226. Your Belief in Yourself is Powerful
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Staying silent doesn't protect us — it costs us our confidence, credibility, and career trajectory over time. Let’s unpack why imposter syndrome hits high-achieving women in STEM so hard, and how being raised to ask permission instead of taking risks shaped a fixed mindset. It’s time to build real self-confidence, so nothing and no one can knock us down.
The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones isn't intelligence or opportunity or resources—it's the belief that they can make their goals happen.
Are you silencing your ideas in meetings because you don't want to come across as pushy or difficult? Are you working longer and harder than everyone else just to prove you belong? Are you waiting for someone else's permission or approval before claiming what you've already earned?
You'll learn that self-confidence isn't built from external validation, past achievements, or other people's opinions—it's an internal belief you generate on your own, and it's the real difference between the people who succeed and the people who don't.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
How the six warning signs of low self-belief are quietly costing you the visibility you need at work
4 practical strategies to build unshakeable self-confidence
Why relying on other people's belief in you leaves you more vulnerable, while self-generated confidence can never be taken away
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and twenty-six. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
There is a price you pay when you stop believing in yourself. Every time you silence yourself in a meeting because you don't want to seem pushy, every time you dismiss your accomplishments as just luck, every time you wait for someone to give you permission to pursue what you've already earned—it's costing you. It's costing you your self-confidence, your self-respect, your career's trajectory, and quite possibly your sanity.
In this episode, we're going to talk about what happens when you stop advocating for yourself, why believing in yourself isn't just some fluffy self-help concept, but actually mission critical for women in STEM, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it before you lose any more ground.
Here's what nobody told me when I was starting in my career: staying silent won't keep you safe. Being nice and not rocking the boat won't protect you. In fact, not speaking up in meetings, not advocating for yourself, not pushing back when you're being overlooked—those end up costing you in the long run. They're active choices that compound over time, creating a very real disadvantage.
The cost of staying silent is incredibly high, especially for women like us when we're already fighting an uphill battle. When you avoid conflict and decide not to voice your ideas because you don't want to seem difficult or aggressive, you're essentially removing yourself from consideration for the opportunities that matter. You're training everyone around you—your manager, your colleagues, your entire team—that you don't need to be consulted, that your input isn't necessary, and you're fine being invisible. And the truly frustrating part is the fact that they'll believe you. They'll take you at face value. If you act like your contributions don't matter, they'll assume they don't.
This is the war of attrition that is life at work these days. It's not one big dramatic moment where someone tells you to sit down and be quiet. It's a thousand tiny moments when you tell yourself to keep your head down and just do the work, and then you wonder why you feel invisible despite your achievements. You do excellent work. You meet every deadline. You go above and beyond and yet, somehow, you're still overlooked for that high-profile project or that promotion. And here's what I need you to understand: feeling invisible despite your achievements isn't just frustrating, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less you advocate for yourself, the less visible you become. And the less visible you are, the easier it is to convince yourself that maybe you don't deserve to be seen. And around and around we go.
So, why is this particularly brutal for women in engineering and STEM fields? Recognition and reward for our hard work are already scarce in these industries, but for people like us, they're practically mythical. You can do everything 'right'—get the degree, publish the papers, lead the projects, hit every metric—and still find yourself stuck while less qualified colleagues sail past you. And before you start thinking that this is just in your head, let me assure you, it's not.
The pushback women experience in male-dominated fields is well-documented, and it ranges from subtle to the not-so-subtle. You get talked over in meetings. Your ideas get attributed to your colleagues, who repeat them five minutes after you've said them. You suggest something and get crickets; someone else suggests the exact same thing and suddenly it's brilliant. You're direct and assertive, which in a man would be called leadership, but in you, it gets labeled as "aggressive" or "difficult to work with". Someone always wants to know how you're balancing family and work, even when you don't even have kids yet, but no one is asking your male coworkers the same question. These microaggressions aren't random, they're systematic, and they chip away at your confidence, one interaction at a time.
