Confidence doesn’t come from experience alone.

I used to think confidence was something you built internally. That once you’d reached a certain level of experience, shipped enough work or led enough people, it would stabilise.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise that confidence is heavily shaped by environment.

I spent time inside a very large organisation. Highly ambitious, fast moving, incredibly capable people. The scale alone changes how everything works. Distance increases. Decisions travel through layers. Context fragments. You can feel certain one day and uncertain the next, even when your capability hasn’t changed at all.

What surprised me most was how easy it became to lose momentum without anything actually going wrong.

Not because the work wasn’t good, not because the people weren’t strong, but because clarity and trust behave differently at scale.

What kept me grounded during that time was the team. Building and supporting it, creating space for people to grow. Protecting the team when pressure rose and watching leaders emerge. When I eventually moved into a much smaller organisation, the contrast was immediate. Not because it was easier, it wasn’t, but because proximity had returned.

Decisions happened in the open and strategy could be shaped collaboratively. Trust wasn’t inferred through process, it was built through conversation. I felt heard again, clear again and accountable again.

And with that came confidence. Not the loud kind, the steady kind. The kind that comes from knowing where you stand, what you’re responsible for and how your work connects to the outcome. It forced a realisation I think many leaders quietly avoid.

Sometimes confidence doesn’t disappear because you’re failing. Sometimes it fades because the environment no longer fits how you lead. That doesn’t make one better than the other. Large organisations need people who thrive in abstraction, influence without proximity and long feedback loops. Smaller, growth stage companies need leaders who operate close to the work, shape direction in motion and build trust through presence.

Both are hard, just in different ways. Understanding which environment brings out your best leadership is not weakness, it’s clarity. And clarity, more than confidence, is what actually sustains you over time.