Introduction

I’m worried I’m not Good Enough.

What if they don’t think I’m Good Enough?

They’re going to find out I’m not Good Enough.

These statements and questions regularly come up in discussions with my clients. Why is it that so many women like us feel that we aren’t Good Enough at work?

As women, we have all the capabilities and attributes needed for leadership and senior management. We possess powerful problem-solving abilities, empathy, ethics, and tend to be great team-players, motivators and role models.

But, for many, our level of self-belief and our courage to take risks doesn’t reflect these valuable skills.

In my role as a Career, Leadership and Confidence Coach, I see many immensely talented and incredibly accomplished women who won’t stop doubting themselves.

Perhaps you’re one of them?

Do you feel under pressure to prove yourself? Have you fallen into habitual behaviours that keep you stuck? Does it feel like a battle with your inner critic to keep delivering your unrealistic standards?

Well, the good news is change is absolutely possible.

I’d love to be able to hand you a magic wand which with one flick would ensure you always felt genuinely Good Enough.

I’m afraid though that like most things worth having it takes commitment, intention and practice. If you can provide those, then this book will give you the rest.

In the 12 years I’ve spent researching successful women and working with hundreds of amazing clients, I’ve discovered the typical biases and challenges that women face at work. These can be cultural, like an unconscious bias towards men or when a woman who is very self-confident gets a backlash for being thought of as aggressive or bossy.

Then there are the individual challenges such as the Imposter Syndrome – worrying you’re not Good Enough for the job and you’ll be found out, or the fear of being judged negatively by others which makes you think you need to deliver at a perfect level all the time.

As you explore this book, you’ll read about these challenges, but the focus will be on the proven strategies my clients have used to overcome them. You will also find inspiring real-life stories from the awesome women I have worked with.

What is the Confidence Gap?

The idea of ‘The Confidence Gap’ between men and women at work became universally accepted around 2013/2014. It was around this time that books such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In ¹and The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman² were popular.

The low number of women in senior leadership positions was thought to be a result of this confidence gap.

Both books provided research and studies to support this theory. One of the most well-known studies in The Confidence Code took place with Hewlett Packard employees. They analysed internal data relating to when candidates felt confident enough to apply for promotions.

Women working at Hewlett Packard, the study discovered, applied for a promotion only when they believed they met almost 100 per cent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to put themselves forward when they thought they could achieve 60 per cent of the job requirements.

From this, it was surmised that women hold themselves back from applying as they lack confidence in their abilities and fear the outcome if they fail.

There have been many other studies backing this assumption. In 2014 an American consulting company published a report called Everyday Moments of Truth: Frontline Managers Are Key to Women’s Career Aspirations³. It found that 43% of women aspire to senior management when they start working for a company but only 27% have the confidence to actually do so. After two years of employment, this confidence figure drops to a low 13%. 

Whereas, 28% of men start out being confident they can reach senior management, and after two years of experience, 55% of them believe they can achieve that top role.

The suggestions that came out of the report were about line managers recognising a balance of skills in an individual rather than just the existing leadership competences, and the importance of balanced recruitment processes and support from the boardroom.

The confidence gap has been the subject of an overwhelming number of articles. The majority of them conclude that women have less self-belief and are more risk averse than men.

Before I go further, I would like to point out that despite everything I’ve said so far, this book is not about telling women to pull themselves together and behave ‘like a man’. There are many interwoven issues involved in finding a solution to the lack of top-level women, but blaming women or men is certainly not the answer.

In the years following the release of the highly successful books above, many researchers have challenged the belief that women lack confidence compared to men at work.

Defining what confidence is and how it can be measured is the first problem. A study by Simmons University, Women and Confidence: An Alternative Understanding of the ‘Confidence Gap’ ⁴asks how we can know what confidence looks like. In particular, how can you see the distinction between high and low confidence when individuals demonstrate it in different ways.

The study above also says that women shouldn’t be encouraged to emulate the behaviours of men. This is because firstly, not all men think and behave the same way, and secondly, women need to be authentically confident and not feel they should copy the style of others. Somehow we have given women the idea that their confidence is broken and needs to be fixed. This is not only wrong but unhelpful and can further knock women’s self-belief.

In 2018, Laura Guillen, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at The European School of Management and Technology, researched the subject of self-confidence appearance along with colleagues Margarita Mayo of IE business school and Natalia Karelaia of INSEAD.  They didn’t focus on how confident women feel, instead, the focus was on how confident men and women appear.

They published the research paper, Appearing self-confident and getting credit for it: Why it may be easier for men than women to gain influence at work ⁵

Its findings were that the consequences of appearing self-confident were not the same for women as for men. They suggested that confident men become liked and successful, whereas women who demonstrate confidence, also need to show warmth and caring if they are to be successful and fit in.

Changing this double standard can only be achieved through organisational and cultural reforms around recruitment, career progression and role models. To do this, we need more women at the boardroom table.

With the recent evolution of the #MeToo phenomenon, there is even more focus on the behaviours of men and women in the workplace. It brings a fantastic opportunity to increase the speed of change in workplace gender equality.

Whether the lack of women in senior roles is a result of low self-belief or a cultural double standard, on an individual basis, we can all agree that building your confidence will have a positive impact on your career progression.

Who Am I?

My career journey started when I qualified as a Pharmacist. I quickly realised I didn’t find the profession fulfilling and instead chose the management career pathway in a FTSE 100 company.

