaginary board.

Confidence becomes conditional. She trusts herself after somebody else agrees, after she's gathered enough evidence, after she's found a way to disappoint nobody. That's an impossible standard. She starts looking outside herself for answers she already had.

That isn't reflection. It's just another way of not trusting herself.

Real confidence rarely looks like the version we're sold.

It looks like saying no and still feeling guilty afterwards. Letting somebody be disappointed without immediately trying to make that easier for them.

Sending the shorter message. Noticing you're about to explain yourself for the seventh time and deciding the explanation has already done enough work.

Sometimes it's admitting that you don't need more information. You're just waiting for the decision to stop feeling uncomfortable.

Confidence doesn't require a woman to become harder, louder or less considerate of others.

It requires her to stop treating her own experience as the least credible voice in the room.

That's the part many women have to practise.

Not finding their voice.

Trusting the one that was already there before they learnt to edit it for everybody else.

This blog post was written by Jen Radman, please find out more about her below and connect with her on Facebook if you’d like to chat more about how she can help you lead your business with confidence.