When did you stop trusting yourself?

Hi Reader

In January it will be five years since I stood in a car park, crying down the phone to Bob.

I’d just come out of a meeting where a decision was made about my role, the last in a long run of decisions that had been building up. Bob said, “Niki, come home.” I did, and on the Monday I handed in my notice, after twenty years building my HR career, with no plan at all.

For a long time that meeting was my whole story, that was the day I broke.

Later I added a second chapter - the pandemic, the uncertainty, and a new leadership team I no longer fitted with. I was more tired than I’d ever been, crying privately, and working harder and harder to be the leader I thought I needed to be rather than the one I naturally was. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was burnt out. I had also stopped believing I was good enough to do my job, even though nobody had ever told me that.

I even enrolled on an HR course because I thought I’d lost the ability to do my job, and found that everything they taught was exactly what I’d been doing for years.

It took me a couple of years, and my coach training, to see that I hadn’t stopped being capable at all. The world around me had changed and I had adapted to it, again and again, until I lost trust in myself.

I thought I’d finished working that out. Then a few weeks ago, whilst I was on a burnout coaching course, I realised it went back much further than I expected. Eight to ten years earlier I was in a job where I didn’t fit with a very assertive, dominant operational team, and I was already adjusting myself to cope. Before that, in my first leadership role, my manager told me, “You need to be a bit more corporate, Niki.”

I’ve been adapting who I am since my mid-30s, and I only noticed a few weeks ago.

On Tuesday evening I took a small group through the same exercise in my free masterclass, Exhausted, Not Broken: when did you stop trusting yourself? Afterwards, a few people told me that looking back along their own line, they could finally see why they’d felt like they were simply surviving in that role. I think that’s one of the most freeing things a capable leader can notice, because the question changes from “what’s wrong with me?” to “what was I adapting to?”

If you couldn’t make it, the replay is here: Masterclass Replay​

It runs for about 40 minutes in total, but broken down into 4 episodes for bitesize viewing. I cover why capable leaders lose trust in themselves, what survival mode looks like at work, and I walk you through the timeline. I’ve cut the quiet time while everyone was writing, so pause it when I ask you to draw your line.

Try it yourself

Here is a short version of the exercise I call Look for the Shift. Grab a pen, some paper and about 15 minutes.

1. Draw a line across your page. This is your career.
2. Mark the key moments over the last 8 to 10 years: job changes, promotions, a new manager, a restructure, a big project, a difficult period. Don’t overthink it.
3. Under each moment, jot down a few words on what was around you. What was your manager like? Your team? The culture? How did you feel (confident, stretched in a good way, stressed, uncertain)?
4. Now step back and look for patterns rather than a single cause:
   • Where do your confidence and enjoyment dip, and what was happening around you at that point?
   • What was different when you felt most confident and most like yourself?
   • Where did you start adjusting how you show up to fit in, and who or what asked you to?
   • What did you start doing to protect yourself? Saying yes to everything, over-preparing, staying quiet in meetings, carrying your team’s workload?
   • What surprised you?
5. Go back one job further than where you think it started. What do you notice?

Then ask yourself what you’d say to a colleague you respect if this were her timeline.

When you work through it, you may find, as I did, that your confidence didn’t disappear because something was wrong with you. It shifted when the things around you shifted, giving you something real to work with.

I’d love to hear what you notice if you'd like to reply and let me know.

And if something big surfaces that you’d like to talk through, you can book a strategy call with me.

Warmly,
Niki

P.S. My next free masterclass is on 24 November, all about the confidence myth. My book, Exhausted, Not Broken, comes out in January.