I’ve noticed there’s a belief that women often carry quietly: I’ll do it when I feel more confident. And it sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface.
I’ve heard things along the lines of: “I’m sort of starting a business. I’ll do it when I’ve done enough preparation, or when things aren’t so busy.” We’ve all said some version of this. I know I have.
Inherited expectations
Over 25 years of working with women founders, leaders, and high achievers, I’ve seen that one thing holding them back is the confidence myth.
Most women I know aren’t simply lacking self-belief. They are tuned into inherited expectations they’ve never stopped to question: expectations about how prepared you should be before you begin anything and how much you should know in advance. This goes deeper than confidence. It’s about recognizing which expectations are truly yours and which you’ve been living by without consciously choosing them.
There’s a tendency to think you start out being confident. But in reality, you end up confident.
There’s something else I’ve noticed: Women often feel they need to be completely ready before they put themselves forward, whereas men appear more willing to give it a try and work things out as they go. This isn’t a gap in capability but a gap in permission.
I hear women saying things like, “I’m thinking about putting myself forward,” or, “I might apply.” We can underplay what we’re doing before anyone else has even had the chance to question it.
This means they hold onto an idea and wait until they feel ready. But then they don’t get the chance to try it, see what happens, and learn from it. Without that experience, they still believe they weren’t ready in the first place.
Losing good ideas
A common theme among women I have coached is that they put off setting up a business because they believed there were already too many similar businesses and that their ideas or business plans weren’t strong enough. These women eventually started, and now run, successful businesses. Their confidence grew as they built them and worked things out.
This is where waiting to feel ready stops having merely a personal impact. The woman with the most useful thing to say in the room may never say it, so everyone misses out on what she knew. Organizations miss out too.
And when confidence gets confused with competence, the person who puts themselves forward can look readier than someone with stronger judgement or more experience. This often means capable women can be overlooked, and the organization loses ideas and talent.
Fear is normal
In the confidence-building workshops I’ve held, I’ve also found that some women believed confidence came from a naturally strong personality or from how they had been brought up. They were convinced that their lack of confidence was a fact of life.
Women can carry an image of a future version of themselves who has it all together as more confident, more competent, and finally ready. We think we have to become her before we can begin, and in doing that, we lose sight of who we are now.
This doesn’t mean you have to rush. You can think something through, weigh the options, and still take a step. It is normal to feel afraid. There’s a tendency to confuse a sense of being ready with a feeling of comfort, since trying something new will probably be uncomfortable at first. Rather than asking yourself, “Do I feel ready?” ask instead, “Can I work it out as I go?” Competence is not certainty. It means being able to respond to what happens and handle things as they come.
The more you do something you’ve been putting off—giving a presentation, having a difficult conversation, making a pitch—the more your confidence grows. It doesn’t have to be perfect; at least you’ve given it a try and gotten through it. Or perhaps you broke down but eventually felt relieved.
It’s very easy to think about what might go wrong if we give it a try, but not what might be missed by waiting. Often waiting can cost us more than trying in the first place.
There’s a lot of talk about helping women become more confident. I think it would be more useful to ask whether they are willing to have a shot before they feel completely ready. That might mean speaking without having the perfect answer or trying something knowing they could make a mistake. Confidence can naturally come later.
You may not have everything you think you need, but you do have something to begin with. The women I see moving forward aren’t the ones who finally felt certain. They got tired of waiting and went through the door anyway. As you go, you learn and adapt. Somewhere in the doing, you realize that confidence was never something you needed to find first. It was always something you needed to practice.