Confidence Under Pressure: How to Stop Second Guessing Yourself at Work
You are good at what you do.
You have the experience. You have the results. You have handled hard things before and come out the other side. And yet, in certain moments, something shifts. The big meeting. The difficult conversation. The decision where the stakes feel high. And suddenly that quiet voice starts up.
"What if I get this wrong?"
"Who am I to be making this call?"
"Everyone else seems so sure of themselves. Why don't I feel that way?"
If you recognise that, you are in very good company. In my experience coaching business owners, executives, and high-performing individuals across Ireland, second-guessing yourself at work is one of the most common and least talked-about challenges people face. Not because they are not capable. But because confidence and capability are not the same thing, and understanding that difference is where everything starts to shift.
In this post I want to give you an honest, practical breakdown of why this happens, what is going on beneath the surface, and, most importantly, what you can actually do to build genuine confidence that holds up when the pressure is on.
Why capable people second-guess themselves
Here is something I find genuinely useful to share with people early on: imposter syndrome is not a beginner's problem. In fact, it tends to get worse as competence grows.
Why? Because the more you know, the more clearly you can see how much you do not know yet. The more responsibility you carry, the higher the stakes feel. The more people are watching, the more exposed you feel. Someone just starting out is often too inexperienced to fully register the risks. It is the people who understand the complexity of what they are doing who feel the weight of it most acutely.
Research from the International Journal of Behavioural Science suggests that around 70 percent of people, including executives, entrepreneurs, and high achievers, experience imposter syndrome at some point in their lives. It is not a niche issue. It is a near-universal human experience that tends to go undiscussed because everyone assumes everyone else has it figured out.
They do not. They are just not saying so.
The Imposter Cycle, and why it keeps you stuck
In my work, and in my book The Clarity Code, I talk about something I call the Imposter Cycle. It is a pattern that keeps incredibly capable people trapped in self-doubt despite clear evidence of their ability. Here is how it works.
You achieve something. You do well, you deliver results, you handle a difficult situation competently. But instead of taking that in and building on it, you immediately dismiss it. You tell yourself it was luck, or the timing was right, or anyone could have done it. So the achievement does not land. It does not build anything.
Then the fear kicks in. Because if the last success was a fluke, then the next thing might be where you get found out. So you work harder, over-prepare, over-explain, over-deliver, all to stay one step ahead of being exposed as someone who does not really know what they are doing.
And then, even when that next thing goes well, the cycle starts again. You dismiss it, you fear the next one, you work harder to compensate. Around and around it goes.
You achieve. You dismiss. You fear. You overcompensate. You achieve. You dismiss. You fear. You overcompensate.
The problem with this cycle is that it is exhausting, and it never resolves. Because the issue is not actually your capability. It is the story you are telling yourself about your capability. And no amount of achievement will fix a story problem.
The identity anchor, what is holding you back without you knowing it
Beneath the Imposter Cycle, there is usually something deeper at work. I call it the Identity Anchor.
Think of a hot air balloon that will not lift off. The burners are lit. The air inside is rising. The sky is clear. But the balloon is not moving. Why? Because it is still tethered to the ground. A small, forgotten anchor is holding it down.
That is what an outdated self-belief does. You can have vision, skills, experience, and genuine drive, and still feel stuck, if somewhere underneath you are still carrying a story about who you are that was written a long time ago and has never been updated.
Maybe a teacher told you that you were not clever. Maybe a parent communicated, verbally or otherwise, that you were not quite enough. Maybe an early failure left a mark that quietly hardened into a belief. These things become Identity Anchors. And what makes them so powerful is that your brain, designed for efficiency and safety, will actively filter for evidence that confirms them.
When you carry the belief "I am not confident at work," your brain will find and file every moment that proves it, and quietly skip over the moments that contradict it. It is not laziness. It is not weakness. It is neuroscience. Your brain is doing exactly what it is built to do. The problem is that it is reinforcing a story that is no longer true, and possibly never was.
Recognising this is one of the most powerful shifts I see in coaching. The moment someone sees clearly that their self-doubt is not an accurate assessment of their ability, but a habit of perception, things start to move.
