The Common Misdiagnosis That's Costing You Your Best Women
She'd just been promoted. A high performer with clear potential. The kind of woman every company says they want more of at senior levels.
And yet in every appraisal, every conversation with her manager, she kept hearing the same thing: "You're not confident enough."
When she came to work with me, I could see it immediately. She was confident. Deeply confident, actually. She trusted herself, she knew what she was doing., she held herself in high regard.
So what’s the problem then? Well, she wasn't loud enough.
She also needed time to process information before responding, rather than jumping in with the first thing that came to mind.
And because she'd been told so often that she wasn't confident enough, she'd started to shrink. She was doubting herself - not because she actually lacked confidence, but because everyone around her kept misdiagnosing what they were seeing.
And she started to seem like she lacked confidence even more.
This happens constantly with women I work with. And it’s costing companies the exact women they say they want to promote.
Why these misdiagnoses are so common
The reality is, we've been conditioned to think we need to fix women. That to be successful, women have to align with outdated models of patriarchal leadership.
So we assume that if someone’s quiet, they must lack confidence, right?
When confidence is actually about self-trust, which means you can be high in confidence and low in volume at the same time.
And now we're so used to saying women have a confidence issue that women will self-diagnose with it, even when that's not the actual problem.
It's easier to look at external behaviour and miss the internal experience, so traditional leadership training has always focused on skills and strategy. We see someone not speaking up in meetings and think: "She needs assertiveness training." We see someone hesitating to negotiate and think: "She needs to learn how."
But the gap is rarely about knowledge. It's about safety.
What the misdiagnoses really are
When companies ask me for salary negotiation training, what their women actually need is to address why they don't feel allowed to negotiate in the first place.
When they ask for assertiveness training, what their women need is to unpack why being assertive feels unsafe.
When they ask for confidence building, what their women need is help understanding that being visible doesn't equal danger.
Your women already know how to do most of this. They can negotiate. They can be assertive. They can speak up.
What they can't do is feel safe doing it.
What happens when you get it right
Back to my client who wasn't "confident enough."
We released the programming that said she had to be loud to be successful. She realised that needing time to process wasn't a weakness - it was actually one of her superpowers. It meant she gave more thoughtful response and made better decisions.
She had conversations with her manager about the language he was using to describe her. And she showed up in completely different energy: I own who I am. I own how I show up.
People started responding to her differently. Not because she changed. Because she stopped apologising for who she was.
Another client came to me going for a new role. She wanted to negotiate but kept asking herself: Is stepping into leadership being bossy? Is negotiating being too much?
She'd absorbed all the lessons from patriarchal leadership. The ones that said women who negotiate are difficult. That asking for more makes you ungrateful.
We know that men don't worry about being bossy. Men don't worry about being too much - not in the same way.
Once we deprogrammed that and gave her full permission to negotiate without worrying she'd be rejected or treated unfairly, her energy shifted. The negotiation became easy and it became safe.
She got everything she wanted - a bigger pay rise, a better bonus, more holiday.
Another client was stepping into a new role and knew she needed to set boundaries from the start. She knew how to set them. She could have written out the script.
But she was still carrying the programming that said: As a woman, you need to be available. As a woman, you need to be the one taking care of everybody.
Even though she knew the how, she was struggling with internal permission.
We worked on boundaries around her availability, her hours, where she was allowed to put her own wellbeing first. The internal shift was simple: she's allowed to do all of that and be good at her job.
She set those boundaries with the energy of someone who was allowed to set them. And they were respected pretty much from the start.
What changes when you address the actual problem
These women didn't need more skills. They needed to feel safe using the ones they already had.
When you address what's actually stopping them - the conditioning, the programming, the internalized rules about how women are supposed to show up - women move forward fast.
They set boundaries that stick. They negotiate and get what they're worth. They show up without the mask. They contribute more because they're not spending half their energy managing how they're perceived.
And they stay. Because they're not burning out trying to be someone they're not.
If you're wondering why your leadership programmes aren't moving more women into senior roles, this is why.
You're solving the wrong problem.
Email me - lauren@scoutandcircle.co to book a call about The POWER Code. Let's talk about what's actually keeping your best women from stepping up - not what you think it is.