Confidence Is Not Something You Find. It Is Something You Build.

I want to tell you about a meeting I sat in early in my career.

It was a room full of people who looked nothing like me. Senior. Confident. Authoritative in a way that seemed entirely natural to them. I had done the work. I knew the numbers. I had prepared more thoroughly than almost anyone else in that room.

And I said almost nothing.

Not because I had nothing to contribute. Because I kept waiting for the moment that felt right. The moment when my idea would be so clearly brilliant that no one could dismiss it. The moment when I felt ready enough. Certain enough. Confident enough.

That moment did not arrive. It never does. I learned that lesson more slowly than I would have liked. It is one of the things that now sits at the centre of my work as a leadership coach for women - because I know, from the inside, how much is lost when talented women stay quiet waiting to feel certain.

Why is the confidence gap not just in women’s heads?

There is a narrative that frames women’s confidence as a personal failing to be fixed. Read the right book, do the right exercises, think the right thoughts, and the confidence will come.

That framing is incomplete and, I would argue, it is dishonest.

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that confidence in women is consistently evaluated differently than confidence in men. Identical behaviours are read as assertive in men and aggressive in women. Speaking with authority is welcomed from some and perceived as overstepping from others depending, substantially, on who is speaking.

KPMG’s Women’s Leadership Study found that 67% of women report struggling with imposter syndrome at some point in their career - with rates higher among women of colour in senior roles. That is not a personality trait. It is a structural response to operating in spaces that do not consistently reflect your value back to you.

The confidence gap is not purely internal. It is a rational response to environments that do not consistently reward women’s confidence in the same way they reward men’s. Understanding that does not excuse silence. But it does contextualise it.

Confidence is not the absence of doubt. It is the decision to act in spite of it. And that decision gets easier the more times you make it.

How do you actually build confidence as a woman in leadership?

What shifted for me was not a mindset transformation. It was a series of small, deliberate acts that accumulated into something I could stand on.

I started speaking earlier in meetings. Not with polished, fully formed contributions but with questions, observations, partial thoughts. I stopped waiting to be certain before I opened my mouth.

I stopped treating my wins as anomalies. There is a well-documented tendency to attribute success to luck or circumstance and failure to personal inadequacy. I started doing the opposite. Deliberately. Repeatedly. Until it became a different kind of automatic. For more on what that practice looks like and why it matters, see our piece on knowing your worth.

I invested in coaching. Having someone who was unambiguously in my corner, asking me the questions I was not asking myself, made a material difference to how I showed up. I tell every woman I work with: getting support is not a luxury. It is an accelerant. Korn Ferry’s 2024 research found that self-aware leaders - those who actively seek honest feedback and act on it - outperform their peers by up to 20% in key metrics. Self-awareness and confidence are not separate conversations. They are the same one.

What role does community play in building professional confidence?

I built a network of women who reflected my capability back to me on the days I could not see it myself. That is not a small thing. It is, in many ways, everything.

The research on this is consistent: women with strong peer networks of other women are more confident, more likely to advocate for themselves, and more likely to progress. Not because the network gives them confidence directly, but because it provides the honest feedback, the shared experience, and the active sponsorship that confidence requires to grow. For a fuller picture of how intentional networking shapes women’s careers, see our piece on success and intentionality.

Community is not a passive resource. It is something you build actively - by showing up for other people before you need them to show up for you, by contributing to conversations that do not yet benefit you directly, by making introductions with no immediate return in mind. The confidence you develop in that kind of community is different from the confidence you develop alone. It is grounded in something external that can hold you when your internal narrative wavers.

How do you know when you already belong in the room?

Here is what I want every woman reading this to hear.

The discomfort you feel in rooms that were not designed for you is not evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence that those rooms need to change. Your job is not to shrink yourself to fit a space that was built too small. Your job is to be so consistently, undeniably present that the space has to expand.

Being the CEO of your career means deciding - actively, deliberately - that your presence is not something that needs to be earned room by room. It is something you bring with you. The rooms change when the people in them do. And you are already one of those people.

That takes courage. It also takes community. Find yours. Build it if it does not yet exist. And when you have it, use it - because the confidence you build in yourself is only part of what makes a career. The other part is the people who can see it when you cannot.

For you to sit with: Think of a recent situation where you held back. What were you waiting for? Was that condition actually necessary, or was it a habit of self-protection? Who in your life consistently reflects your capability back to you when you cannot see it yourself? If no one comes to mind, what does that tell you about what you need to build?

Patrice Gordon works as a leadership coach for women across the UK and internationally, offering executive coaching and career development support for women who are ready to stop waiting to feel ready and start showing up fully. Whether you are navigating a senior role, a transition, or simply recognising that you have more to offer than you have been giving yourself permission to bring - get in touch to find out more →

• Why do women struggle with confidence in leadership?

  The confidence gap in women’s leadership is not simply a mindset issue. Harvard Business Review research shows that identical confident behaviours are evaluated differently depending on the gender of the person expressing them - assertive in men, aggressive in women. KPMG’s Women’s Leadership Study found that 67% of women report struggling with imposter syndrome at some point in their career. These experiences are structural responses to environments that do not consistently reward women’s confidence in the same way they reward men’s. Understanding this shifts the question from “what is wrong with me?” to “what does this environment need to change?” - which is a far more productive place to begin.

• How do you build confidence as a woman in a senior leadership role?

  Building confidence as a woman in a senior leadership role is a practice, not a transformation. The most effective approaches include: speaking earlier in meetings rather than waiting until you feel certain, attributing your successes accurately rather than to luck or circumstance, building a peer network of women who can reflect your capability back to you on the days you cannot see it yourself, and investing in executive coaching that provides honest, structured feedback. Korn Ferry’s 2024 research found that self-aware leaders - those who actively seek and act on feedback - outperform their peers by up to 20%. Self-awareness and confidence are not separate conversations. They are the same one.

• What is the difference between confidence and arrogance in leadership?

  Confidence is an accurate assessment of your capability - the willingness to act on what you know and contribute what you have, without requiring certainty or external permission first. Arrogance is a distorted overestimate of your capability that dismisses the contributions of others. In leadership, the two are often conflated - particularly for women, whose confident behaviour is statistically more likely to be labelled as aggressive or arrogant than the same behaviour exhibited by men. The antidote is not to shrink your confidence to avoid the label. It is to be so consistently, specifically grounded in what you actually bring that the distinction is clear to those paying attention.