What second-guessing yourself actually costs you
I want to say something plainly here because I think it gets underestimated.
Chronic self-doubt at work is not just an internal experience. It has real, practical consequences.
It slows down decision-making, because every call requires more internal justification than it should. It makes you more vulnerable to manipulation from people who sense your uncertainty and use it. It exhausts you, because over-preparing and over-explaining everything burns enormous energy. It limits the risks you are willing to take, which limits your growth. And over time, it can quietly shrink the size of the life and career you build, not because of your actual ability, but because of what you believed you were capable of.
I have worked with executives in Ireland who were genuinely running at a fraction of their potential because their internal narrative had not caught up with who they had actually become. Getting that alignment right does not just feel better. It changes outcomes.
How to build confidence that actually holds under pressure
Let me give you something practical. Because this is not about positive affirmations or telling yourself you are great. Real confidence is grounded, honest, and built deliberately. Here is how.
- Start taking your own evidence seriously
The Imposter Cycle depends on you dismissing your successes. Start deliberately interrupting that pattern. When something goes well, make yourself sit with it for a moment. Not in an arrogant way. Just long enough to actually register it. Keep a record if it helps, a note on your phone, a journal, anything that gives you a reference point when the doubt voice starts up.
You have evidence. You are just not using it. Start using it.
- Watch the language you use about yourself
I worked with a woman once who started almost every self-description with something like: "I am just not the kind of person who..." or "I am terrible when it comes to..." She was literally priming herself, through the words she used daily, to keep being that person.
When we looked at it together and she started consciously shifting those phrases, even to something as simple as "I am getting better at this," the difference over time was significant. Subtle change, but compounded over weeks and months, it rewires how you see yourself.
Your brain believes what you tell it repeatedly. Be careful what you are telling it.
- Separate your performance from your worth
One of the root causes of second-guessing is equating how well you do something with how much you are worth. When those two things are tied together, every decision carries an enormous emotional weight because it feels like a verdict on you as a person.
Your value as a person is not on the line every time you make a call at work. You are allowed to be uncertain, to make mistakes, to not know everything, and still be fully worthy of the role you are in. Getting comfortable with that separation is one of the most freeing things a person can do.
- Act before you feel ready
Confidence is not what you feel before you take action. It is what grows as a result of taking action. Waiting to feel confident before you do the thing is waiting for something that will never arrive. Confidence follows action. It does not precede it.
This does not mean being reckless. It means recognising that the discomfort you feel before a stretch moment is not a warning signal. It is just the feeling of growth. The people who build strong confidence at work are not the ones who wait until they are certain. They are the ones who act despite the uncertainty and update their self-story based on what happens.
- Get an outside perspective
You cannot get perspective on something you are standing inside. One of the most consistent things I see in coaching is that people have a significantly worse view of their own capability than everyone around them has. The gap between how you see yourself and how others see you performing is often striking.
Whether that is a trusted mentor, a peer who knows your work, or a coach, having someone reflect your actual performance back to you clearly is one of the fastest routes to closing the gap between your capability and your confidence in it.
A final word
Confidence at work in Ireland, and everywhere, is not some fixed trait that people either have or do not. It is a skill. It is built through action, through updating the stories you carry about yourself, through taking your own evidence seriously, and through getting the right support to help you see yourself clearly.
You are likely more capable than you give yourself credit for. I say that not as empty encouragement, but as an observation from over twenty years of working with people who consistently underestimate themselves.
The question is not whether you are good enough. You would not still be here, reading this, if you were not. The question is whether you are willing to start believing it.
Want to work on this?
If your confidence has been knocked by difficult people, a toxic dynamic at work, or simply years of running the Imposter Cycle without realising it, my masterclass is a great place to start. It covers the patterns that quietly undermine your confidence and gives you practical tools to start responding differently.
→ How to Deal with Narcissists & Bullies, Mark's Masterclass
Or if you would like to work directly with me on building genuine, lasting confidence at work, I offer one-to-one coaching and executive coaching tailored to exactly these kinds of challenges. Get in touch through my contact page and we can talk about what is going on and what might help.
→ Work with Mark, Coaching & Contact
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