219. Confidence is the Moxie You Need to Get Ahead
- 5 hours ago
- 17 min read
There’s a hidden price we pay, every single day, for hanging onto self-doubt and there’s real consequences for playing small at work. We tend to stay stuck by confusing confidence with being the most outgoing and waiting until we feel ready in order to start anything that feels a little risky. It’s time to focus on building our confidence from the inside out, because confidence isn't a trait we're born with; it's a skill we can build.
You need to give yourself permission—to step up, speak up, show up, and to have the moxie that separates those who wait from those who win.
Are you spending hours rehearsing conversations that haven't happened yet, second-guessing yourself, and then ultimately saying nothing at all? Are you watching less qualified colleagues get the promotions and recognition while you keep your head down and wait your turn? Are you telling yourself you're just not ready yet, when what you're really waiting for is to feel confident?
You'll learn that confidence isn't a magical personality trait you either have or don't have—it's a skill you build through action, because successful people don't act once they feel confident; they feel confident because they take action.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why hanging onto self-doubt carries a hidden, compounding cost
5 practical strategies to build confidence from the inside out
Why separating observation from interpretation matters
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and nineteen. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we could do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
How many hours have you spent this week worrying about a conversation that hasn't happened yet? How many times have you rehearsed what you're going to say in that meeting, revised it, second-guessed it, and then ultimately, said nothing at all? How many opportunities have you watched pass you by while you were busy waiting to feel 'ready'? While you're overthinking, someone else is stepping up. And in the competitive world of work, that hesitation has an opportunity cost because you're not advancing in your career in the way you could be. It might also be costing you the professional respect you've been working so hard to earn.
In this episode, we're talking about the hidden price you pay every single day for hanging onto your self-doubt and why it's time to stop paying that price. We're going to talk about the very specific ways your self-doubt is sabotaging your success and the real consequences you're inevitably going to face if you keep playing small. You don't need to be louder, bolder, or more like 'one of the guys' you work with. You just need to start showing up for yourself and learn to present your ideas with conviction. Confidence isn't some magical personality trait that you either have or don't have. It's a skill, and like any skill, you can build it.
Every moment you spend second-guessing yourself before a negotiation, and every time you hesitate before speaking up in a meeting because you want to make sure you're right, is costing you. And the worst part—it compounds over time. Each time you hold back, it becomes easier to hold back the next time. Each missed opportunity makes the next one feel even riskier. You're losing momentum, visibility, and it's having a negative impact on the professional identity you've been trying to build.
On one hand, we're taught that hard work speaks for itself, that if we just put our heads down and deliver excellent results, we'll naturally advance. On the other hand, we're working in environments where visibility matters more than we care to admit, where those who are top of mind get chosen, and where waiting your turn often means you'll end up waiting forever.
So, we end up stuck between two equally frustrating options: compromise our values and play the self-promotion game in a way that feels inauthentic, or stay true to ourselves and watch less qualified people get the exciting assignments we have been working so hard for. But, here's what nobody tells you: this is a false choice. There's a third option, and it starts with understanding that exuding confidence isn't about becoming someone you're not.
Here are five most common pitfalls I see keeping brilliant women stuck in this cycle:
Confusing confidence with extraversion. You think you need to be the loudest voice in the room, the one dominating every conversation, or the one who's always 'on'. But that's not confidence and it's exhausting. Real confidence is about genuine presence. It's not surface-level bravado. It's about showing up as yourself, fully present and engaged, without needing to fill every silence or prove yourself in every interaction. The women I see who are most successful aren't necessarily the most outgoing; they're the ones who speak with intention, who know their value, and don't waste their energy trying to talk over everyone else in the room.
Perfectionism. You're killing yourself trying to be flawless when what the situation actually requires is just being polished and professional. There's a massive difference between refining your presence and becoming someone you're not. Polish is about showing up prepared, thoughtful, and competent. Perfection is about never making a mistake, never showing uncertainty, and never showing that you're human. And here's the cruel irony: while you're exhausting yourself trying to achieve perfection, your colleagues are confidently presenting work that's 'good enough' and getting promoted for it, because progress beats perfection every single time.
