Lost Confidence at Work? How to Tell If It's You or the Job

Oct 10

13 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Woman at her desk who has lost confidence at work and is thinking it over.

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

You used to walk into a meeting knowing your stuff. Now you reread a two-line email five times before you send it, and you sit on a good idea until somebody else says it out loud.

If you have lost confidence at work, the first thing most people hand you is advice about you. Be more confident. Speak up. Go work on your imposter syndrome. (I am a coach, and I am asking you to hold that thought for a few minutes.)

I spent 15+ years in HR, rising to Chief People Officer. I have sat in the rooms where promotions get decided and where resignations get processed. In my experience, when a capable woman's confidence drops, you can usually trace it to something specific. A boss. A reorg. A promise that got broken.

So before you sign up for one more confidence workshop, let's look at the room you are standing in.

A Crying Closet at Work Is Not Normal

It rarely happens in one day. A promotion you were promised goes to someone else, and nobody tells you. Your workload grows while your title stays put. Your idea lands better when a colleague repeats it ten minutes later.

You stay late to finish what got handed to you. You find a quiet office to cry in before you drive home.

I tell people all the time that having a crying closet at work is not normal. I hear about them more often than I would like to admit.

Then the story in your head starts to change. You stop saying "this place is a mess" and you start saying "maybe I was never that good." You explain away your own wins. I got lucky. I was the only one who applied. Right place, right time.

And you work harder, because that is what we were taught to do. Get through this quarter and it will finally be okay. In my experience, that has never been the case. It has always just gotten worse.

I know this one from the inside. Earlier in my career I worked for a company that had courted me, created a role for me and put me on succession plans. I had a mentor there who pulled me into rooms I wouldn't have been in otherwise. Then came the reorg. He left, and new leadership came in.

I had pitched a role I'd dreamed about and built an entire strategy around. The new VP of HR sat across from me, perfectly calm, and told me it was going to someone else. Someone who didn't build it, but who had the right connections in the new power structure. I made it to my car and sat there gripping the steering wheel, crying, asking myself one question on a loop. Erica, how did you mess this up?

It took me a while in that parking lot to see it. I was the same person they had courted and put on succession plans. The strategy was just as good as the day I built it. The one new thing was who was in charge. That doubt arrived with the reorg, and I had been carrying it around like it was mine.

The Conversation That Sent Me Digging

I recently talked about this with Aoife O'Brien on Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors. You can listen to my full conversation with Aoife O'Brien.

Aoife is the founder of Happier at Work, the host of the award-winning Happier at Work podcast (more than 300 episodes), and the author of Thriving Talent, an Irish Times bestseller. She spent 20 years in corporate roles and holds a master's in organisational behaviour. You can find her book at thrivingtalentbook.com.

Her early career went well. Then she landed at a company she now describes as an old boys club. A role she had been promised went to a colleague, and she found out when he pulled her into a meeting and started asking about her clients. She told me the damage went well past her confidence, into her health and her relationships, and that it took her about 10 years to recover.

Here is the line from Aoife I wrote down: "I think if anyone has ever had a toxic boss, we don't realize just how lasting the impact is."

She went back to school to understand why this keeps happening. What she noticed is that most workplace programs are aimed at the employee. In her words, "we focus on fixing people." Resilience training. Imposter syndrome sessions. Very little attention goes to the environment those people are working in.

My little HR heart was all over the place during that conversation, so I went looking for what the newest research says. Y'all, it backs her up.

Why Have I Lost Confidence at Work?

Start with the biggest study of women in corporate America. The Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, published in December 2025, pulled data from 124 organizations employing roughly three million people and surveyed about 10,000 employees.

It found that women were less likely than men to say they want a promotion. At the entry level, 69% of women wanted one, compared with 80% of men. At the senior level, it was 84% of women and 92% of men. The report calls this a gap in ambition.

Then comes the finding I want every woman reading this to sit with. When women receive the same career support that men do, that gap falls away.

Same women. Same talent. Give them a manager who advocates for them and a senior person who opens doors, and they want the bigger job just as much as the men do.

Now look at what women are working inside of. Deloitte's Women @ Work 2026 report surveyed 7,500 women across 15 countries between May and June 2026. A third of them said they had experienced non-inclusive behaviors at work in the past year. Of the women who experienced microaggressions, only 36% reported it to someone at work. And just 54% believe they can report that kind of behavior without it affecting their career.

