Why Have I Lost My Confidence?

Maybe you used to walk into a room without thinking twice about what people thought of you. You trusted your decisions, felt comfortable meeting new people, or simply felt more like yourself. Then somewhere along the line, that changed.

Perhaps you can point exactly when your confidence took a knock…or maybe there was no obvious turning point at all - you’ve just gradually started second-guessing yourself, comparing yourself to others, or holding yourself back in ways you never used to. If that sounds familiar, you might find yourself wondering, where did my confidence go?

The answer is rarely that you simply “became less confident”. Confidence is shaped by our experiences, beliefs, behaviours and environment - which means there can be many reasons it changes over time.

First, what actually is confidence?

We often talk about confidence as though it’s something we have or don’t have. In reality, it can be much more changeable than that.

You might feel incredibly confident at work but uncomfortable in social situations. You might trust yourself to look after everyone else but struggle to make decisions about your own life.

Psychologist Albert Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy can help us understand this. Self-efficacy refers to our belief in our ability to do what is needed in a particular situation. Those beliefs influence the challenges we take on, the effort we put in and how we respond when things don’t go to plan.

In other words, confidence isn’t necessarily a fixed part of your personality. It can grow…and it can be knocked.

So, what might have happened to yours?

1.Something knocked your confidence - and your brain remembered it.

Rejection. A relationship ending. Losing a job. Being criticised. Making a mistake. Experiencing a failure. A friendship changing. Even one particular embarrassing moment. Sometimes confidence changes because something happens that challenges the way we previously saw ourselves.

Imagine you’ve always thought, “I’m good at my job”, then you receive unexpectedly harsh criticism. The experience itself might be temporary, but the meaning you attach to it can linger…”Maybe I’m not actually very good at this”. Now you enter the next situation with slightly less confidence…you hesitate…you notice your mistakes more readily…you might interpret neutral feedback more negatively. Before long, one experience has started influencing how you see yourself more generally. The knock to your confidence may have happened once - but self-doubt can keep replaying it long after the original experience has passed.

2.You’ve stopped doing the things that used to make you feel capable.

This is one of the most interesting things about confidence: we often wait to feel confident before doing something, when doing things is partly how confidence develops in the first place.

Bandura proposed that one important part of self-efficacy is what psychologists call mastery experiences - experiences of successfully doing something ourselves. When we repeatedly experience ourselves coping, learning, or succeeding, we gather evidence: “I can do this”.

But the opposite can happen too. If your confidence drops and you begin avoiding things - social situations, dating, speaking up, trying something new, applying for opportunities - you lose opportunities to gather new evidence that you can cope. You may even feel less confident, so you avoid even more. It can become a loop: lower confidence > avoidance > fewer experiences of capability > even lower confidence.

This is why rebuilding confidence often involves action rather than waiting for the feeling to magically return.

3.You’ve started comparing your life to everyone else’s.

Comparison is human. We naturally use other people as reference points when evaluating ourselves. The difficulty comes when comparison stops giving us useful information and starts becoming evidence that we’re somehow not enough.

You see somebody else’s relationship and question why you’re single. Someone gets promoted and suddenly your career doesn’t feel impressive enough. You see someone looking confident and put-together and wonder why you can’t feel that way.

Social media gives us almost endless opportunities to make these comparisons - often using very limited information about somebody else’s reality. And if you’re already feeling uncertain about yourself, you may be particularly drawn to information that seems to confirm it. Instead of: "“they’re doing well”, it becomes: “they’re doing better than me”, and eventually: “I’m falling behind”.

The problem isn’t necessarily noticing what other people are doing. It’s when someone else’s life becomes the measuring stick for the value of your own.

4.Your self-worth has become attached to something that’s changed.

Sometimes what feels like losing confidence is actually a deeper wobble in self-worth.

Psychological research into contingencies of self-worth suggests that people differ in the areas on which they stake their sense of self-worth - things such as appearance, achievement, approval from others or academic competence.

When things are going well in an area we’ve tied our worth to, we may feel great about ourselves…but it can make us vulnerable to. If a large part of your self-worth comes from being successful at work, what happens when your career stalls? If you feel worthy when other people approve of you, what happens when somebody rejects you? If feeling attractive has become important to how you value yourself, what happens when your appearance changes? Suddenly, it isn’t simply: “something in my life has changed”, but it can start to feel like, “something about me has changed”. Separating “something I value isn’t going how I’d like” from “therefore I am less valuable” can be an important part of rebuilding self-esteem.

5.Your inner voice has become more critical.

Pay attention to how you speak to yourself when something goes wrong. Maybe you make a mistake and think: “I’m such an idiot”…you look awkward in a photograph: “I look awful”…someone doesn’t respond the way you hoped: “they clearly don’t like me”…you struggle with something: “why can everyone else manage this except me?”. One thought probably won’t destroy your confidence, but repeated often enough, these interpretations can begin to shape the story you tell yourself about who you are. And because our brains are very good at spotting information that fits an existing belief, once “I’m not good enough” becomes part of that story, you may start noticing evidence that supports it while overlooking evidence that doesn’t. That doesn’t mean forcing yourself to replace every negative thought with: “I’m amazing”, sometimes a much more useful question is simple: “is there another way of looking at this?”.

6.Your life has changed - but your sense of self hasn’t caught up yet.

Sometimes losing confidence isn’t really about failure at all. It happens during transition.

You leave university…change careers…move somewhere new…end a relationship…become a parent…lose a friendship…approach a milestone birthday…experience changes to your body…find yourself in a completely different stage of life from the people around you. The things that once helped you understand who you were may no longer fit in quite the same way. That can create an uncomfortable in-between period: “if I’m not quite that version of myself anymore, who am I now?”. We can interpret that uncertainty as lack of confidence, when sometimes we’re actually rebuilding our sense of identity around a life that has changed.

So, can you get your confidence back?

Yes - but perhaps the goal isn’t to become exactly the person you were before.

Confidence doesn’t have to mean never feeling insecure, never doubting yourself or walking into every situation believing you’ll succeed. A more sustainable kind of confidence might sound like: “I don’t know exactly how this will go, but I trust myself to handle it”.

Rebuilding it can mean noticing where your confidence changed, questioning the beliefs you’ve developed about yourself, taking small actions that give you new experiences of capability, and learning not to make your worth dependent on always succeeding or being approved of.

Most importantly, confidence isn’t something you need to find hidden somewhere inside you. It’s something you can build.

A question to reflect on

Rather than asking, “why am I not confident anymore?” , try asking: “when did I start seeing myself differently - and what was happening in my life around that time?” . The answer might tell you much more about when your confidence went, and what you need to begin rebuilding it.

Want some support rebuilding your confidence?

If your confidence has taken a knock and you don’t quite feel like yourself anymore, you don’t have to work through it alone.

Through psychology-informed life coaching at The Mind Thread, we can explore what might be sitting underneath your loss of confidence, understand the patterns and beliefs that could be keeping you stuck, and work towards rebuilding your confidence, self-esteem and trust in yourself.

The Mind Thread offers life coaching online across the UK. You can book a free 15-minute Discovery Call to find out whether working together feels right for you.