Why even your most capable leaders sometimes lose their confidence, and how to help them reconnect with it when it matters most.

We’ve all felt it, in our logical mind we know we have the power… but for whatever reason the belief just isn’t there.

We tend to think of confidence as a fixed trait, you either have it or you don’t. But that’s not true, confidence like any other feeling…  joy, pain, excitement, anger, grief, courage, fear… none of them are fixed states. States come and they go, several times a day in some cases; the intensity and duration of a state also varies.  And, states can also be trained.

As John C. Maxwell put it, “People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.” That’s why confidence isn’t about what you say, it’s about who you are when you say it.

Across Pharma and Biotech, I meet talented professionals who look perfectly capable on paper. They have the qualifications, the experience and the results. Yet something has knocked them off centre. Sometimes it’s a change in role, relocation, or new company culture. For others, it’s a personal event that unsettled their sense of self of a mixture of several different unrelated events that has caused a confidence crash. The cause varies, but the result is remarkably consistent. They start to identify with the less confident side of themselves and forget how to access the other side.

The harder the prepare, the more they rehearse and overanalyse every word, the more they try to mask their anxiety and the more they start feeling like a fake. Because no amount of preparation helps when the problem isn’t a lack of skill… it’s the lack of access to the state of confidence.

One client comes to mind. Let’s call her Elena. After moving to Germany to take on a new global role, she began doubting herself in meetings. Her English was strong, her technical skill unquestioned, but she started associating with the nervous, cautious part of herself instead of the calm, capable scientist she’d always been. She’d walk into meetings tense and guarded. Her tone changed, her energy dropped, and her ideas weren’t landing. She knew she was better than this, but she couldn’t reach that side of her when it counted. And that’s the point. The confident version of her still existed, it was simply out of reach.

The Four-Step Reconnection Process

Helping people like Elena reconnect to their confident state isn’t about teaching them new skills. It’s about guiding them through a sequence that allows that confidence to re-emerge naturally.

1. Awareness – Recognising the full range of states available to you and how they feel. Acknowledging the common triggers that lead to a state change and how to avoid or generate this. This involves noticing physical cues and mental patterns before they take over.

2. Generation – Learning how to create the internal conditions for calm focus. Techniques vary depending on the trigger, but they all centre on shifting attention from the inner critic to the inner resource.

3. Practice – Any new skill or technique requires practice and this is no different. Rehearsing gaining access to desired states; first in private, then in safe, low-pressure situations until the confident state feels familiar again and can be accessed at will.

4. Deliberate State Shift – The ability to choose the state you need, when you need it. Not forced confidence, but authentic steadiness you can access under pressure.. Having the ability to access states not only in stressful situations but also after the event, enables you to stop overanalysing after events and move on to the next task.

It’s the same type of process athletes use before stepping into competition and actors before stepping on stage. It’s trainable, measurable and sustainable.

Why It Matters for HR

When an employee’s confidence falters, the consequences ripple through the team. Ideas stay unspoken, decisions slow down and the quietest people become the most overlooked.

HR and L&D teams often invest in presentation or language training, but those approaches only address the surface problem. Without addressing the internal state the external skills can’t take hold, which is why results from standard training fade when pressure returns.

By helping employees reconnect to their confident state, you unlock more than communication skills. You restore clarity, collaboration and credibility… qualities that directly influence leadership impact and team trust.

Even Superman has moments when he questions himself. The cape stays in the cupboard and the world still expects him to fly. Your employees feel that too. They haven’t lost their power, they’ve just forgotten where it lives.

When they learn to reconnect with it, performance becomes consistent, presence becomes natural and they stop trying to sound confident and start being confident.

If this resonates, let’s have a conversation. Book a consultation call through the link in my bio and discover what reconnecting to confidence could look like for your leaders.

Because confidence doesn’t vanish. It just needs to be found, trained, and chosen again when it matters most.