That is a lot of women doing math in their heads every time something happens. Is this worth saying? What will it cost me?

The people in charge of your daily experience are struggling too. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, and manager engagement dropped to 22%, down nine points since 2022. Most managers are not engaged in their own jobs, and their teams feel it.

And the research on imposter feelings is moving in the same direction. A study published in May 2026 in the SA Journal of Human Resource Management surveyed 317 HR professionals. It found that 83% reported moderate or higher imposter feelings, with no significant difference between women and men. The authors concluded that the results support treating the imposter phenomenon as context-driven.

Ruchika T. Malhotra and Jodi-Ann Burey made this case in Harvard Business Review back in February 2021, in an article titled "Stop Telling Women They Have Impostor Syndrome." That piece is older, and I am naming it because it is the original source of this argument. The 2025 and 2026 numbers have caught up to it.

So if you are asking why you have lost confidence at work, here is my answer as a former Chief People Officer. Confidence responds to conditions. Support, credit, clear expectations and safety to speak all feed it. Take those away from a talented woman for long enough and she will start to doubt work that is still excellent.

Women colleagues in a meeting at work, one speaking while others listen.

Why This Lands Harder on Women

Women get less of the support that builds confidence in the first place.

In that same December 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn.Org report, 31% of entry-level women had a sponsor, compared with 45% of entry-level men. That matters for your paycheck, because employees with sponsors were promoted at nearly twice the rate of employees without one. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women were promoted, and for women of color the number was 74.

The companies are pulling back too. Only 54% of companies in the report rank women's career advancement as a high priority, and one in six has cut staff or resources for diversity and inclusion.

The same thing is showing up with AI. The report found that only 21% of entry-level women are encouraged by their managers to use AI tools, compared with 33% of entry-level men. That is one more form of backing going to someone else, on the skill every company says it wants.

So here is the setup. A woman gets less sponsorship, fewer promotions and less encouragement. Her confidence dips, which is a reasonable response. Then she gets handed a workshop on confidence.

There is one more piece, and Aoife said it in a way that landed hard for me. For years, former colleagues told her that company was a great place to work. Only recently did she connect the dots. Every one of the people who told her that was a man. They never saw what she saw because it was happening to the women.

You're not crazy. Plenty of people around you will never see it, because it is not happening to them. Trust what you have seen with your own eyes.

How a Bad Boss Follows You Into a Good Job

This is the part I care most about, because it is where a broken workplace turns into a sticky floor.

In my Sticky Floors vs. Glass Ceilings framework, a glass ceiling is the external, systemic barrier that keeps women from rising. A sticky floor is internal. It is the limiting beliefs and behaviors, like imposter syndrome, perfectionism and fear, that keep you stuck.

A bad workplace is a glass ceiling problem. And it leaves sticky floors behind.

I watched this up close when I was full-time in corporate and leading an HR team. I ran that team on one rule: if you mess something up, say it. We are all going to make mistakes. Tell me, we will fix it, and we will move on. And we are talking big oopsies, like overpaying or underpaying someone.

Most of the team was good with that. One woman could not do it. No matter how many times I told her she would not get in trouble, she tried to fix every mistake on her own and cover it up. That created downstream problems, and I would hear about them from other leaders. If she had come to me first, I could have defended her and solved it with the full picture.

I believe that habit came from a previous boss who got mad when she made a mistake. It was protection she had learned somewhere else. She could not get past that sticky floor, and ultimately she worked her way out of the organization because of it.

Aoife has a name for this. She calls it the "organizational culture hangover."

Research published in March 2026 in the Journal of Management Studies found the same thing. Across one field study and two experiments, the researchers looked at people who had been abused by a former supervisor and then started a new job. Those employees avoided interacting with their new supervisor and asked for less feedback. Their performance and their job satisfaction in the new role both suffered.

So the damage has two parts. There is what the bad job does to you while you are in it. Then there is what you carry out the door. You can work on the second part, and that is good news, because it means it is yours to fix.

Is It Me or Is It My Job? Five Checks to Run This Week

1. Check the pattern

My favorite HR saying is "When it becomes a pattern, it's a problem."

Look back across your last three roles. If your confidence was solid until this boss or this company, that points at the place. If you have left three organizations over the same issue, with three different bosses, that points at something you are carrying, and it is time to look inward. We all have places we can work on.

Aoife added an important caveat on the episode. Some people will not feel safe to speak up no matter what a leader builds for them, because of earlier bosses or something deeper from childhood. That is a sticky floor, and it is workable with the right support.

