Hey Reader,
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Melanie had summited Kilimanjaro. She'd completed five marathons. Now she was interviewing at one of the most prestigious firms in her field. Yet, when she sat down for our coaching session, she told me she likes to make herself small so other people feel more comfortable. (WTF?!)
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Melanie is not uncommon.
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As a career coach, I've seen thousands of high-achieving women take big swings in their lives and yet minimize themselves at work.
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At first I thought it was a confidence gap.
But after analyzing 114 transcripts of coaching sessions I conducted over two years, I discovered something else.
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These women were absolutely confident. They knew they were excellent at their jobs. They believed they were worthy of more.
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Still, they were stuck.
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What surprised me most: the majority said they were "confused." They said didn't know what they wanted or how to get it.
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However, the transcripts told a different story. In one breath, they would say they had no idea what they wanted — and later in the same session, they would describe it with total specificity and zero hesitation.
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They knew. They'd known all along.
The answer was never missing. The safety to trust it was.
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The prevailing narrative about women at work has two parts:
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- The external: unequal systems, lack of childcare support, environments that were never built for women to succeed in
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- And the internal: the confidence gap. The idea that women hold themselves back. That something is missing in them.
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Both contain truth. Neither explains what these sessions showed.
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​These women didn't have a confidence problem.
They had absorbed their workplaces...into their bodies.
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​Many cited the physical toll directly. One woman told me: "My body literally staged an intervention. I ended up in the hospital with sepsis."
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That's not a mindset issue. That's the body keeping score in the most literal sense.
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And yet the solutions we keep offering women are all aimed at the mind. Think differently. Reframe it. Believe in yourself more. These tools help...up to a point.
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But if the problem is living in the body, the solution has to go there too.
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Which means we need to talk about the nervous system.
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It's a pattern-recognition machine. It learns — quickly, without your conscious input — what is safe and what isn't, and stores those lessons as automatic responses. For many of the women in these sessions, the threat wasn't one dramatic moment. It was a pattern.
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One woman traced the same message across decades — from a parent, to teachers, to managers. Different words each time, same meaning: you are too much.
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Another had spent twenty years building her career before being called into a meeting with no specifics, no names, no way to respond — and told her contributions were being questioned.
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A third was given feedback that had nothing to do with her work and everything to do with who she was outside of it.
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So the body adapted. Going quiet. Making herself smaller. Suppressing the want before it can be penalized. These responses stop feeling like responses. They start feeling like personality.
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The fog wasn't confusion. The stuckness wasn't ambivalence. They were the body doing exactly what years of contradictory demands had trained it to do.
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Across those 114 sessions, I found four distinct patterns:
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- The woman who walks into the meeting prepared and loses the answer the moment someone senior asks the question.
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- The woman who has been meaning to apply for that role — or start that thing, or have that conversation — for longer than she'd like to admit.
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- The woman whose inner debrief after every meeting is harsher than anything anyone in that room said out loud.
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- The woman who knows what she needs and yet ends every conversation having agreed to give everyone else what they need instead.
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Freeze. Flight. Fight. Fawn. Four protective states.
​Not personal shortcomings.
And underneath all four, the same thing: a nervous system that has learned it isn't safe to fully show up. I've started calling it the Self-Trust Gap and it's different from the confidence gap we've been talking about for decades.
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Confidence asks: Can I do this?
Self-Trust asks: Is it safe to want/do this?
One lives in the mind. The other lives in the body. And they require completely different approaches to heal.
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I turned all of it into a free research report (made with my wonderful wife, Ashley Louise - hire her!)
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It covers the data, the patterns, the root cause, and what it actually takes to move through it — including what organizations can do differently, because some of this isn't on us to fix alone.
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So if you've ever known what you wanted but couldn't reach it when it mattered, I think it will land. Email me back if it does :)
Now go get paid.
x Claire
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