You’ve done the course. You’ve kept the wins file. You’ve stood in the loo before the board meeting with your hands on your hips because somebody told you it changes your hormones (which is true by the way!).
You’ve written the affirmations. You’ve been told to take up space, speak up more, stop apologising, fake it till you make it.
And you still walk into the room feeling like you’re not enough.
Here’s what I want to say to you, and I want to say it plainly.
Nothing is wrong with you. The advice was wrong.
Why don’t I feel confident even though I’m good at my job?
Because competence and self-belief are not stored in the same place.
Your competence is evidenced. It’s in the results, the promotions, the team that would follow you anywhere. You can point at it.
The belief that you’re not enough isn’t made of evidence. It was formed long before any of this, usually in childhood, and it has been running quietly underneath ever since. So when you hand it more evidence, it has nowhere to put it.
This is why the wins file doesn’t work. You already have the wins. That was never the missing piece.
There’s a name for this in the research. Self-verification theory, from the psychologist William Swann, describes how people seek out, believe and remember the feedback that matches what they already think about themselves, even when what they think is negative. We don’t just hold a self-image. We defend it.
So the praise slides off and the one critical comment sticks for a fortnight. That’s not fragility. That’s a self-concept doing its job.
Is the confidence gap between men and women real?
You’ll have heard the statistic. Women apply for a job when they meet 100% of the criteria, men apply at 60%.
It isn’t a study. It has never been a study.
Curt Rice traced it back: Lean In cites a McKinsey article, and McKinsey’s lead author confirmed it came from executive interviews rather than data. There’s no research to examine.
When somebody did test it properly, the result was almost the opposite. The Behavioural Insights Team ran the experiment with over 10,000 jobseekers, measuring people against actual job requirements. Women applied when they met 56% of the criteria. Men applied at 52%.
And when Tara Mohr surveyed more than a thousand professionals about why they hadn’t applied, “I didn’t think I could do the job well” was the least common answer of all. Around one in ten women. Slightly more men.
They weren’t holding back because they doubted themselves. They were holding back because of what they believed about the process.
I want to be careful here, because this is where most of the internet overclaims. Some measured differences in self-reported confidence between men and women are real. They’re also inconsistent, often small, and they largely disappear among high performers.
What doesn’t hold up is the story built on top of them. That low confidence is the thing keeping women out of the room.
The most interesting study I found says something different again. Guillén, Mayo and Karelaia looked at 236 engineers, using colleagues’ and managers’ ratings alongside people’s own. Among the high performers, there was no visible confidence gap at all.
But confidence converted into influence for the men. For the women, it didn’t. Women gained influence only when they were also seen as warm.
Read that again, because it reframes the whole thing. You weren’t short of confidence. You were in a system where your confidence bought you less. Which is the double bind women leaders get put in, and it’s exhausting in a way that no amount of self-belief resolves.
Does “fake it till you make it” work?
The most famous version of that advice is power posing. Stand like a superhero for two minutes, change your hormones, change your life.
The lead author of the original study, Dana Carney, published a statement saying she does not believe the effects are real. She listed the problems in her own work and said she discourages other researchers from studying it.
A larger replication found the feeling of power, but none of the hormonal or behavioural effects. And the best meta-analysis to date, 73 studies, found no reliable benefit of an expansive posture over a neutral one. What it did find was that collapsing in on yourself makes things worse. So the effect, such as it is, comes from not slumping.
It is still on almost every confidence listicle on page one of Google.
And here’s the deeper problem with faking it. You already know. Every hour you spend performing a woman who believes in herself is an hour spent confirming to yourself that you are not her. The performance isn’t neutral. It’s evidence, filed against you, by you.
Why don’t affirmations work for me?
Because they were never designed for you.
In 2009 Wood, Perunovic and Lee ran the study everybody should know about. Participants repeated “I am a lovable person”. The people who already had high self-esteem felt better afterwards.
The people with low self-esteem felt worse. Worse mood, lower self-regard, worse than a control group that did nothing. And when they were told to focus only on the positive, they got worse still.
The intervention makes things worse for precisely the people it’s sold to.
There’s a mechanism, and you’ve felt it. Say something to yourself that contradicts what you believe, and the mind doesn’t accept it quietly. It argues. “I am confident and capable” brings every counter-example straight to the surface. You’ve just run a four-minute rehearsal of your own case against yourself.
This is why I don’t give my clients affirmations.
What if the advice feels like it’s asking me to become someone else?
Hold onto that feeling. It’s the most accurate thing you have.
Almost every confidence programme asks you to behave like a person you’re not yet, in the hope that you’ll catch up. Speak first. Interrupt. Take the credit. Don’t say sorry.
You can do all of that. Plenty of women do, at enormous cost, and it reads as inauthentic because it is. You’re running a performance on top of a belief that hasn’t moved.
The resistance you feel isn’t you being difficult, or not wanting it enough. It’s you noticing that the work is being done at the wrong level.
If it isn’t confidence, what is it?
It’s identity.
Not “I lack confidence”, which is about a capability. But “I’m not enough”, which is about who you are. Those two sentences feel similar and they behave completely differently.
A capability can be trained. An identity defends itself.
And it defends itself for a reason, which is the part almost nobody talks about. There’s a payoff. The belief that you’re not enough is very often the engine that built the career. It made you prepare harder, stay later, catch the thing everyone else missed. It works. So some part of you is not at all sure it’s safe to put it down, because what would drive you then?
That’s why it’s held on through every course you’ve been on. You weren’t failing to change it. You were protecting it.
I write about this in more depth in my guide to what imposter syndrome is and where it comes from, and in why you keep proving yourself.
Underneath the identity sit the beliefs running the whole thing. And underneath those sits your body. Belief work without nervous system regulation is thinking your way out of something your physiology decided before you got there. Your system is faster than your reasoning. It will keep voting.
That’s the whole of it. Identity, belief, nervous system. Three levels, none of which a confidence course touches.
What does real confidence feel like?
Quieter than you expect.
It isn’t a voice in your head saying you’re brilliant. It’s the absence of the voice saying you’re not. It’s walking out of a meeting that went badly and thinking, that went badly, rather than spending the evening building a case that you shouldn’t be there.
It’s being able to say I don’t know without your stomach dropping.
It’s turning your phone off on holiday, delegating the thing and not checking it, asking for help without rehearsing the sentence first, and letting go of perfectionism you’ve carried for years because you no longer need it to feel safe.
Notice that none of that is performance. Every bit of it is subtraction.
Real confidence isn’t something you add on top. It’s what’s already there once you stop defending an identity that was never true. This is what’s underneath burnout that looks like workload and is really about identity.
You were never short of confidence. You were carrying a belief that you had outgrown by about fifteen years.
Start with seven minutes
You don’t need another course telling you to stand differently.
Start by giving your brain and body something it can feel rather than something it has to argue with. My free seven-minute confidence visualisation does exactly that, and it works the opposite way round to an affirmation. You’re not telling yourself something you don’t believe. You’re letting your system experience the state first.
Download the seven minutes to confidence visualisation
When you’re ready to go at the identity underneath rather than the behaviour on top, that’s what my women in leadership programme is for. We work one to one on the beliefs, the nervous system and who you’re being, not on how you hold your shoulders.