People-pleasing. You're so focused on making everyone comfortable, or not rocking the boat, or as being seen as agreeable, that you slip into behaviors that actively undermine your own advancement. You stay quiet when you disagree. You soften your language so much that your point gets lost. You take on extra work to be helpful, even when it pulls you away from those high-visibility projects. You convince yourself that this is what it takes to succeed. But is it really? I hate to tell you that it's actually just a form of self-sabotage. It's not your job to make everyone comfortable.
Risk-aversion. Believing that you have to avoid all failure in order to succeed. This keeps you playing it safe, avoiding anything that might not work out perfectly, and staying in your lane even when your lane is leading you nowhere. Confidence comes from accepting a challenge and from recovering when things don't go as planned. It comes from trying something, having it not work out, learning from it, adjusting your approach, and trying again. Every time you avoid potential failure, you're also avoiding potential growth. You're teaching yourself that you can't handle setbacks, when the truth is, you've already handled dozens of them and survived every single one.
Readiness illusion. This might be the most damaging pitfall of all. You keep telling yourself that you're not ready, yet. And it sounds so reasonable, so responsible, and so mature, but it's actually self-doubt. You're not waiting to be ready, you're waiting to feel confident. But successful people don't act because they feel confident—they feel confident because they take action. They feel scared and they do it anyway, while they're uncertain, even when they're convinced they're going to screw it up, and they learn from that experience. And then, the next time is a little less scary.
So, what are the real consequences if you keep letting your self-doubt run the show? Let's start with the personal toll, because that's what you feel every single day, even if you're not connecting it to this issue. You're experiencing chronic stress and mental exhaustion from constantly monitoring yourself. Every meeting is a performance you're rehearsing for. Every email is analyzed for tone. Every interaction is a test you might fail. This level of hypervigilance is draining your energy, affecting your sleep, and quite possibly, making you someone you don't even recognize anymore. You're so busy managing everyone else's perception of you that you've lost touch with who you actually are.
There's also the deep resentment that builds when you watch less competent colleagues advance while you stay stuck. You know you're just as good as they are, maybe better. You know you work harder. You know your ideas are solid. But they're the ones getting promoted, getting the recognition, and getting the opportunities. And every time it happens, it reinforces this belief that maybe the game is rigged, maybe hard work doesn't matter, and maybe you should just stop trying. That resentment doesn't just affect your career—it affects your entire relationship with your work and your sense of professional identity. You start to lose the passion that brought you here in the first place.
The professional consequences are just as brutal. When your contributions are invisible, you don't get promotions, raises, or leadership opportunities. Period. It doesn't matter how good your work is if nobody knows you're the one doing it. I see this constantly—women doing the heavy lifting on projects while others do the presenting. And then, guess who gets remembered as the driving force? Your ideas get attributed to others who voice them more confidently, and you become the 'reliable worker', but never the 'rising star'. You're the one people come to when they need something done right, but you're not the one they think of when they're identifying future leaders.
Today's workplace is moving faster than ever. Engineering evolves. New technologies emerge. And if you're stuck in the same role, doing the same work, having the same limited impact year after year because you're too afraid to step up, you're falling behind. The skills you have become less relevant. The network you're not building becomes more critical. The opportunities you're not taking go to people who will leverage them into even bigger opportunities. The gap between where you are and where you could be gets wider every single day.
Your brain is often giving you outdated information and you don't even realize it. Those thought patterns that tell you to stay quiet, play small, and wait your turn—many of them were formed early in your career or even earlier than that. Maybe they kept you safe when you were one of only a few women in your engineering program. Maybe they helped you navigate a toxic first job. Maybe they were survival strategies that made sense in that context. But contexts change, and those same strategies that once protected you are now the very things holding you back. Those automatic thoughts running through your head aren't facts. They are things you made up to keep you safe that you haven't started questioning, yet.
