How to be confident if the world is either mistrustful of you, threatened by your expertise, or undermines every step you take? According to this year’s McKinsey report, Women in the Workplace, despite global organizations recognizing the need for equality, representation, and importance of diversity, things aren’t even remotely okay for women, especially women of color in business. 

Even though there are more and more women in top management or C-board, their work is often unrecognized, they’re more burnout, have more bad experiences at work, and so on. 

There are no quick fixes for that as the issue is deeply systemic and it’s super challenging to stay confident in that environment: women in the leadership position, more often than not, have to enter the room where no one looks or thinks like them and be obligated to prove their worth, again and again, as the other. 

Survival and thriving in these environments require confidence, and this article will provide a few tips on how to start developing it. 

Find a Personal Business Coach or, Better, a Business Partner 

A business coach mainly assists you as you scale your business, set goals, and face challenges — and this may sound ridiculous, but a woman as your business coach can help you not only with the business side of things but also with, like, being relatable and understanding what you’re going through. 

Partner is an even better option. Rugged individualism the corporate world gladly imposed on itself helps no one — there’s a slim chance you’ll be the next big genius, sure, but even the biggest geniuses have never done it alone. Find yourself a partner who’s into your business idea, interested in whatever value you want to bring to the market. A partner who has skills and experience you don't know: know intricacies of programming languages, or have impeccable negotiation skills, or has domain knowledge in the field you want to target. Try to alleviate the pressure to do everything alone or it won’t count somehow — it always counts, and it is always better to do a great thing with someone. It’s easier as well — this year’s burnout stats are no joke. 

Curate Your Social Contacts

Don’t work with people you wouldn’t recommend your best friend to work with. If you feel your collaboration with someone is one-sided, or that it actively drains your energy; if you’ve noticed you’ve started to question yourself (not your decisions) more but the outcomes aren’t improving — it might be time to rethink the premise. If someone is Not Great With People (™) — that’s often a euphemism for those who harm people around them and refuse to change when told about the impact of their behavior — but a Great Professional, it’s always the former that will matter the most for you, your team, and your mental health. 

Also — choose to be around people who encourage, but still hold you accountable. 

Think Positively

We have all heard about the magical effects of positive thinking and the law of attraction — despite the fact lots of people confuse wearing deliberately ignoring bad things with thinking positively. Several studies have shown that optimistic people make more money than pessimistic ones. (Although one may argue that, often, a foundation for boundless optimism is a privilege; nothing can hurt someone who can withdraw at any moment.) 

But positive thinking would rather help you solve the issue rather than decide that it doesn’t matter anyway, isn’t worth trying, ends up being a fluke anyway. Positive thinking isn’t surrounding yourself with marshmallows and unicorns and lying to yourself — it’s recognizing that yes, things are terribly hard, people are often the worst, and we’re probably very much doomed (re: climate change) but still finding things worth moving forward. Finding reasons to look for silver linings, pivots, to return to things that bring joy. 

Such an attitude is going to inspire confidence because you aren’t letting yourself fall into a mental health slump — it helps you overcome difficulties and mitigates your risk aversion. The latter is one of the signature features of women in business — it can be super helpful, but it can also stop you from progressing, turning you back to double, triple check your thoughts and ideas instead of bringing them to life. 

Visit Courses and Seminars

Doubt is a confidence killer, and the best way to keep doubt a bay is through knowledge. Certainty is a great confidence booster, on the other hand. 

So, regular courses from the experts in your niche, talks, seminars, conferences, new books, documentaries, etc. — all of these will help you expand boundaries of what you reliably understand (and what you don’t, which is also a very good thing.) They are also great for networking. 

Leave the Comfort Zone (Again)

Sadly, women have very little comfort in business environments already. But hear this out. A lot of anxiety can be alleviated by spontaneous decisions — and that works for business, too. It’s not about deliberately taking dubious steps or under researching things. It’s about trying things when you think about them. Business — especially on stages of product discovery and initial work with the customers — is a perfect canvas for trying things; in fact, trying things would help you build a better business model, actually understand your audience, and find the ways to talk to it. 

Your risk tolerance will grow significantly the more you do activities outside your comfort zone. That will also build your resilience to failures and help you understand that everyone fails, but failure doesn’t mean The End. It’s just something that happens — then, you recover from it and, again, move on. If the previous paragraph was about certainty, this is about uncertainty: you’ve got to embrace it, too. You’ll never know perfectly what’s the right thing to do — and the good news is that you don’t actually have to. You’ll find what to do after experiments, dialogues, tests, and so on — and that’s the main thing, right?