The Confidence Paradox – Where Does the Pattern Come From?

In the first article in this series, I explored the confidence gap – the disconnect that many people experience between their external success and their inner experience of themselves, something felt as much as it is thought. The response to the first article confirmed something I see in my work, that this pattern is more widespread than most of us realise, and that it runs through life more broadly than just the professional context. In this article I go a layer deeper. Without awareness, we are on autopilot. Developing our awareness of where our patterns originated is like turning on a light switch.

What I have come to understand, through my own personal development journey as much as through my work with people, is this: the confidence patterns that show up when the stakes are high rarely originate in the present. They have roots that go much further back, into earlier chapters of a career, into formative relationships and experiences, into the messages we absorbed about what it means to be capable and credible.

For most of us, these patterns have simply never been examined. They operate in the background, shaping our responses in ways we have no reason to question, until something brings them into view.

A leader I worked with had joined her organisation as an intern. Over the years she had built an exceptional track record, earned the respect of her colleagues and eventually reached director level. By any measure, she was successful. And yet in peer meetings, when challenged by colleagues who had been in the organisation longer than her or were older than her, something shifted. The confident, clear-thinking leader who showed up everywhere else became quieter, more hesitant, less willing to hold her ground.

When we explored this together, what emerged was the embodied feeling of being the intern again. The most junior person in the room. The one who hadn’t yet earned the right to push back. It wasn’t a conscious belief. She knew intellectually that she had earned her place. Naming it was what made it possible to work with it at the level where it actually lived – not in her thinking, but in her body. She is also the youngest in her family, and she recognised for the first time that the pattern of feeling like the junior in the room had roots there too, in ways she hadn’t previously connected.

This pattern shows up in my work with the people I coach. The trigger is in the present. The response belongs to the past. And because the gap between the two is rarely visible, the person experiences it simply as a loss of confidence, without understanding what is actually driving it.

Another leader I worked with had been identified as high potential early in his career. A mentor he respected had given him a piece of advice that was well intentioned and, at the time, genuinely useful: listen and learn. He had followed that guidance and it had served him well. But years later, now a senior person in his own right, he found himself sitting in important meetings with a great deal to contribute and saying very little. The old instruction had become an internal rule, operating quietly beneath the surface long after the circumstances that shaped it had changed.

What these two examples share is not the specific trigger, but the same underlying pattern. Something in the present activates a much older embodied feeling, and the response that follows makes complete sense in its original context. It is only when you examine it through the lens of who you are now – the experience you have accumulated, the capability you have developed – that the gap between the feeling and the reality becomes visible.

When the environment is the trigger

Not every confidence pattern has its roots in the past. Sometimes the environment itself is the trigger. A leader I worked with came to a session saying her confidence had been knocked and she wanted to work on it. She was feeling demoralised and angry. The trigger was a change in leadership at the top. The behaviours the new CEO valued were not the behaviours that had been rewarded in the past. Speaking up, challenging ideas and bringing a different perspective were seen as acts of dissent rather than engagement. What felt like a loss of confidence to her was actually a misalignment of her personal and professional values.

This matters because it brings another dimension. When confidence erodes in a misaligned environment, the work is not simply about understanding your internal patterns. It surfaces deeper needs and priorities and how you want to navigate from that place.

This is ongoing for all of us

Recently I was working with a group I hadn’t worked with before, in a context where I do a great deal of work. I was aware that I was behaving differently to how I normally work. Something about the dynamic in that group had activated a response in me that I didn’t fully know what to do with in the moment. I didn’t clarify my role explicitly at the outset, which is what I would normally do. I managed myself in the situation, but I was a quieter, more contained version of my professional self.

I brought it to my own supervision to explore it further. What emerged was an understanding of where that response was coming from, something older than the situation itself. The trigger was in the present. The roots were elsewhere.

That experience is another reminder that awareness of the pattern is necessary but it doesn’t always override it.

What all of these people had in common, and what my own experience confirmed, was that the pattern, once named, was immediately recognisable. Not as something new, but as something familiar. Something felt before, in a different context, at a different time. That recognition is significant. It is the moment the pattern becomes visible. For some, awareness alone is enough to begin changing the behaviour. But when it isn’t, when the pattern runs deeper than awareness can reach, that is what the third and final article explores.

If this resonates and you’d like to explore what this work might look like for you, we’d love to talk.

Frequently asked questions

Why do confidence issues persist even in experienced people? Confidence patterns that show up when the stakes are high rarely originate in the present. They have roots that go much further back, into earlier chapters of a career, into formative relationships and the messages we absorbed about what it means to be capable and credible. For most of us these patterns have simply never been examined. They operate in the background, shaping our responses in ways we have no reason to question until something brings them into view. Without awareness, we are on autopilot. Developing our awareness of where these patterns originated is like turning on a light switch and that is where the work goes deeper.

How does our early career experience affect our confidence? The guidance we receive early in our careers can be genuinely useful at the time but become a limiting belief later. A message like “listen and learn” given to a high-potential junior person can become an internal rule that keeps them silent in strategic discussions long after the circumstances that shaped it have changed. The trigger is in the present. The response belongs to the past.

Can the environment itself affect a person’s confidence? Yes and this is often overlooked. When the culture shifts, when values are no longer honoured or when the behaviours that were once rewarded are no longer welcome, what presents as a loss of confidence is often something different entirely a misalignment of personal and professional values.

At KOI we work with people in Ireland and internationally to explore these patterns, understand where they come from and begin to shift them, in person and virtually.