Here are five red flags to watch out for in your own behavior, because recognizing these patterns is the first step to changing them:
Using diminishing phrases to preface your ideas. If you find yourself over-apologizing or excessively hedging in technical discussions with things like, "This is probably a dumb question..." or "Sorry, just one more thing...", that's a red flag. You're undermining your own expertise before anyone else gets the chance to. I can bet your colleagues aren't prefacing their statements with disclaimers, so why do you do it so often?
Waiting to be called on instead of jumping into conversations. This isn't school. You don't have to put up your hand and wait for permission to speak. I bet you're sitting there with something valuable to say, waiting for the perfect moment, waiting for an invitation, or waiting for acknowledgement that this is your area of expertise—and it never comes. Meanwhile, someone else has interrupted three people and shared half-formed thoughts that somehow moved the conversation forward. I'm not saying you should interrupt people—I'm saying you should stop waiting for permission to participate in discussions where your expertise is needed.
Declining opportunities because you don't meet all of the criteria. And yet, you watch others apply with even less experience and qualifications than you have, and you see them get the job anyway. Research shows this pattern happens repeatedly in the workplace, and I've seen it happen over and over again. Because here's the secret: Those job descriptions are wish lists, not requirements. They're looking for someone who can grow into the role, not someone who's already doing it perfectly. When you decline to apply because you're missing one or two qualifications, you're making the decision for them. You're rejecting yourself before they even get a chance to see your value.
Pay attention to how you attribute your success. Do you credit luck instead of competence when receiving recognition? Do you hear yourself saying things like, "Oh, I just got lucky with the timing", or, "I had a lot of help"? This attribution pattern where you deflect any and all credit for your success is a massive red flag that you're not seeing your capabilities clearly.
Avoiding opportunities to share your expertise. This might be declining those 'risky' endeavors like making presentations or disagreeing with more senior colleagues. You tell yourself you're being strategic, picking your battles, or waiting for the right opportunity, but what you're actually doing is making yourself invisible. Nobody gets promoted for work that nobody sees. Nobody gets recognized for ideas they never share. Nobody is picked for leadership opportunities when they've never demonstrated that they want to lead.
Along with being aware of these red flags, it's also time to reframe the beliefs that may be keeping you stuck, because this is where the real transformation happens. Here are five common limiting beliefs that you might consider reframing:
The old belief that says, "Confidence is something you either have or don't—you're either a confident person or you're not". But here's the reframe: confidence is a skill you build day-by-day through practice, not a personality trait you're born with. Every time you do something that scares you and you survive it, you build confidence. Every time you speak up, despite the voice in your head saying you'll sound stupid, you build confidence. Every time you apply for something you're not fully qualified for, you build confidence. It's cumulative and it's completely within your control.
The old belief that says, "You need to feel ready before you act". Try reframing this as: Successful people act before they feel confident, because action creates confidence, not the other way around. Think about the last time you learned a new skill. Did you feel confident before you started, or did your confidence increase after you've practiced, messed up, adjusted, and practiced some more? Waiting to feel ready is just waiting to feel comfortable, and comfort is the enemy of growth.
The old belief that says, "Being bold means being brash, cocky, or entitled". This keeps so many women stuck because we don't want to be that person. But true moxie isn't about being obnoxious. It's about being direct but not disrespectful, self-assured but not entitled. It's the difference between confidence and arrogance. Confidence says, "I have something valuable to contribute", while arrogance says, "I'm better than you". Confidence is earned through competence and action. Entitlement is expecting rewards without effort. You're not being entitled when you advocate for yourself. You're being strategic.
