Leadership advice for new leaders usually starts with a tutorial on earning the trust of your team and customers. But what if the first person you need to trust is yourself?

The need for self-trust becomes clearer the moment you step into leadership. You make decisions with incomplete information. People expect you to have answers when you’re still working out the best path forward. The job may come with more authority, but it often comes with less reassurance.

Getting promoted into leadership has a strange way of making a previously competent person wonder whether they have forgotten how to do their job. That can make new leaders assume they need more confidence. More certainty. More proof that they are getting it right. But confidence may not be the real problem.

Francesca Rawlinson, an integrative psychotherapist and mental health educator, describes this kind of self-trust with a simple question: “Does a bird land on a branch because it trusts the branch won’t break, or because it trusts its ability to fly away?”

For new leaders, confidence is not certainty that everything around you will stay stable. It is trusting your ability to adapt when circumstances change.

Why Leadership Can Make Competent People Doubt Themselves

Moving into management changes where reassurance comes from. As an individual contributor , there are usually clear signs that you’re doing well. You finish the project, hit the target, get the approval and move on. Leadership is much messier. You can make a thoughtful call and still disappoint someone. You can explain yourself carefully and still be misunderstood. You can spend months helping a struggling team improve, only to find that the progress is real but nowhere near as obvious as a green checkmark on a dashboard.

There may also be less feedback than new managers expect. Gallup reported in May 2024 that only 36% of managers said they received feedback from peers through a formal process. Four in 10 managers also said that they had not reached an advanced or expert level in engaging their teams or managing performance. In other words, leaders are expected to improve while working in an environment that does not always tell them clearly how well they are doing.

“For many new leaders, confidence doesn’t drop because of a lack of ability; it drops because of a loss of external reassurance,” Rawlinson said in an email interview. “There’s no longer constant validation, no clear markers telling you you’re doing well, and no guarantee that your decisions will be received the way you intend.”

The temptation is to replace that lost reassurance with certainty. That is where trouble starts.

The Confidence Trap Is Trying To Make Everything Feel Certain

When a leader does not trust their own response to uncertainty, controlling the circumstances around them can feel safer. That can look like one more edit to the email. Another meeting to make sure everyone agrees. Another hour spent replaying a conversation that everyone else stopped thinking about somewhere around lunch.

None of those behaviors is automatically bad. Consultation and reflection are part of responsible leadership. They become a problem when their purpose shifts from improving a decision to soothing the leader making it.

“A common response to this discomfort is to try to create certainty,” Rawlinson said. “Leaders overthink decisions, delay action until they feel fully confident, and look for consensus to reassure themselves they’re on the right track.”

The hidden assumption, she explained, is: “I’ll feel confident when everything feels stable.”

Leadership is an especially poor place to make that bargain. Priorities change. Employees disagree. A decision that was reasonable with Monday’s information can look less clever by Thursday. Sometimes none of the options make everybody happy because leadership, rather inconveniently, involves choosing between competing needs.

“If your confidence depends on the branch holding steady, it will always feel fragile,” Rawlinson said.

Self-Trust Is Different From Being Sure You Are Right

This is where self-trust can be more useful than conventional ideas about confidence. Self-trust does not mean assuming your judgment is flawless. Quite the opposite. A leader who trusts themselves can acknowledge that they might be wrong because being wrong is no longer treated as a catastrophe.

They can make the best decision available, watch what happens and change course when necessary.

Research on leader self-efficacy points in a similar direction. Leadership self-efficacy refers broadly to a person’s belief in their capacity to carry out the behaviors required to lead effectively. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Management Development , based on research with 116 leaders at a global technology company, found that leaders with stronger self-efficacy appeared to interpret and reflect on their experiences differently. The researchers described the process as “reflective positivity,” suggesting that leaders’ interpretation of their experiences, not simply the experiences themselves, can contribute to leadership self-belief.

The point is not to collect enough successful experiences to eliminate doubt. It is to learn how to interpret those experiences without making every setback a judgment on your ability.

Strong Leaders Learn They Can Recover

Confidence built entirely on positive outcomes is conditional. If you trust yourself only when the presentation lands, the team agrees or the strategy works, every setback can start to feel like proof that you were never leadership material in the first place.

A more durable kind of confidence comes from learning you can recover when things don’t go as planned. That doesn’t mean shrugging off mistakes or pretending criticism doesn’t sting. It means refusing to turn one difficult moment into a verdict on your ability to lead.

A 2026 qualitative study in the International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior examined nine managers and found that their confidence and self-efficacy developed through everyday managerial coaching, reflection and interpretation of feedback. Because the study was small and qualitative, it shouldn’t be generalized broadly. Still, it reinforces a useful principle: managers can build confidence through coaching practice rather than treating confidence as a prerequisite.

For new leaders, building that kind of self-trust can start with a few practical shifts:

  • Notice what you do after something goes wrong. The difficult meeting matters, but so does what happens next. Can you regroup, have the follow-up conversation and make a better call the second time around?
  • Separate a bad outcome from your identity. A failed strategy does not automatically make you a bad leader. Ask what the outcome can teach you before deciding what it says about you.
  • Get comfortable changing your mind. Self-trust is not stubbornly defending every decision. Sometimes it looks like saying, “I got this wrong,” adjusting course and moving forward without turning the mistake into a crisis of confidence.
  • Treat criticism as information, not a verdict. Useful feedback can help you lead better without becoming proof that you are failing. Ask: What part of this is helpful? What can I act on? What does not belong to me?
  • Ask whether you trust yourself to respond, not whether you can guarantee the outcome. Instead of “Is this definitely the right decision?” try, “If this does not work, do I trust myself to handle what comes next?” That small shift moves confidence from certainty to adaptability.

Over time, those experiences become evidence that an imperfect outcome does not have to become a crisis of confidence. You do not have to become the person who knows what will happen. You have to become someone increasingly capable of dealing with what happens.

“We often think confidence comes from knowing things won’t go wrong,” Rawlinson said. “But real confidence comes from knowing that even if they do, you won’t abandon yourself. That you’ll adapt, recover, respond, choose again.”

Returning to the initial analogy, she continued, “That’s what the bird trusts. Not the branch, its wings.”

For new leaders, that may be a much better definition of confidence. The branch was never going to stop moving. The work is learning that you can still fly.