I had a very successful 17-year corporate career, and as part of it, I got to coach the senior leaders in the business. I have always had a love of learning, and developing my coaching skills opened up a fabulous new arena for me to continually learn while supporting others to grow.

Seeing colleagues having ‘Ahah!’ moments or insights into other perspectives, gave me real pleasure and a sense of achievement. I recognised that for me, coaching was fulfilling and it gave me a sense of purpose.

The role required me to stay away from home, and as I’d had my daughter, I took the option of voluntary redundancy. I used the opportunity to gain further qualifications in coaching and set up my coaching business.

I then had one of the toughest times in my life. I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in the placenta of my third pregnancy. 

The cancer wasn’t initially diagnosed, and as I was bleeding heavily, I thought I’d miscarried. The tumour was deceiving me though. The placenta produces HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin), which is the hormone detected in pregnancy tests. As my tumour had taken over the placenta, this hormone was produced at extremely high levels. That meant I had all the pregnancy symptoms but multiplied.

A couple of weeks later I had a life-threatening bleed and was hospitalised.  I was rushed to a specialist hospital in London as the HCG levels had rung alarm bells and the next morning I was started on chemotherapy.

The treatment led to eighteen months in a cancer bubble, where the outside world didn’t seem to exist. After a horrendous time spent having chemotherapy every week for six months, regularly going neutropenic (no white blood cells for immunity) and missing out on time with my one and three-year-old, I was lucky enough to go into remission and have been clear ever since.

Coming out of this period I knew I should be happy and look forward to a new future. However, I found my confidence had crumbled, and I questioned my future purpose.

I returned to my love of coaching and began to use my coaching skills a small step at a time. While I rebuilt both my physical strength and my confidence, I also started the journey to find my new career.

It was then I had my ‘light bulb’ moment and realised that I wanted to help other women build their confidence and reach their potential. I decided to combine my corporate experience and the research I’d done into successful women to focus on confidence in career women and my business took off.

After 12 years of studying and working with thousands of women, I have a proven system to support women to achieve confidence, courage and credibility in their career. I’m so excited to be sharing it with you in this book.

I’m passionate about supporting wonderful women like you to achieve individual career success, as well as becoming role models for my daughter and for all the girls to come.

How to Use This Book

The purpose of this book is to raise your awareness of the challenges and opportunities that career women face, to give you an understanding of the mindset behind your behaviours and to share proven tools and strategies to help you feel confident, courageous and credible in the workplace.

Some or all of the topics in the book may apply to you. You can choose to work your way through the chapters in order, or dip in and out of the challenges that resonate with you.

I have written the book so that the first six chapters focus on the mindsets that tend to hold women back in their careers and how to overcome them. The second part of the book then builds on practical strategies to accelerate your career progression and fulfilment.

In each chapter, you’ll find a ‘Self-Coaching Activity’, a ‘Client Story’ and an ‘In A Nutshell’ summary. I suggest at the end of each chapter that you take the time to complete the activity, and to reflect on how to put the ideas into action in your career before moving onto the next subject.

Read on, learn lots and enjoy.

Chapter 1

Why Don’t I Feel Good Enough?

"When you know you’re ENOUGH!

When you stop focusing on all things that you’re not.

When you stop fussing over perceived flaws.

When you remove all imposed and unbelievable expectations on yourself.

When you start celebrating yourself more.

When you focus on all that you are.

When you start believing that your perceived flaws are just that - perception..."

Malebo Sephodi

In the introduction, I talked about confidence levels and the confidence gap between men and women. When it comes to feeling Good Enough though, there is another element, as important as your confidence.

That is your self-worth, which is a measure of how you feel about yourself and your value in the world.

If you struggle with believing you are worthy, then you may feel confident in your abilities to do your job, but still think that you are not Good Enough to be doing it.

Self-worth is something we are all born with. From our beginning, there are no feelings of inadequacy, no worrying about being judged or being compared negatively to others.

Have you ever known a baby to need counselling?

It’s only over time that our thinking about the experiences we encounter changes this.

The Golden Nugget

Imagine your self-worth as a golden nugget (bear with me on this metaphor). As you experience life and have anxious thoughts about those experiences, you start to bury the nugget under a layer of soil.

The more self-doubting thoughts you have, the more layers of soil you put over your golden nugget, until you don’t even remember it was a golden nugget!

When your golden nugget of self-worth gets hidden under these layers of mud and soil (our thoughts and beliefs), you lose touch with it. Then instead of knowing that you are worthy and of value, you begin to question yourself. You believe the thoughts that tell you that you’re not Good Enough or as important as others.

As individuals, we don’t want people to see this side of ourselves – the vulnerable, not Good Enough parts we all think we have. Which means we instead choose to wrap that mud-covered golden nugget, in a thin layer of gold paper.

That layer is your outer persona, the mask you put on to look like a real golden nugget and show others how happy and sorted you are, but it is only paper thin.

Now you are even further from your golden nugget, and it’s even more difficult to touch that innate feeling of wellbeing, wisdom or gut intuition.

All the time, your feeling of self-worth, well-being or value is right there within you, if only you could get through the paper and mud layers.

There are a lot of small and insignificant experiences in life that distance us from our self-worth.

For example, a simple and what do you do? can make us question our value and believe we only matter if we pass certain conditions. As Stanford psychologist Meag-gan O’Reilly says in her TEDx talk⁶, we then think our sense of worth depends on something outside of us.

What if your intrinsic value came from you just existing, rather than what you contributed or achieved?

I remember when I first started my corporate career, it was my pre-registration year. That’s a year of practical