Balance & Beyond Podcast

What if your must trusted career strategy - collect more proof - has been the very thing keeping you from real confidence?

We dig into the hidden gap between competence and confidence and explain why high achievers feel like imposters despite glowing resumes, promotions, and degrees. Drawing on years of coaching women at every level, we unpack the early conditioning that links safety to perfection and people-pleasing, and we show how that wiring turns us into validation seekers who outsource worth to gold stars and inbox zero.

From there, we explore the cost of living on proof: over-preparation, constant availability, and the slow erosion of self-trust. You’ll hear a candid story about chasing praise in the smallest corners of life and the sobering realisation that external approval dries up as you rise. That’s the turning point—shifting from certainty to courage, from performance metrics to inner measures. We offer a practical way forward with the Confidence Compass: identity, worth, boundaries, voice, regulation, and competence. Each point acts as a doorway back to self-trust so you can make clean decisions, hold firm lines, and act before anyone hands you permission.

Expect simple, usable steps: naming your skills without minimising, choosing one boundary and holding it through discomfort, slowing your responses to decouple speed from value, and regulating your body so you can choose rather than react. The result is a rebalanced life where competence earns respect and confidence grants freedom—the freedom to back yourself without another certificate, to say no without guilt, and to move through uncertainty with steadier nerves.

If this conversation resonates, share it with a friend who needs the reminder that she already knows enough. And if our show supports you, tap follow, leave a quick review, and tell us: which point of the compass will you strengthen this week?

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Jo Stone (Host)

You can be the most capable woman in the room and still feel like an imposter. I see it every week. Women with degrees, titles, expertise, and yet still doubting themselves, overpreparing, or holding back. That's why today we are unpacking why competence doesn't equal confidence and what actually fills that gap. Competence and confidence are two words that are similar on the outside.

And when I explain these differences to people, their minds are blown because they're built from completely different places. Competence is the ability, knowledge, and skill to do something effectively. It's from the Latin compete, which means to be suitable or fit. You build competence through evidence and repetition, and competence is measured externally. Qualifications, performance, results, gold stars.

Confidence, on the other hand, is what you believe about yourself while you use that competence. It's from the Latin confidentia, which means to act with trust. That's right. It is about an act of trust. And that's how confidence is built, through self-trust, through boundaries, through identity. And true confidence can only be measured internally. It's about your belief systems, it's your courage, it's your capacity to act in uncertainty.

When I work with women, we really pause to take a look at what they know and what they've achieved. And every time when I sit down and say, all right, tell me about what you do for work, tell me about your knowledge and experience, they have this moment when they go, Oh, I actually do know a lot compared to somebody who's not in my industry or not in my area of expertise. That competence is actually there.

And if you were to ask me to rate myself out of 10 on competence, I'm probably gonna put it quite high. What's missing is the trust in what they already know. So the problem isn't lack of skill, it's a lack of self-belief. When we spend our lives thinking externally, no, let's start again. Keep going, ignore that part. This conditioning where we put competence on a pedestal, ahead of confidence. That's trying to end. This trend we have of thinking that our confidence comes from our competence begins really, really early. As little girls, we were told to be good, to be nice, to care for others, to avoid mistakes, to not get in trouble.

Our nervous system has learned, "If I'm perfect, if I'm prepared, if I'm pleasing, if I'm content, then I'm safe." "If I get it wrong, if I get in trouble, I'm going to lose love, I'm not going to have the approval of my parents." "Now, I am not safe." In this moment, and for some of us it was one moment, in others, it was a series of a thousand little micro moments where we then become external validation junkies.

This means all our sense of self-worth comes from outside of ourselves, and a huge part of that is based on our competence in our job. Our identity is completely tied to work. And you will know if either you've ever been made redundant or lost your job or know someone who's been through that experience, they feel completely adrift. They don't know who they are without their work. Their sense of self implodes because their confidence is only ever based on their competence.

But ironically, so many women still second guess, still overthink because they don't think they know enough. They're still chasing MBAs and qualifications and going to conferences, because all they can see is the gap of what they don't know. But this is the cycle that keeps us stuck. Because every time we say yes when we really mean no, every time we do something that we don't want to do, or we put somebody else ahead of ourselves, even though we're exhausted, we abandon ourselves that one little bit.

Over the years, we stop trusting ourselves. We don't trust our voice, we don't trust our bodies, we numb them, we ignore them, and we rely on proof from others, we rely on praise, and we rely on permission from others to know more or to trust ourselves. This is a cycle that is self-perpetuating. And for many women, it's been running for decades. And because the confidence that you have is based on competence, which doesn't come from within, it's never enough.

So I have seen so many women, and I've done this myself. It's like, "Right, I don't feel confident." "I clearly don't know enough." "I'm gonna double down." "I'm gonna chase proof, proof that I'm worthy, proof that I belong, proof that I won't get caught out." But that proof comes at a consistent cost. Massive amounts of over-preparation, so that I can answer every question, staying on top of your inbox so that people think that you know everything, responding really quickly because somehow you believe that if you don't respond really fast, that you don't know enough.

So we overwork, we over-give. And in those continual moments of micro-self-abandonments, we quietly disappear. We start to confuse improvement with worthiness. So we always have to improve. We always have to know more. I know this pattern very, very well. I was what I used to jokingly call a praised heart. I used to fish for praise. I was so hooked on external validation from bosses, even my husband.

And this praise-heart came when I was looking for praise for, I don't know, emptying the dishwasher or doing something. And he looked at me and he said, "Good girl!", and mimicked like our dog when you say, you know, good boy and he wags his tail. That's what I was looking for. It sounds really funny, but in that moment, it was really sobering. I was addicted to praise from others. And as you move up the food chain, as you become more senior, you don't get any praise. You just get slapped when you make a mistake.

And so I'd been in this vacuum of "You're doing a good job, you know your stuff!" "That was the right decision." And so I was seeking it anywhere in life I could get it, right down to the dishwasher. In that moment, I had this slap in the face and went, oh my God. No amount of learning or gold stars was ever going to actually make me feel confident.

My brain loves certainty, as does yours. And what I loved about the books and the podcasts, that competence always gave me evidence. It was a box to tick, a grade to earn, a qualification to get, and then outsourcing my sense of power and worthiness to someone else. But confidence actually demands faith. My definition of faith is belief in evidence unseen. That's what confidence is. Trusting yourself before there's proof. And that shift changes everything.

For me, that shift from looking for proof and giving myself permission to have faith was the turning point. I stopped waiting to feel ready to gather enough qualifications for somebody outside of me to hand me a certificate that says, hey, Joe, you're now confident. I decided to trust that I already was. And that's what true confidence is built on. Not more information, not more doing. It is self-trust.

And when I finally saw this clearly, having worked now with thousands of women in such close proximity, I've mapped what was beneath the parts that hold confidence steady, even when life gets crazy. This is what I now call the confidence compass. And it's not a framework to master something that you stick in your book and go, "Oh, I need to have a bit of this and a bit of that."

It's a mirror. It's a way to see where your trust in yourself is strongest and where it's been outsourced. The points of the compass are identity, worth, boundaries, voice, regulation, competence, each one a doorway back to self-trust. Because when you trust that you want to say no, you give yourself permission to say it. When you trust yourself to hold yourself, when you trust yourself to sit in the discomfort of a disempowering emotion or somebody else's disappointment, then you can step into that conflict.

When you trust yourself, you don't need to be perfect. You don't need an MBA. You don't need the next qualification. You just need to back the woman that you already are. This, my friends, is the real difference between competence and confidence. Competence earns you respect, but confidence gives you freedom. I know which one I'd prefer.