Why Successful Women Lose Confidence at Work: The Hidden Cost of Managing How You’re Perceived

6 Sept

Latasha Baynham - Coaching - Why Successful Women Lose Confidence Blog

It can be confusing to reach a point in your career where you are more experienced, more capable and perhaps more senior than you have ever been, yet find yourself second-guessing things that once felt relatively straightforward.

You may notice yourself rewriting an email several times because you are worried it sounds too direct, replaying a meeting on the journey home wondering whether you came across the wrong way, or adding far more explanation than you originally intended. In the moment, these things can seem small. You may tell yourself you are being careful, thoughtful or diplomatic.

But when this starts happening regularly, something else may be going on.

Many successful women are not only managing the work in front of them. They are also managing how their confidence, authority and ambition might be perceived by the people around them.

Over time, that can become exhausting.

The first job is doing the work. The second is monitoring yourself while you do it.

And when more of your attention starts going towards questions such as How am I coming across? Was that too direct? Should I soften this? Did I say too much?, it can begin to feel as though your confidence has disappeared, even when your capability has not changed at all.

Why can confidence become harder as women become more successful?

We often assume that confidence should grow naturally with experience. The longer you have been doing something, the more evidence you should have that you are capable and, therefore, the more confident you should feel.

In reality, career progression can introduce a different kind of pressure.

As you become more senior or visible, there may be more attention on how you communicate, how you lead and how other people experience you. The decisions are bigger, more people may be watching, and the behaviours associated with leadership can come with conflicting expectations for women.

Research around role congruity and the leadership double bind has explored this tension for years. Women may be expected to demonstrate confidence, authority and decisiveness in order to progress, while at the same time being judged against expectations that they remain warm, accommodating and likeable. Catalyst described this as a “double bind” in which women can be seen as “too soft” or “too tough” depending on how they lead. (Eagly & Karau, 2002, Role Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders. Catalyst, The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership.)

That can create a difficult balancing act.

Be ambitious, but do not appear intimidating.

Be successful, but remain likeable.

Be confident, but not too much.

Speak up, but do not overreach.

And that balancing act matters because people learn from how they are received.

You notice when a direct comment lands differently from the way you expected. You notice when a man is described as decisive for behaviour that earned you feedback for being abrupt. You notice who is encouraged to speak more forcefully and who is told to soften their approach.

None of that has to be stated explicitly for you to start adapting.

When self-monitoring starts to feel like self-doubt

One of the patterns I see with highly capable women is that the self-editing often begins in very ordinary ways.

It may be adding more context than is really necessary because you do not want to sound too direct. It may be holding back an idea until you are more certain of how it will land, softening a request that did not originally need softening, or thinking about how other people are reacting while you are still trying to make your point.

Individually, those moments can seem insignificant.

Collectively, they can become another job alongside the one you are actually being paid to do.

You are no longer only concentrating on the work itself. Part of your attention is also monitoring how you are performing the work, how people are reacting and whether you need to adjust yourself in response.

That can take a surprising amount of energy.

And this is where I think confidence can sometimes be misunderstood.

The problem may not be that you suddenly know less than you used to. It may be that less of your attention is available to access what you know because so much of it has moved towards managing how you are being perceived.

Being able to read a room is useful. Knowing how to adjust your message for different audiences is part of good communication. Diplomacy, judgement and emotional intelligence all matter at work, but those strengths can become tiring when they are always switched on.

If you are speaking in a meeting while simultaneously wondering whether you sound too confident, too uncertain, too direct, too apologetic or too ambitious, you are trying to process two things, or even 200 things, at once.

You are thinking about the substance of what you want to say while also managing yourself as you say it.

Over time, that can begin to affect how confident you feel. You may start preparing more than you used to, hesitating over decisions you would previously have made comfortably, or leaving conversations frustrated because you did not quite say what you actually wanted to say.

Women can start shrinking themselves in rooms they have already earned the right to be in.

And sometimes the person doing that shrinking is not someone early in her career. She may be highly experienced, respected and successful on paper.

The question then becomes less about whether she is capable and more about how much emotional effort it is taking to continually prove that capability.

Has your confidence disappeared, or has your attention moved?

This distinction matters because if you assume the problem is simply I need to be more confident, you may end up trying to fix the wrong thing.

