Looking at job boards at 1am?
It never comes at the start. Quite the opposite, in the beginning she can usually tell me exactly what's wrong, and very often what's wrong, as she sees it, is her confidence. She's lost it somewhere along the way and she'd quite like it back before she has to walk into another meeting feeling like a fraud.
Then she tells me a bit about herself, and this is the part that always gets me. She's usually run teams for years and she's still the person people ring when something's gone wrong or when there's a mess nobody else wants to touch.
So I ask what she's good at. That takes some coaxing, because most of us weren't brought up to list our strengths out loud, but once she gets going there's plenty, with real evidence behind it and the odd story about a project that nearly went sideways and didn't.
Then I ask what she wants next, and that's when it goes quiet.
When the answer comes, it's usually 'I know I don't want to keep doing this' or 'I just don't know what I want', said in the tone of someone who knows it isn't much of an answer and is slightly cross with herself about that.
I've come to think confidence needs something to attach itself to. When you know what you're going for, you can be nervous and out of your depth and still feel confident, because you've got a direction and you're moving in it. Lose sight of what you want and every decision starts to feel like a guess, and a working life made of guesses feels an awful lot like self-doubt from the inside.
Honestly, most of the women I talk to have spent years adapting to what everyone else needed from them, at work and at home, and somewhere along the way they stopped asking themselves what they wanted. The longer that question goes unasked the harder it is to answer, and after a while struggling with it starts to feel like a personal failing. So she reaches for the word she's got, which is confidence.
One woman I worked with came to me convinced she'd lost her motivation and most of her confidence along with it. Before I'd asked her anything much, she told me she was new and didn't really have an opinion, which she absolutely did. Somewhere along the way she'd decided she should be grateful and happy with her lot, and that had hardened into her personality, glass half empty and not much point pushing on. She'd been making herself smaller at every opportunity, and it had been a long time since anyone, including her, had asked what she actually wanted.
What I worry about is the new job. A woman who believes she's lost her confidence will often go looking for the fix in a fresh start, applying for roles that look like a step up or a step out and hoping somewhere new will make her feel like herself again. Without knowing what she's moving towards, she usually picks something that looks different from the outside and feels very familiar by about month three.
This is where 25 years in recruitment comes in handy, because I've heard the feedback from a lot of interviews and a lack of clarity shows up there long before anyone mentions confidence. Ask her a question and she gives the interviewer all of it, because she hasn't decided which parts of her experience matter for where she's going.
What she thinks is a thorough answer turns into seven minutes, and the person across the table is left hunting for the answer to their question somewhere in the middle of it. Once she knows what she's going for she knows which bits of her story to tell, and that tends to change an interview faster than any amount of confidence work.
Which brings me back to that silence on the call. I leave it alone because whatever she says after it is usually the most useful thing she's said all session, and quite often it's the first time she's heard herself say it out loud.
You can get some of the way there on your own, and this is where I'd start: Get a piece of paper and twenty minutes where nobody needs anything from you. Write down the last time you came home from work feeling like yourself, and be specific about what you were working on and who you were with. Then do the same for the most recent day you came home feeling flat. Put the two side by side and look for what was there on the good day and missing on the flat one. Note it down, because it's a far better starting point for what you want next than anything you'll find on a job board at 1am.
If nothing comes up, that's worth knowing as well, and it's usually a sign it would help to talk it through with someone.
Sally
Coming up
On Tuesday 13th October I'm running Taking Control of Your Career for We Are The City's Women in Tech Week, a free live session that goes further into getting clear on what you want before deciding what to do about it.
Taking Control of Your Career WITW
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