Confidence is not something you are born with, or without. And for many people in leadership, the moment that changes everything is the moment they stop waiting to feel ready.
Confidence is one of the most misunderstood concepts in leadership development. It is talked about as though it is a fixed personality trait: either you have it, or you don’t. This framing is not only unhelpful, but can be damaging, particularly for women who have been told (directly or indirectly) that confidence is something other people possess naturally, something they must feel before they’re allowed to step up.
In the world of ‘confidence’, no one has ever become more confident by being told ‘to be more confident’. ‘Jessica Schubert’
The reality is that confidence is not a feeling that precedes action. It is a result of action. It’s built through clarity about who you are as a leader, through preparation that creates certainty, and through accumulated evidence of your own capability. The myth tells women to wait until they feel ready. But the truth is that readiness comes from doing, not from waiting.
Women who remain trapped in the confidence myth spend years, sometimes entire careers, holding back, under-pitching themselves, waiting for a feeling that never quite arrives. They watch opportunities pass. They downplay their expertise. They over-prepare to the point of paralysis, or they stay silent in rooms where their voice would have changed the outcome. The cost is not just personal. Organisations lose the full contribution of some of their most capable people.
When women stop waiting for confidence to arrive and start building it deliberately, everything shifts.
They take up more space in rooms. They put their hand up for the roles they want (even if they don’t tick all the boxes). They speak with more authority, make decisions with less second-guessing, and stop shrinking their ideas to make others comfortable.
You can’t learn to swim from the side of the pool
Building confidence is a little bit like learning to swim. You cannot build swimming confidence on the side of the pool. At some point, you have to get in the water. And every stroke you take, however imperfect, is what teaches you that you can.
Susan didn’t need more capability. She needed an evidence file
Last year, I worked with Susan (not her real name), a senior manager in a large consulting firm who had been described by her peers as “one of the most capable people in the room”. A phrase she had heard more than once and never quite believed. Susan came to coaching because she had been offered a step up into a Director role and was seriously considering turning it down. Her reason? She didn’t feel confident enough.
When I asked Susan what confident enough would look like, she paused. She didn’t have an answer. What we uncovered over the following session was that she had been measuring her confidence against an imagined version of leadership (tough and unshakeable) that didn’t actually exist in any of the leaders she admired. She had been setting herself an impossible bar.
We worked on building what I call an evidence file, a deliberate, running record of moments where she had led well, initiated difficult conversations, made tough calls, navigated complexity, and delivered. Within weeks, Susan started to change her language, especially her inner dialogue. The tentativeness in how she described herself began to dissolve. Susan took the role. Six months later, she sent me a message: “I believe I was ready the whole time. I just didn’t have the evidence organised in a way I could see it.”
The gap was built. It can be rebuilt.
The landmark 2014 book The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman brought together extensive research showing that women consistently rate their performance lower than it actually is, while men rate theirs higher, regardless of actual results. This isn’t a quirk of personality. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that these confidence gaps are not innate, but are shaped by socialisation, feedback patterns, and environment from early childhood. In other words, the gap was built. Which means it can be unbuilt and rebuilt, on better evidence than the one we were handed.
Clarity: know your strengths and what you bring to the table
→ Action: do the thing, imperfectly if necessary
→ Evidence: record what went well and what you learned
→ Belief: update your self-perception based on real data
→ Clarity: repeat at a higher level
The myth tells women to start at Belief. The reality is you start at Clarity and build from there. The loop is the point: confidence is not a destination; it is a practice.
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” — Dale Carnegie
Stop waiting for it. Start building it
- Build your evidence file: start a running document, right now, of every piece of evidence that you are capable: positive feedback, problems you solved, moments you led well, decisions that landed. Confidence lives in evidence, not in feelings, and most women have far more evidence than they realise; they just haven’t organised it anywhere they can see it.
- Separate preparation from procrastination: preparation builds confidence. Over-preparation is often fear in disguise. Ask yourself honestly: am I preparing, or am I waiting? Set a threshold and commit to acting when you reach it, not when you feel ready.
- Borrow belief temporarily: when your own confidence is low, act from the belief others have in you while yours catches up. This is not performance. This is how confidence is built in the gap between where you are and where you’re going.
- Reframe the inner critic: when the voice says “you’re not ready,” ask it: “What would I need to see to believe I was?” Then go and build that evidence deliberately, rather than waiting for the feeling to change on its own.
If this is the gap you’ve been quietly carrying, this is the work I do with professional and executive women through coaching, and the heart of a new program launching soon with Business Women Australia. Reply to be among the first to know. jessica@intactteams.com