2. Write down what happened, with dates

Get it out of your head and onto paper. "March: promised the team lead role. June: role filled, no conversation. July: found out in a client meeting."

Then write down the evidence about your ability. Aoife told me that two months into that job, people who had been there for years were coming to her with questions about how to do the work. That is data about how good she was. You have data like that too. Performance reviews. Client emails. The projects people bring to you first.

Facts on paper read very differently than the story you tell yourself at 2 a.m.

3. Ask for one specific thing and watch what happens

Aoife's framework includes what she calls drivers, meaning what each person needs in order to do her best work. More autonomy. More guidance. Recognition.

Pick one and ask for it in plain words. "When the Q3 analysis goes to the leadership team, I want my name on it." "I need 30 minutes with you every other week to get clear on priorities."

A healthy workplace responds to a clear ask. If you make reasonable asks more than once and nothing lands, you have your answer about how that place values you.

4. Find out who is speaking for you

Remember the sponsor numbers. If nobody senior is saying your name when you are out of the room, your work is going unseen, however good it is.

Aoife suggested looking for an internal move or a different boss before you walk away from the whole company. I think that is worth one honest look. I will also tell you what I told her. If a toxic boss is being tolerated, I believe it goes all the way up.

5. If you cannot leave yet, set a date and a number

Aoife was open that she left both of her bad jobs because she had the financial means to do it. Plenty of women do not have that option today.

If that is you, start planning your exit now. Decide the savings number you need and the date you are working toward. Make a list of five people to call.

I have a dear friend who left a secure company after 20 years for a new role. Less than six months in, her boss cut her pay. So we got to work and started activating our networks. That is what your people are for.

Aoife shared a mindset move for this stretch that I called a gold nugget on the spot. Shift from "I have to be here and I hate this" to "I am choosing to be here so I can save money and make my exit."

In my SNAP Method (Stop, Name, Ask, Pivot), that is the P, the Pivot. You walk into the same building on Monday as a woman with a plan and a date, and the decision belongs to you.

Woman writing a plan in a notebook at a table.

If You Lead People, You Are Part of Somebody's Workplace

I have to turn this on myself, because most of us assume the toxic one is somebody else.

My team once told me my toxic trait. I have a little sprinkle of ADHD and a big-picture brain, so I would get excited about something new and tell them to make a spreadsheet for it. I promised to rein it in. About a week later I sent them another spreadsheet, and they said, "Erica, we already have a spreadsheet for this."

We laughed about it. And they only told me because it was safe to tell me.

So ask your team directly. "What do I do that makes your job harder?" If nobody will answer, you have learned something about how safe it feels to work for you.

What I Want You to Take From This

Your confidence took a hit somewhere specific. Find out where. Run the five checks, and let the facts tell you how much of this belongs to you and how much belongs to the place you work.

Work on the part that is yours. Hand the rest back to the company it came from.

Then take that record of what you have done into your next negotiation, or your next job, and get paid for it. Nothing changes until you do.

If you want a room to do this in, come see HER Collective. I built the room I couldn't find. It is a private community of women who are damn good at what they do, live every week, where you find out what everyone else asked for and what they got. Take a look at what is inside here.

If the support is not coming, start with the one hour you can claim yourself: No Time for Yourself? The Hour You Keep Handing Back.

If a reorg or a bigger life change has you rebuilding from scratch, read my post on starting over after rock bottom and the five stages of change.

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

Why have I lost confidence at work?

Most of the time, something in your environment changed first. A new boss, a broken promise, missing credit or a workplace where it does not feel safe to speak up will wear down a talented woman's confidence over time. The December 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that when women receive the same career support men do, the gap in wanting a promotion falls away. Start by tracing when the drop began and what was happening at work when it did.

Is it imposter syndrome or a toxic workplace?

Run a pattern check. If the self-doubt started with one job or one boss, look hard at that workplace. If it has followed you through several employers, you may be carrying a sticky floor, which is my term for the internal beliefs and behaviors that keep women stuck. Often it is both, because a bad workplace leaves habits behind that travel with you to the next job.

What should I do if I have lost confidence at work but cannot quit yet?

Start planning your exit, even if it is months away. Write down what has happened with dates, set a savings number and a target date, and tell five people in your network what you are looking for. Then use the Pivot from my SNAP Method and remind yourself you are choosing to stay for now so you can fund your next move.