And then there's the overqualified-and-still-overlooked phenomenon. You know what I'm talking about. You have more experience, better credentials, a longer track record of success, and yet you watch someone with half of your qualifications get the opportunity you wanted. When you ask why, you get vague answers about "cultural fit" or "leadership potential", or my personal favorite, "we're looking for someone who's more of a self-starter". Meanwhile, you've been demonstrating your ability to be that self-starter since day one, but apparently, that doesn't count because you didn't announce it loudly enough or take credit aggressively enough. That distinct feeling of being an outsider, even when you objectively belong, becomes part of your daily existence. And all of it becomes exhausting.
So, what does this actually look like in practice? What are the warning signs that your lack of belief in yourself is costing you without you even realizing it? Let me give you six of the most common red flags to watch for in your professional setting:
You find yourself constantly asking permission instead of just going ahead and taking the initiative.
You're working harder and later than everyone else to "prove" yourself while they go home at five o' clock without a second thought.
You attribute your successes to luck, timing, or other people's help, and yet your failures are all you. You easily see those as all your fault, entirely predictable, and proof that you're not good enough.
You're the only one who doesn't speak up in meetings, or when you do, you preface everything with diminishing phrases like, "This might be a stupid question..." or "I'm probably wrong, but...".
You decline opportunities because you don't have enough experience yet, even though the requirements listed read like an ideal candidate wish list rather than actual prerequisites.
You apologize excessively, even when you've done absolutely nothing wrong, saying things like, "Sorry to bother you with this email" or "Sorry for speaking up", which begin to sound like you're apologizing for existing at all in this space, or daring to take up oxygen.
This is where imposter syndrome comes crashing in. And look, imposter syndrome isn't the same thing as low confidence—but rather it's a symptom of low confidence, especially if it's a recurring feeling at work. Imposter syndrome is that persistent self-doubt despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. It's the feeling that you're about to be found out as a fraud, that you don't belong here, that everyone else knows what they're doing and you're just faking it. The internal dialogue is brutal, like, "Who do I think I am? I'm not qualified for that promotion. I don't have enough experience to ask to work on that project. I must be the only one who's overwhelmed with this workload, so I'll just work harder. I'll stay extra late to figure this out because I don't want to bother my manager—since anyone else would have figured this out by now on their own."
What you may not realize is that imposter syndrome most often strikes high-achievers, and I have yet to meet a successful female engineer who isn't a high-achiever, even if she vehemently denies it. High-achievers set impossibly high expectations for themselves, and when you combine that with all the subtle and not-so-subtle pushback we just talked about, imposter syndrome gets magnified.
Your negative thoughts erode your confidence even further. After you've been talked over for the hundredth time, asked how you'll ever do your job and have a family, told you're too aggressive when you're just being assertive, or excluded from social events where real networking happens—that's when even the most confident woman is going to start doubting her abilities. That's not a personal failing. That's a rational response to a hostile environment.
As I've said many times, awareness is the first step to changing anything. These beliefs might sound rational in your head, but they're actually costing you everything. Some of these beliefs might sound all too familiar:
"I can't ask for that raise or promotion—I don't want to seem greedy or pushy." Meanwhile, your colleague who's been there half as long as you, just asked for both and got them.
"If I was really good enough, they would have offered it to me already." And yet, they're not sitting around thinking about your career development because advocating for what you want is your job.
"I need more credentials or experience before I could possibly speak up." I hate to tell you that if this is what you're thinking now, you could have three PhDs and still find a reason that you're not qualified enough.
"What if I fail? Everyone will know I'm a fraud." And yet, the reality is that everyone runs the risk of failing at some point, but the people who are most likely to succeed are the ones who fail more, not less.
"I should just be grateful I have this job at all." Grateful? Really? You earned this job. Maybe you should consider that they should be feeling grateful that they have someone like you on their team.
