When Work Shakes Your Confidence: How to Rebuild It

Most of us have had a moment—or sometimes an entire season—at work that rattled us.

Maybe a project went badly. You made a mistake. You stepped into a bigger role and suddenly felt overwhelmed. You received difficult feedback, mishandled a conflict, struggled with a staff situation, or went through a period when the demands simply felt bigger than your capacity to meet them.

Sometimes the setback is even harder to understand because you did many things right and the outcome was still bad.

Whatever the circumstances, the experience can do something deeper than simply leave you disappointed. It can shake your belief in your own ability to handle difficult things.

As a coach, I have the unusual privilege of hearing about these experiences from professionals and leaders all the time. And while the person going through it may feel like they are the only competent, accomplished person who has ever found themselves questioning everything, I can attest: they are far from alone.

Leaders and managers are navigating enormously complex challenges every day—staff issues, difficult bosses, competing priorities, budgets, organizational change, interpersonal conflict, impossible workloads and decisions where there may not be one clearly right answer. Even very capable people will sometimes encounter situations that knock them off balance.

When a Setback Starts to Change How You See Yourself

One experience that can be particularly gutting is negative feedback.

It might come from a direct report who says they don't feel supported. It might come from a manager telling you that something needs to change. Or it might come through a disappointing performance review, a board member, a colleague or simply the realization that something you were responsible for did not go well.

There is research showing that this kind of experience really can affect how capable we feel. One field experiment involving 296 working managers found that negative feedback from a supervisor reduced people's job-specific self-efficacy—their belief in their ability to successfully do their jobs. Strikingly, the effect occurred regardless of managerial rank.

In other words, being experienced or senior doesn't make you immune.

You can have years of success behind you and still have one difficult experience make you wonder: Maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought. Maybe I'm not ready for this level. Maybe I can't handle this.

Psychologists use the term self-efficacy to describe our belief in our capacity to successfully handle a particular challenge or task. It is a little more specific than confidence, and it matters because what we believe about our capability can influence how we approach our work.

A large meta-analysis of 114 studies involving more than 21,000 people found a meaningful positive relationship between self-efficacy and work-related performance.

More recent research suggests that self-efficacy also relates to how willing we are to go beyond the minimum. A 2025 meta-analysis found that people with higher self-efficacy were more likely to engage in workplace behaviors such as speaking up, helping others, taking initiative and contributing beyond their formal responsibilities.

And this is where a confidence setback can quietly begin to matter.

When Losing Confidence Makes Us Play Smaller

When your confidence takes a hit, you may not suddenly become incapable. But you may start behaving differently.

Maybe you stop speaking up as much in meetings. You hesitate before volunteering for the difficult assignment. You triple-check decisions you once would have trusted yourself to make, defer to someone else's judgment or start interpreting the normal uncertainty of leadership as evidence that you don't know what you're doing.

None of these behaviors is necessarily dramatic. In fact, other people might not even notice them.

But over time, they can cause us to play smaller—and they can inadvertently deprive us of exactly what we need to regain our footing: new experiences that remind us that we are capable.

So if you've been through something at work that has shaken your confidence, the answer isn't simply to tell yourself to “be more confident.” There are more concrete ways to begin rebuilding it.

Separate What Happened From What You've Made It Mean About You

How you make sense of a setback can have an enormous effect on how you recover from it.

I find it helpful to separate three things that often get tangled together after a difficult experience: what happened, what you learned and what you concluded about yourself.

What happened might be: The project failed. I made a mistake. My boss criticized me. My employee was unhappy with how I handled something. I became overwhelmed and didn't manage everything as well as I wanted to.

What you learned might be: I need to set boundaries sooner. I need more experience navigating conflict. I underestimated the complexity of this situation. I should have asked for help earlier. I need to communicate differently next time.

Those first two categories can be enormously valuable. We want to learn from our experiences—even the painful ones.

The danger often lies in the third category: what I've concluded about myself.

I'm not a good leader.

I'm not ready for this.

Everyone else knows what they're doing and I don't.

I'm terrible at managing people.

Maybe I just can't handle pressure.

A setback may contain important information about something you need to learn or do differently. But it doesn't automatically follow that it contains the truth about your overall capability.

Rebuild Your Evidence File

One of the strange things about a setback is how quickly one difficult experience can overshadow years of evidence to the contrary. Someone can have 15 successful years in leadership, go through one terrible six-month period and suddenly begin wondering whether they were ever very good at leading in the first place.

When that happens, deliberately reconstruct your evidence. Think about other difficult situations you've navigated successfully. What problems have you solved? What have people consistently relied on you for? What challenges once intimidated you that you eventually learned to handle?

Ask yourself: What did I know how to do six months ago—or five years ago—that I haven't suddenly forgotten because this one thing went badly?

This isn't about creating an artificially positive story about yourself. It's about making sure one vivid recent experience doesn't erase a much larger body of evidence.

Borrow Perspective From People You Trust

When our confidence is shaken, our own assessment of ourselves can become surprisingly unreliable. That is one reason trusted colleagues, mentors, former supervisors, coaches and friends who know your work can be so valuable. They may be able to see strengths, patterns of competence and previous accomplishments that you're temporarily discounting.

But I wouldn't simply ask someone, Do you think I'm good at my job?

Ask for evidence instead. What do you see me doing particularly well? When have you seen me navigate something difficult successfully? What capability do you think I'm underestimating right now?

Their perspective won't replace your own. But it can help recalibrate it. It can also help to hear how other accomplished people have struggled.

We often see the polished version of other people's careers and compare it with the messy interior of our own. Having real conversations with peers and mentors about the mistakes, difficult seasons and confidence crises they have experienced can remind us that struggling with something difficult is not evidence that we don't belong in the room.

Give Yourself Opportunities to Experience Competence Again

We often assume that confidence needs to come first.

Once I feel confident again, I'll speak up. Once I feel ready, I'll volunteer. Once I stop doubting myself, I'll take on the harder thing.

But confidence is often rebuilt in the opposite direction. You take an action. You handle it. Your brain gets a new piece of evidence: I can do this.

That doesn't mean immediately choosing the biggest, most intimidating challenge available. It may mean deliberately creating opportunities for smaller wins—having the conversation you've been avoiding, leading one meeting, making a decision without endless second-guessing or taking ownership of a project that uses strengths you know you have.

The goal isn't to prove that you will never struggle again. It's to start giving yourself fresh experiences of capability.

Don't Confuse Depletion With Incapability

There is another question worth asking after a difficult period at work: What condition was I in when this happened? If you were exhausted, chronically stressed, under-resourced, managing an impossible workload or carrying challenges in multiple parts of your life, that context matters.

Sometimes we interpret our emotional or physical state as evidence about our abilities.

I'm overwhelmed, therefore I must not be capable of handling this.

But those aren't the same thing. A difficult period may reveal something you need to change—about your workload, your boundaries, the support you need or the environment you're working in—without proving anything sweeping about your competence.

You Don't Have to Erase the Setback

Rebuilding confidence doesn't require convincing yourself that nothing went wrong.

Maybe something did go wrong. Maybe you have something important to learn. Maybe you would handle the situation differently if you had the chance to do it again.

That's growth, not failure.

Confidence after a setback is built by putting the experience back into proportion: learning what it has to teach you while refusing to let one difficult chapter become the final verdict on what you're capable of.

And sometimes the most useful question isn't, How do I get my old confidence back?

It is: What do I need to do next to give myself new evidence that I can handle hard things?