Where to start looking
I have lost confidence in myself
You hesitate before things you used to do without thinking.
You rehearse ordinary conversations afterwards.
You are aware you are being careful, and that awareness makes it worse.
Confidence is situational, even when it feels total
People say they have lost their confidence and mean, on inspection, that they have lost it in one arena. In meetings. With one person. Since one event. Naming the arena shrinks the problem from a character to a circumstance.
Something usually happened
Confidence rarely drains for no reason. A criticism that landed, a failure that was public, a period of being managed badly, a change that removed the things you were good at. The event is often small and the effect is not proportionate to it.
Caution is sometimes accurate
Not all lost confidence is a distortion. Occasionally a person is being appropriately careful in an environment where care is warranted. That is worth ruling in or out before treating it as something to fix.
What this usually connects to
- Where you are still confident, which is usually more places than it feels like.
- What was happening around the time it changed.
A question worth sitting with
- What is the specific thing you now expect to go badly?
The session audits where confidence is intact and where it is not, rather than treating it as one thing.
Your confidence auditIt is a conversation, not a questionnaire. You can stop at any point, and finishing it does not mean anything has to change.
If the question turns out to be a different one