The old belief that says, "If you just work hard enough, someone will notice". Hard work is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Here's the reframe: on the job, being patient often means being complacent. Recognition is scarce, especially for women in STEM, and you have to create your own visibility. This doesn't mean promoting yourself to the point of annoyance. It means ensuring that the people who make decisions about your career actually know what you're contributing. It means speaking up about your accomplishments in the same straightforward way your colleagues do. It means understanding that your manager has seventeen other priorities and isn't spending their day cataloging your achievements, so make it easier for them and remind them of what you've done well, every so often.
The old belief that says, "Failure would be devastating". Try reframing this as: Resilience means viewing rejection as a pit stop, not a destination. Recovery builds confidence faster than perfection ever could. I would bet that every successful person you admire has failed more times than you've even attempted. The difference is that they don't let it stop them because they've built the resilience to keep going.
So, what are the practical strategies for building this kind of confidence from the inside out? It begins with doing the foundational work, the things that are completely within your control.
First, keep promises to yourself. Start with non-negotiable self-care like adequate sleep, eating to fuel your body, and making time for some movement or exercise. I know this sounds basic, maybe even irrelevant to career confidence, but stay with me. Every time you tell yourself you're going to do something and then don't do it, you're teaching yourself that your word doesn't matter and you're eroding self-trust. When you keep promises to yourself about these foundational habits, you build the muscle of self-trust that translates into professional confidence. You start believing that when you say you're going to do something, you actually do it.
Second, face your fearful thoughts. Get genuinely curious about the automatic thoughts running through your mind. What are the thought patterns that keep you playing small? Write them down. Look at them objectively. Are they helping you or hindering you? Because here's the thing—you get to consciously choose your thoughts once you're aware of them. That voice in your head saying that you're not qualified enough is just a thought; it's not a fact. You can question it. You can challenge it. And, you get to decide whether to believe it, or not.
Third, shift from self-criticism to self-compassion. I had a hard time making this switch. I guess I figured that if I was harder on myself than anyone else would ever be, I'd save them the trouble, or protect myself from whatever was coming. It was very difficult for me to break this habit, even when I knew it wasn't helping me. The idea of treating myself the way I'd treat a dear friend seemed pointless to me. When I'd make a mistake, instead of defaulting to that harsh internal voice, I'd have to consciously try to reframe this as, "That didn't go how I wanted, but I learned something valuable". In doing this repeatedly, I slowly learned that this wasn't about lowering my standards or making excuses. It was about freeing up the mental energy I was currently wasting on beating myself up and redirecting it toward actually solving the problem. It took me a long time to realize that showing a little self-compassion isn't being weak—it's actually strategic.
In order to demonstrate your confidence, you need to show up more professionally, not just louder. This means being prepared, being thoughtful, and being engaged—but also being willing to say, "I don't know" when you don't know. It means presenting your ideas clearly without apologizing for them, but also being open to feedback and incorporating the input provided by others. The difference between refinement and performance is that refinement is about becoming a better version of yourself, while performance is about pretending to be someone you're not.
Now, in order to help you build your confidence, here are two action strategies, because knowledge needs to be paired with action:
Create a reset ritual. Have a tool you can deploy when imposter syndrome hits to get out of your own head. Whether it's a specific playlist, a breathing technique, a power pose—choose something that works for you. For me, what I found that works is a specific song that completely shifts my mindset. For you, it might be a mantra or a visualization. The type of tool you employ doesn't really matter. What does matter is having something reliable that you can use to interrupt the spiral of self-doubt and get back to being present and effective.
Embrace the contrarian approach. Question things at face value. When something feels unfair, propose another idea. Engage in productive debate. Use your influence and persuasion to help people embrace your perspective. This willingness to be contrarian and push for better outcomes is what distinguishes those who see barriers everywhere from those who see possibilities. It's the difference between accepting that this is just how things are done around here and instead, asking someone to explain to you why we do this this way. If you're an engineer, you solve problems for a living, so apply that same analytical mindset to the structures and systems that are holding you back.