These types of beliefs aren't serving you. They're keeping you playing small, keeping you quiet, and ultimately keeping you stuck. So, let's reframe them. Instead of "I can't" try, "I'm learning how." Instead of waiting for external validation to give you confidence, understand that self-confidence isn't based on past evidence—it's based on your willingness to have your own back regardless of what happens. You don't need anyone's permission to believe in yourself.
The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones isn't intelligence or opportunity or resources—it's the belief that they can make their own goals happen. That's it. That's the difference. Successful people believe they can figure it out, and unsuccessful people believe they can't. Both are right. If you're struggling with this, your lack of belief in yourself will limit you, no matter how great the ideas or opportunities are that come your way—no matter how smart you are, how credentialed, or how experienced.
Confidence, or lack thereof, starts young. It's a product of how we were raised and the society around you. In general, girls are rewarded for fundamentally different behaviors than boys from day one. Girls are rewarded for helping others without complaint, for sitting still, for being quiet and well-behaved. We're not encouraged to take risks. Don't swing too high on the swings. Find a steady, safe job, because that's the path to success. Girls don't learn to take risks. Instead, we learn to ask permission.
Boys, on the other hand, are rewarded for trying new things. They're expected to take risks, even to their own detriment. They're not expected to sit still or to be quiet or be the peacekeeper. Boys will be boys, right? Their natural curiosity is encouraged, which means they rack up both more successes and more failures early in life. They learn to take risks and take setbacks in stride when they're young. They develop what Carol Dweck calls a "growth mindset"—the belief that they can learn anything if they practice enough and have the right resources. They understand that their level of intelligence and skills aren't fixed; they're learned through practice and failure.
Meanwhile, girls who learn to ask permission and don't learn to take risks? We develop what Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset". We believe our level of intelligence and skills are fixed, that we either have them or we don't. When someone says no to us, we take it as a personal rejection of who we are as people, not just a rejection of one idea or one request. This conditioning doesn't make us weak—it makes us human. But it does mean we have to deliberately cultivate what wasn't built into our upbringing: a growth mindset, risk tolerance, and self-confidence that doesn't require anyone else's approval.
Don't shy away from a challenge. Growth is happiness. Having something to work toward, believing you're capable of achieving it, watching yourself get closer to your goals—those are what give you purpose. That gives your life meaning beyond just surviving another day at work.
When you build genuine self-confidence—not the fake-it-'til-you-make-it kind, but the real kind that comes from trusting yourself—you develop resilience against inevitable setbacks. You stop being destroyed by every criticism or setback. You learn to advocate for yourself, which models the behavior for other women who are watching you, whether you realize it or not.
You reclaim your time and energy by working smarter instead of just harder, because you're no longer trying to prove your worth through sheer volume of work. You discover that the worst thing that can happen is an emotion, and you prove to yourself that you can handle any emotion. And eventually, you get to live without fear of failure because you know that, no matter what happens, you'll have your own back.
Cultivating your self-confidence is the most attractive, the most fun, and the most exciting way to live. When you're generating self-confidence from within, your life becomes so much more interesting because you're not limited by what you've already done or what others think you're capable of. You're limited only by what you're willing to try.
So, now let's get practical. What can you actually do about all of this? Here are four strategies you can implement starting today, and they all focus on what's within your control:
Strategy #1: Understand the difference between self-confidence and confidence. Stop waiting for more credentials or experience to earn the right to speak up or to go after what you want. This may seem like splitting hairs, but confidence is based on something external—your past achievements, other people's opinions, or evidence that you can do something. Self-confidence is based on something internal—your willingness to feel any emotion, your trust that you'll manage whatever happens, and your belief that there are things you don't know how to do, but you'll find a way if you commit to it. You can have zero experience doing something and still have complete self-confidence that you'll figure it out. That's the distinction and that's what will change everything for you.
