Where Did My Confidence Go? How High-Achieving Women Find Their Way Back to Themselves

When I first stepped into my career, I was unstoppable.

I knew it. The people around me knew it. There was a certainty in how I moved, how I spoke, how I walked into a room. I was not performing confidence. I simply had it.

And then, somewhere along the way, I did not.

It did not happen all at once. It crept in slowly, the way these things always do. More responsibility, higher stakes, a growing list of people depending on me. The higher I climbed, the more I was aware of everything that could go wrong. And somewhere in that climb, the unshakeable woman I started out as got very, very quiet.

A few years ago, a leader I respected looked at me and said, “What happened to your confidence? You had more a few years ago.”

She meant it kindly. She wanted to help. And she was right. I just did not have any words yet for where it had gone or how to get it back.

You Are Not Starting from Zero

Here is what most confidence advice gets wrong. It treats confidence like a skill you need to build, as if you are starting from nothing and need to accumulate enough experience, enough wins, enough credentials before you can finally feel it.

But for most high-achieving women, that is not the story. The story is that confidence was already there. It was the foundation you built everything on. And something covered it over.

Research from CDI’s Valuing Careers study found that 32% of women cite a lack of confidence as a major obstacle to achieving their career goals, compared to 25% of men. What that data does not capture is how many of those women were deeply confident earlier in their careers, and watched that confidence quietly erode as the stakes got higher and the pressures compounded.

This is a different problem than not having confidence. And it requires a different solution.

What Actually Erodes Confidence Over Time

The women I work with are not lacking confidence because they are not good enough. They are often lacking confidence because they have spent years in environments that rewarded performance over presence, output over identity, and doing over being.

When your worth becomes tied to how much you produce, every setback feels like evidence against you. Every mistake carries more weight than it should. You start scanning the room for what is expected instead of trusting what you know. You stop leading from the inside out and start performing from the outside in.

That performance is exhausting. And over time, it disconnects you from the part of yourself that was confident in the first place.

The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2023 report found that women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rate ever recorded, and at higher rates than men in leadership. One reason is burnout. Another is the grinding weight of navigating environments where they feel they have to prove themselves continuously. When proving becomes the mode you operate in, it is only a matter of time before something that felt natural starts to feel forced.

Confidence does not disappear. It gets buried under the performance of it.

The Four Practices That Bring It Back

What I have learned, both in my own journey and in working with the women I coach, is that confidence does not come back the way it left. It does not return through a single breakthrough moment or a perfectly executed presentation. It comes back in small, consistent practices that reconnect you to yourself.

Create space before the noise begins. Ten minutes in the morning, before the emails and the meetings and the requests, belongs to you. Breathe. Stretch. Journal. Set an intention. This is not a productivity hack. It is a practice of returning to yourself before the world tells you who it needs you to be that day. When you start the day from your own center rather than someone else’s agenda, you move differently. Somatic breathwork is one of the most direct tools I use for this, and I host a free monthly breathwork session for exactly this reason. If you have never tried it, it is a powerful place to start.

Take action, especially when you do not feel ready. Self-doubt lives in your head, in the spiral of overthinking and ruminating and replaying. Action quiets it. Not because the action is perfect, but because doing something, anything, breaks the cycle. Thirty minutes on the project you have been avoiding is more powerful than waiting for the conditions to feel right. The timing is never perfect. Small, consistent steps are what build the evidence your nervous system needs to feel safe moving forward.

Anchor to your commitment, not your comfort. When I had to give difficult feedback to someone on my team, I did not want to do it. It was uncomfortable. It felt like a risk. But I stayed anchored to who I had committed to being as a leader, someone who does not compromise standards and who tells the truth with care. That commitment was steadier than my comfort level. Leading from your values rather than your fear is one of the most direct paths back to confidence.

Celebrate what you did, not just what you did not. Most high achievers are expert at cataloging their gaps and blind to their wins. At the end of each day, acknowledge something you did well. Not to be falsely positive, but because your nervous system learns from what you give it. When you consistently focus only on what fell short, you train yourself to see yourself as always falling short. Shifting that pattern is quiet but cumulative work.

Confidence Is Not Something You Perform

This is the piece that matters most, and the one I come back to again and again in my coaching work and on The Way She Leads podcast.

The confidence I had at the start of my career was not a performance. It was a natural expression of who I was before the weight of proving myself accumulated. The path back is not learning to perform it more convincingly. It is returning to the self underneath the performance.

Something I talk about often is the difference between fawn and flow. When you are in fawn mode, you are scanning, accommodating, shrinking or overcompensating to stay safe. It is a survival response, and for many high-achieving women it becomes so habitual that it feels like personality. When you are in flow, you are operating from your actual center. Confidence is what naturally emerges from that place. It is not manufactured. It is uncovered.

That return requires nervous system work as much as mindset work. If your body does not feel safe in a high-stakes conversation, your confidence will collapse under the pressure no matter how much you have rehearsed it. This is why the practices above are not just mental. They are embodied. They regulate you before, during, and after the moments that matter.

This is the deeper work. And it is exactly what private coaching is designed to hold.

If you are done waiting to feel ready and want to actually find your way back, I would love to connect.