Here's the insight most people miss: there's a difference between observation and interpretation. It's easier than you think to confuse fact with fiction. You observe a situation—like maybe your idea wasn't discussed in the meeting—and your brain automatically interprets that as your input isn't valued here. But that's not a verified fact, it's only an opinion, and that's not a helpful one at that. Maybe they're still gathering people's input. Maybe the timing was off. Maybe they loved it, but the agenda item ahead of it derailed the meeting and they ran out of time. Maybe it'll appear on next week's agenda. You don't actually know what it means, so stop making assumptions.
Your thoughts happen automatically and rarely do you get curious about where you've made these types of assumptions. This is exactly where you're struggling more than you need to. You're creating entire narratives based on interpretations you've never fact-checked. Someone didn't respond to your email? You've decided they're annoyed with you. Your manager seems distracted in your one-on-one? You've concluded that they're not impressed with your work. A colleague disagreed with your approach? You've determined they think you're incompetent. None of these interpretations are necessarily true. They're stories your brain is telling you and you're believing them without question.
Perhaps, consider it fiction until you verify whether it's true, or not. This single shift can be absolutely transformative. Instead of spiraling into catastrophic thinking, get curious. Start by asking yourself whether the assumption you're making is even true. Perhaps even go as far as asking whether the opposite could also be true. Then, go out and gather actual data. Ask questions. Seek clarity. Test your assumptions. And most of the time, I bet you'll find that the story you've been telling yourself was either completely wrong or significantly exaggerated.
It can be a game-changer when you realize those silent conversations you've been having with yourself shape everything. When you shift how you relate to yourself—from critic to ally—you don't just feel better, you perform better. You free up the mental energy you're currently spending on catastrophizing and redirect it toward actual problem-solving. You show up differently in meetings because you're not spending half your attention managing your inner critic. You take on bigger challenges because you trust yourself to handle whatever happens. You recover from setbacks faster because you're not adding insult to injury with harsh self-judgment.
Confidence sometimes doesn't feel like confidence when you're in the midst of building it. It can feel uncomfortable, scary, and risky. But consider the alternative. If you're sitting around staying quiet and hoping something good comes your way, you'll often get nowhere. The competitive world of work is not for the faint of heart, and in STEM fields where women already face an uphill battle, playing small can be the riskiest move you can make. You're not protecting yourself by keeping your head down. You're simply ensuring that you'll be overlooked, undervalued, and ultimately, left behind.
You don't need a permission slip. You need to give yourself permission—to step up, speak up, show up, and have the moxie that separates those who wait from those who win. You need to be willing to be the stubborn contrarian, to refuse to simply accept something at face value, and instead, push for a more desirable outcome. Call it courage, call it conviction, call it whatever you want—but find it within yourself. Because waiting your turn, knowing your place, playing it safe, doing what you're told, and following the rules probably won't get you into trouble, but it usually doesn't get you ahead, either.
It's hard to rise above the rest when you're intentionally staying under the radar. It's hard to stand out from the crowd when everything you're doing enables you to blend in. If you want to achieve what others aren't, you have to act in a way that others aren't willing to. You have to have the courage to voice a dissenting opinion rather than bury it. You have to be willing to do what you can to prevent a problem from occurring in the first place, rather than just dealing with the consequences, after the fact. You have to have the resilience to view rejection as nothing more than a pit stop on the road to success.
The question isn't whether you'll feel confident when you do these things. You probably won't, at least not at first. The question is: What will you do before you feel ready? Because that's where the transformation happens—in the gap between comfort and growth, between safety and success, between who you are now and who you're becoming.
Your challenge for this week is to identify one automatic thought pattern that's keeping you playing small. Question it. Write it down. Look at it objectively, and ask yourself if it's actually true or just a story you've been telling yourself. Then take one action—just one—that you think your confident future self would take. Not a massive career-defining move, just something small that takes a bit of moxie.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Building Your Confidence at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and nineteen.
Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.
Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.
