A mentor once said something to me that I haven’t been able to shake.
“You don’t lose confidence. You gain doubt that eclipses it.”
I didn’t fully understand that until I got laid off. And then – standing in my kitchen at 10am on a Tuesday with nowhere to be – it hit me all at once.
My confidence wasn’t gone. It was just buried under years of accumulated doubt I hadn’t noticed I was collecting.
It Starts Before You Can See It
Think about a kid – any kid. They are pure, unfiltered confidence.
My husband Larry has this theory that teenagers feel immortal not because they’re reckless, but because they genuinely haven’t seen enough of life to know what can go wrong yet. That blissful ignorance? That’s raw confidence. No data to contradict it. No scars to reference. Just of course I can do this.
Then life starts doing what life does.
You try things and they don’t work out. You trust someone who lets you down. You take a risk that doesn’t pay off. You watch someone else get the thing you wanted. None of these moments feel catastrophic in the moment – they’re just small deposits into a doubt account you didn’t know you were opening.
By the time you’re twenty years into a career, that account has some serious balance.
Then the Job Starts Chipping Away Too
Here’s the part nobody puts in the career books.
For a lot of us – especially those of us who hit our stride in our 40s and 50s – it wasn’t just life that eroded the confidence. It was the work itself.
I loved my job once. I was good at it. I cared deeply about doing it well and about the people we were supposed to be serving.
But somewhere along the way, the culture shifted. The leadership changed. The priorities that had once felt meaningful started feeling like window dressing for something else entirely – cost-cutting dressed up as strategy, and management that seemed more interested in protecting their own positions than in actually building something worth building.
I kept showing up. I kept performing. I kept caring more than the room seemed to warrant.
But every year, there was a little less of me in it.
That’s the thing about a toxic or misaligned work environment – it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t send a memo that says “Just so you know, we are now systematically dismantling your sense of professional self.” It’s a slow leak. And you’re so busy trying to stay afloat that you don’t notice how much air you’ve already lost.
And Then Comes the Layoff
By the time I got laid off, my confidence wasn’t at full capacity waiting to be knocked down.
It was already running on fumes.
The layoff didn’t destroy my confidence. It just made the depletion impossible to ignore anymore.
And here’s where it gets genuinely hard for people at our career stage: getting back in the game isn’t as simple as dusting yourself off and updating your LinkedIn. Companies are pickier at senior levels. The hiring process is longer, more opaque, and frankly more discouraging. Ageism is real. You’re competing against people who are younger, cheaper, and who the algorithm likes better for reasons that have nothing to do with what you actually know how to do.
Every rejection letter – or worse, every silence – makes another deposit in that doubt account.
It’s not weakness. It’s math.
What Actually Helped
So what do you do when confidence is buried under thirty years of accumulated doubt, a misaligned work environment, a layoff, and a job market that seems designed to make you feel invisible?
You don’t try to rebuild confidence from scratch. You excavate it.
Here’s what worked for me:
Name the erosion. Not just the layoff – the whole story. Where did the chipping start? When did you first notice you were performing rather than thriving? Getting honest about the full arc takes away some of its power. You weren’t failing. You were enduring something genuinely hard.
Separate the doubt from the truth. Doubt is loud and convincing, but it’s not always accurate. Make a list – actual pen and paper – of things you know you’re good at. Not things you hope. Things you’ve done. Evidence is a useful antidote to doubt.
Take one action you can actually finish. Not a job search. Not a five-year plan. One thing, start to finish, that reminds your nervous system what completion feels like. The confidence doesn’t come from the size of the action. It comes from the follow-through.
Pay attention to what feels like you. This was my real compass. Not job boards. Not what I should want. What actually felt aligned with who I am. Those moments – even small ones – are the signal. Follow them.
Ready isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision. Confidence doesn’t come back before you act. It comes back because you act. Stop waiting for the green light. You are the green light.
The Confidence Was Always There
Here’s the thing my mentor got exactly right.
You didn’t lose it. It’s still there – underneath the doubt, underneath the disappointment, underneath the years of being in the wrong room for too long.
The layoff, as awful as it was, did one useful thing: it forced me to stop white-knuckling a situation that was never going to get better, and start figuring out what I actually wanted to build next.
That’s not a silver lining. It’s just what happened when I finally stopped being too busy to pay attention.
If you’re in the middle of this right now – if you got laid off from a job you’d already half-lost yourself in – you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from under.
And under is closer than you think.
Wendy Matter is the author of Oh Sh*t, I Got Fired! – a practical, humor-forward guide for navigating job loss, career transition, and figuring out what comes next. Especially if “next” feels very far away right now.
GET THE BOOK: https://a.co/d/0ieyJ1jS
