Drip. Trickle. Torrent.

I now know that my self-confidence plays the single biggest role in how I feel about myself.

Over the decades my confidence has increased a lot, but it can still let me down and wreck my day.

This week I ran some events I’ve been organising for months.  The first one went badly. For me anyway.

We couldn’t get into the venue until 30 minutes before guests arrived (20 minutes early), the venue was pretty crappy, we weren’t as prepared as we should have been. The main client kept making (good) suggestions, which made me feel increasingly out of control. By the time I jumped on stage and welcomed everyone I wasn’t on my game.

I’m fifty this year and am, thankfully, much better at hiding when I’m quietly dying inside than I was in my twenties.  Even on stage.

But it felt like my self-confidence fully drained from my body over the course of an hour or two.  First a drip, then a trickle and eventually a torrent.

The event went fine.  Most people didn’t notice. And the event the day after was flawless.

But a few days later I’m left reflecting how critical confidence has been both to my success and how I feel about myself.

Fortunately, with age has come a much faster rebound than when I was younger.

An hour into the event I had quietened the nasty inner critic. Feedback over the next couple of hours showed that few even noticed any problems, and the ones that did didn’t mind. The next day I had emails saying how well organised the event was! And a lovely note from the main client.

It was all in my head.

Except it wasn’t of course.

I have a bar and I didn’t hit it.

When I look back at my corporate job, this week’s experience was unfortunately all too common.

I look back at some of the relationships I had with many senior stakeholders and managers and believe they must have known that I was feeling the way I did, beating myself up for not hitting an impossibly high bar (my bar). They didn’t seek to discourage it – some I’m sure actively encouraged it: back-handed compliments, micro-aggressions, omissions when something really should have been said, comments to others rather than to me.

Annoyingly, some are etched into my memory, years later.

I don’t want to create an impression I was a nervous-wreck, rabbit-in-headlights, scared-of-his-own-shadow type.  Quiet the reverse. Few people would have guessed I had a problem – except those closest to me (including those people above).

And of course I was far from alone. Then or now.

Some of the most brilliantly talented, capable people I know have a problem with confidence. They are often the people that very successful managers want on their team because they care so much and will move heaven and earth to deliver.

Bad managers abuse them.

Corporates need to do more to support these people. They are the company’s most valuable resource – their commitment to perfection often creates cover for much less valuable, less talented people.

You can help those people, the valuable ones I mean.

When you see one doing their best – and not hitting their own personal bar – give them an encouraging smile, tell them they’re doing a great job, offer to do what they’re doing so they can do something else – or just catch their breath for a minute.  And afterwards, sit them down and help them bounce back, because they may not be able to do this by themselves, as quickly as they deserve to – not yet anyway.

For me it took getting out of a corporate and building my own resilience, my own genuine, deep-seated self-confidence. What author Julie Smith describes as “humble” or grounded confidence. And still, as this week shows, it can still let me down.

I now make a point of spotting those people and doing what I can: a struggling waiter, someone with a queue, someone talked over in a meeting, someone just trying to help, someone not getting credit for work they’ve done.

Help them find space to breathe, to smile, to see that the sky is not falling in and tell them how much we appreciate them.

A few more of those people and I might never have left my corporate career.

So maybe I’m rather glad I didn’t!

If you know someone who needs a bit of a boost to their confidence, I really recommend Julie Smith’s Coach yourself confident, super-practical, straightforward and encouraging. Julie worked for a long time at Pepsi and Mars and knows a lot about the drain in confidence that can happen in a corporate career. Reading the book is like having Julie coach you!