Strategy #2: Use your voice effectively and powerfully. This means learning to ask for what you want, without apologizing. Practice scripts for assertively asking for your next raise or promotion. Be sure that your wording does not include apologies, qualifiers, or any form of self-deprecation. Just clear, direct requests based on facts. When you're feeling overqualified or overlooked, reposition yourself by telling a better story about your value. Don't wait for someone to recognize your contributions. Make them visible in meetings, in one-on-ones with your manager, and definitely in performance reviews.
Strategy #3: Stop relying on others' belief in you. This is hard because we're conditioned to seek approval, but it is truly essential. When we were young, we tended to worry too much about what everyone was thinking about what we said or did. That's one of the great things that happens when you've been around as long as I have, you seem to start to care a lot less about what anybody thinks of your choices. Eventually, we realize nobody's been thinking about us at all. People are too busy worrying about their own lives and wondering what you think of them. They're not sitting around judging you nearly as much as you think.
If having others believe in you was a requirement for success, most of us would never accomplish anything. Your family wants to keep you safe, and that does not necessarily help you grow. They'll discourage you from taking risks because they love you and they don't want to see you stressed or disappointed.
When you rely on external validation for your confidence, you have to constantly manage everyone's opinion of you, which is impossible, even for those of us who describe ourselves as complete control freaks. But if you rely only on your belief in yourself, when you're lacking in self-confidence, you know it's only because of the way you're thinking. And the good news is you can fix that.
Strategy #4: Manage your mind deliberately. Notice the thoughts that generate self-doubt. They might sound like, "I don't know how to do this", "I've never done it before", "I'm not good enough", "This is too hard for me", "I'm confused" or "I need help". When you think these thoughts, they generate self-doubt which leads to inaction, which gives you the exact results you were afraid of. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The best suggestion I have for you is to gently notice those thoughts and let them go. Replace them with thoughts that generate more self-confidence, such as, "I haven't done this before, but I'm capable of figuring it out" or "I find this challenging, which means I'm growing" or "I'm exactly where I need to be right now". Stop making setbacks mean something about your worth as a person. Failure simply means you haven't met your own expectations, yet. That's it. It means you're in the process of learning. It means you're human. It means you're in the middle of it. It doesn't mean anything about your value or your capabilities. Trust yourself to have your own back, no matter what happens.
Self-confidence has nothing to do with other people. It has everything to do with your belief in yourself. That's why it's the most powerful thing in the world—because nobody can touch it. You can believe in yourself, no matter what. It doesn't matter if anyone else believes in you. It doesn't matter if you struggle. It doesn't matter if everyone else is better than you at something. You can still have complete self-confidence because it's generated from within, not dependent on external circumstances.
Other people's opinion of you and your abilities does not give you self-confidence. If you rely on other people believing in you, you're relying on confidence that isn't yours, and you will get knocked off your feet the second someone doesn't believe in you. But when you rely only on your belief in yourself, nobody can knock you down. When you fail—and you will fail, because everyone fails—you use it as an opportunity to increase your self-confidence rather than decrease it. You prove to yourself that you can experience fear, defeat, disappointment, even humiliation and still believe in yourself. That's the real power.
You have to believe in yourself first. Stop waiting for someone to give you permission. Stop apologizing for taking up space. Stop searching for reasons why things won't work instead of figuring out what it will take to make it happen.
What you want is worth fighting for, and you're the only one who will be there every single day dealing with your stuff, so you better believe you're capable of creating the career—and the life—you actually want.
Self-confidence is not arrogance. It's not thinking you're better than other people because that actually comes from a place of insecurity. You get to believe whatever you want about yourself. You don't have to ask anyone's permission to believe that you're capable, that you can figure things out, and that you deserve to be here, as much as anyone else.
Show up with as much self-confidence as you can muster, so that nobody can knock you down. Be the person who creates whatever you want in life. Generate more self-confidence with the way you think about what's possible for you. Trust yourself. Manage your thoughts. Be willing to feel all the feelings, good and bad, and still go all in, anyway.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Reclaiming Your Self-Confidence at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and twenty-six.
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.