Sometimes confidence genuinely has taken a knock. A difficult manager, redundancy, exclusion, a failed promotion process, burnout or a period of sustained criticism can all affect how somebody sees themselves.

But sometimes the issue is not a lack of confidence.

It is the amount of attention being spent anticipating other people’s reactions.

That is a different problem.

Sometimes confidence has not disappeared.

Your attention has moved.

Promotion burnout: when the next step stops feeling worth the cost

This is also why I think we need to be careful with conversations about women and ambition.

It is easy to look at women becoming less interested in promotion or stepping away from leadership roles and conclude that they simply want less.

But there may be another question worth asking.

What has ambition started to cost them?

Earlier this year, I contributed to a Yahoo Finance article about what has been described as “promotion burnout”. One of the things I spoke about was the gap between ambition itself and the reality of what progression can sometimes bring. (Yahoo Finance UK (2026). Women are getting ‘promotion burnout’ – is there really an ambition gap?)

For some women, promotion means greater responsibility, higher expectations and closer scrutiny, without an equivalent increase in support, recognition or autonomy.

I have spoken to women who have worked incredibly hard to reach the next level and then found themselves wondering whether they actually want to keep climbing. Not because they suddenly lack ambition, but because the emotional cost attached to maintaining that success has become difficult to ignore.

The question can shift from:

“Am I capable of doing this?”

to:

“Is success worth this level of emotional effort?”

Sometimes the issue is not the role itself.

It is what someone feels she has to become in order to stay there.

If progression means constantly softening yourself, proving yourself, anticipating reactions and monitoring whether your confidence is making somebody uncomfortable, it makes sense that the next promotion may begin to look less attractive.

That is not necessarily a lack of ambition.

It may be exhaustion.

Are you adapting, or are you making yourself smaller?

One of the questions I often encourage women to ask is:

“Is this really me, or is this something I’ve learned to do to keep other people comfortable?”

There are times when softening a message is thoughtful. There are times when changing how you communicate will help somebody hear you better. There are times when reading a room is exactly the right thing to do.

The question is whether you are choosing the adaptation because it serves the situation, or whether it has become an automatic response to the fear of being judged.

You may find it useful to notice what happens just before you edit yourself.

Are you making the message clearer, or are you making yourself smaller?

Would you say this differently if you were not worried about being perceived as difficult?

Are you adding more explanation because it genuinely helps, or because the original sentence feels too exposed?

Sometimes noticing the pattern is the first step towards deciding which adaptations are genuinely useful and which ones you may no longer need.

Confidence cannot be treated as a problem for women to solve alone

There is another reason I think this matters.

It is very easy for organisations to identify that women are holding back and respond by offering confidence training, mentoring or leadership development.

Those things can be helpful.

But if women are being encouraged to speak up, take more visibility and demonstrate greater confidence while the environment continues to respond differently when they do, individual development will only ever solve part of the problem.

Personal work and organisational responsibility have to go hand in hand.

Organisations also need to look at the repeated everyday decisions that shape culture.

Who gets described as decisive and who gets described as difficult? Whose ideas are amplified? Who gets sponsorship and visibility? Who is given the benefit of the doubt after a mistake? What language appears repeatedly in performance reviews? Who is seen as having leadership presence, and what assumptions sit underneath that judgement?

Culture is not just what appears in a values statement.

It is created through repeated decisions about who is trusted, promoted, listened to, challenged, forgiven and given the benefit of the doubt.

And if women are succeeding while feeling they need to become smaller in order to stay successful, the issue is not confidence.

It is culture.

Looking at confidence differently

If you have reached a point in your career where you are wondering why you no longer feel as confident as you once did, it may be worth looking beyond the question What is wrong with my confidence?

You might instead pay attention to where your attention has gone.

Have you become much more conscious of how you are being perceived? Are you spending more time anticipating reactions? Have you started explaining yourself more, filtering your ideas or softening messages that you would once have delivered comfortably?

The work then is not necessarily about becoming louder, tougher or more confident.

It may be about recognising where you have learned to edit yourself, deciding which adaptations still serve you and reconnecting with your own judgement.

Because being good at reading the room is a strength.

It should not come at the expense of being able to hear yourself.

Women at Work • Career Confidence • Leadership Confidence • Self-Doubt • Workplace Psychology • Gender Bias • Ambition • Career Progression • Promotion Burnout • The Human Side of Change