The motherhood confidence drop is brutal

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This week I met with a woman who’s looking to return to work. She’s been out of the workforce for ten years, and she’s keen to get back in. 

Through the years she’s maintained her practicing certificate, and she’s worked hard to keep her skills current while taking time out to raise her family. She has an impressive number of possible work options.

Yet when I met with her to help her make the impressive list of possibilities into a plan of attack, the main thing I heard from her was doubt. She’d lost confidence in herself. She knew logically she could do it, but deep down she didn’t believe she could.

I feel like I’ve managed to avoid the motherhood confidence drop thanks to well-timed comments from a few amazing women in my life. My business partner Amy has given me many a pep talk over the years. She’s encouraged me to stretch myself when taking on new work and clients. She’s talked me down off the cliff when I think I’ve taken on too much and can’t get through it all. Her complete confidence that I’ll be fine is infectious. I try and consciously do this to other mothers now. We need to be cheerleaders for each other when we lose sight of our own worth.

Another friend has reminded me that work probably hasn’t moved along that much since I left. I think when you’re off on maternity leave you start to believe work is moving along quickly without you. The reality is that not a lot changes over 12 months. It alarms me to say I’ve left a project to go on to maternity leave only to return and find it waiting for me, even though the project was considered urgent. We need to stop imagining things are racing along without us, and instead focus on our experience and the particular set of skills that make us employable.

The woman I met with is now cracking along. We worked to break down her plan into manageable chunks that she’s working through. Her confidence is not yet back where it should be, but now she can see a way forward.  Our collective job is now to keep encouraging her. To keep reminding her she’s capable, she’s qualified and she can do it. We need to believe in her until she learns to believe in herself again.

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