“I’m not sure I can ever get my confidence back. Do you think I can?”
Simon* was visibly distressed asking me this question. An experienced mental health professional, he was more familiar with encouraging others than talking about himself. He was looking for solutions as he started a new job while grappling with debilitating self-doubt.
Simon’s confidence wobbles started in his previous role where he was working as a team leader. He noticed waking up in the mornings dreading starting his day and feeling anxious going into team meetings. He had an awareness that he was avoiding parts of his job, specifically tasks that involved him “fronting”, not just meetings but check-ins with team members and providing updates to other team leaders. His recurring thought was “I can’t do it”, followed by an acceleration in this feeling of dread.
While Simon was mostly bothered by these worries at work, some of this loss of confidence, irritability and increased worry was leaking into personal relationships and non-work activities as well. Simon found himself avoiding social situations and talking to people. “I just can’t face it; it feels like another thing to do that I haven’t got either the energy or the confidence for and I don’t know how to explain the dread,” he told me.
Prior to seeking help, Simon had resigned from his job and taken on a role with fewer responsibilities where he could be more “behind the scenes”. Initially, he felt relief from making this change and started to feel more hopeful about getting his confidence back. Unfortunately, the relief was short-lived. As Simon started picking up new projects and tasks, the self-doubt emerged as strong as ever. “It’s like it’s following me around,” he said.
I reassured Simon that many of us look for an external lifestyle change to fix emotional distress – we may change jobs, a relationship or where we live in the hope we will get a different perspective on challenges or some respite from what’s hard. And unfortunately, often the upsets, whatever they are, do tend to follow us around.
From listening to Simon, it was clear that he was interpreting his symptoms and experiences as a personal failure, and this was contributing to the dread and avoidance. My hunch was that workplace factors had played a significant part in this loss of confidence. To recover well, Simon likely needed to lift his perspective from himself and give greater weight to contributing factors from his environment. Simon wasn’t very keen on any diagnostics, including the label of burnout, mostly because he continued to feel optimistic about his profession and his future ability to contribute, rather than cynical.
Instead of searching for labels, we leveraged Simon’s professional interest in mental health and wellbeing and turned to some online research on mental health at work. From reading expert opinions about what contributes to burnout and distress in the workplace – things such as unmanageable workloads, chronic lack of control, insufficient reward and recognition and a values mismatch – Simon was better able to reflect on his own experiences at his previous job and how they might have contributed to his self-doubt.
Fortunately, in his new role, he has greater control over his workload and how he works, and there is a greater alignment between his and their values. But because of his self-doubt and lack of confidence, Simon tends to “bat away” or disregard the positive feedback and recognition that comes his way. Being open to it and finding meaningful ways to accept it is going to be a work in progress.
We started with some self-compassion strategies, including how he might treat a friend who received positive feedback. I asked whether he would he suggest to a friend that positive feedback wasn’t deserved and didn’t mean much as he was telling himself. Or would he encourage that friend to celebrate and soak in the praise as recognition of a job well done.
Another challenge we identified was Simon’s inability to keep firm lines between his work and home life. We took inspiration from a recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology showing that recovery experiences outside work hours were related to calmer moods during the workday. This meant coaching Simon to switch off from work when he wasn’t working. The same study also talked about the power of mastery experiences outside work – things that give us a sense of achievement and accomplishment.
Simon started reading and watching more travel-related content and getting more immersed in gardening – growing things, rather than people, he noted. Developing some different interests was helpful for a sense of mastery for Simon, feeling more effective and capable. As the study suggested, he started to notice small doses of calm and confidence creeping back into his workdays.
Simon also read about the importance of idleness. He found this challenging at first (like many, he was raised with a firm Protestant work ethic), but also inspirational. Incorporating some idle time into each day will most definitely continue to be a work in progress for him. For now, it’s a welcome reminder that his worth is not defined by his productivity.
Finally, we agreed that strategic avoidance was useful for Simon. While we know that blind avoidance isn’t helpful in recovery, Simon is experimenting with a new approach: oscillating between giving himself a gentle push to tackle things he dreads and permission to avoid.
He still doesn’t feel able to share his personal struggles with the people in his life, but he hopes to help others understand that self-doubt doesn’t have to be a life sentence by giving permission for his story to be included in this article.
*Names and details have been changed
• Gaynor Parkin is a clinical psychologist and founder at Button Psychology. Dr Amanda Wallis leads the R & D and innovation team at Umbrella Wellbeing
