Why You Feel Less Confident at Work After Having a Baby — And Why It’s Completely Normal

There’s a version of returning to work that nobody seems to talk about before you go back. It isn’t the logistical, practical version – childcare arrangements, working out what godawful time you now need to get up in the morning to do battle with your child and get them to nursery, where you put the work laptop. It’s the version where you sit at your desk on the first week back and think ‘I used to be really good at this. What on earth’s happened?’

I distinctly remember sitting in a client meeting where they were unhappy with building occupancy. The pre-mother me would have been able to churn out different things to address this in my sleep – the new version of me essentially sat there mute and thinking whether there was something genuinely medically wrong with me as I couldn’t seem to string a coherent sentence together. Eventually I snapped out of it (and then frantically googled whether I could potentially be perimenopausal on the train home and experiencing brain fog).

If you’ve felt that — if confidence that once felt rock solid has somehow slipped — you are not imagining it. And you are certainly not the only one thinking it. The drop in confidence that so many women experience after maternity leave is, reassuringly, completely understandable when you understand what’s actually caused it. It’s not because you’ve lost your edge after having a child – it’s a totally natural consequence of one of the most significant changes a human being can go through.

What’s Actually Happening to Your Confidence

Your brain has literally been remodelled

During pregnancy and the postpartum period, the brain undergoes significant structural changes. Research published in Nature Neuroscience found that grey matter changes during pregnancy can last for years. Regions associated with social cognition, self-referential processing, and empathy are all affected.

Your brain has adapted to the current situation and has rewired itself to attune to your baby – to read their cues, to anticipate their needs and to respond quickly. This is extraordinary if you think about it. But it also means that your brain has been operating in a completely different mode for months. Stepping into a professional work environment is asking it to suddenly switch modes which can feel really jarring.

The slight fogginess, the slower recall, the moments where you search for a word that would once have come instantly — these aren’t signs of lasting cognitive decline. For most women, they resolve as the brain recalibrates itself to its new environment. They are, however, one of the reasons confidence wobbles.

Your professional identity has been on pause

Before you went on maternity leave, your sense of professional self was something you reinforced every day. The meetings you navigated, the problems you solved, the results you delivered – these all ensured that that identity was being constantly topped up.  Maternity leave interrupts that process. For months, your professional self-concept gets very little reinforcement. You simply aren’t topping up that professional self. When you come back, the confidence that was once intuitive must be rebuilt through experience. The fact that you’re not feeling it immediately doesn’t mean it isn’t there — it means you haven’t yet accumulated the new evidence that will bring it back.

Your sense of identity is doing something complicated

Psychologists call the process of becoming a mother matrescence — a term only finally starting to gain the mainstream attention it deserves. Like adolescence, it involves a fundamental shift in identity: who you were, who you are now, and how those two versions relate to each other.

As much as you may want to be, you’re not the same person that you were at work before you had your child. Your values may have shifted. Your priorities almost certainly have. And navigating a professional environment that expects you to show up as you were — whilst you’re figuring out who you are now — is exhausting in ways that look a lot like a loss of confidence. However, it’s not a loss of confidence – it’s your identity that is in a period of transition.

The gap between who you were and who you are feels wider than it is

One of the cruellest aspects of this confidence dip is that it feeds on itself. You notice you feel less confident. You interpret that as evidence that you are less capable. You hold back in meetings. You don’t put yourself forward. Through doing this, you then deny yourself the very experiences that would actually help in rebuilding your confidence. This is the confidence gap, and highlighting this is one of the first steps towards interrupting it.

Why This Doesn’t Mean Something Is Wrong With You

If you are having a mild panic currently, please stop! The confidence you’re missing hasn’t gone. Becoming a mother hasn’t made you terrible at your job or means that the career you always loved is suddenly not right for you. This loss of confidence is a predictable, understandable, physiologically and psychologically explicable consequence of going through one of the most significant human transitions that exists — and then being asked to go into work, usually with very limited support, and act as if nothing has changed.

The women I work with are, without exception, more capable than their confidence currently reflects. The gap is almost always between what they can do and what they believe they can do. Closing that gap is entirely possible. But the first step is recognising that the gap exists because of what’s been happening in your life — not because of who you are.

What Actually Helps

1. Stop waiting to feel confident before you act

This one’s a challenging one, but confidence is not a prerequisite for action. It is a result of it. Every time you do the thing you were slightly afraid to do — speak up, put your name forward, take on the project — and you survive it and it’s not a total disaster, your confidence grows. Every time you wait until you feel ready, you reinforce the belief that you’re not capable. Start small. Take baby steps (and no, that isn’t a terrible pun here). But take those steps. You’d be amazed about how quickly they can start to make a difference.

2. Collect evidence deliberately

Your brain will annoyingly remember what went wrong and gloss over what went right.  Unfortunately, this is just the way we are programmed. Counter this by deliberately keeping note of wins, positive feedback, moments when things went well. You are rebuilding a store of evidence your confidence can draw on. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy – I kept a folder in my inbox with nice feedback in it. When you’re having one of those terrible days where you can’t do anything right, it’s nice to spend a couple of minutes realising that you’re actually pretty good at what you do.

3. Reconnect with what you were good at before

I’ve banged on about this before but looking at your CV and what you’ve done job wise can be really reassuring. Look at the positions you’ve held and what you were responsible for. You did those things. The version of you who did them is still here — she hasn’t been replaced, she’s been expanded. You’ve got the skills that you’ve always had, plus a load more that you’ve developed whilst being on mat leave. That’s pretty impressive.

4. Name it to someone you trust

Saying ‘I feel less confident than I did and it’s making me doubt myself’ out loud to someone you trust makes the thing smaller and makes you less alone with it. This doesn’t need to be someone at work, it can be a friend. The women who navigate this transition best are rarely the ones finding it easiest. They’re the ones who’ve found a way to be honest about how hard it is rather than trying to suppress it all internally. I bet you that when you speak to another working mother about how you’re feeling, they’ll say the same thing happened to them as well.

5. Give it time — but not too much

Confidence after mat leave does come back. For most women it rebuilds steadily as they re-accumulate professional experience and their new identity settles. However, time alone won’t change it. Time, plus taking deliberate action (which means saying yes to things at work that you don’t necessarily want to) does.  

A note for the stressed version of you sitting at your desk panicking

If you’re at your desk wondering whether you’ll ever feel like yourself at work again — what you’re feeling is normal and (thank god) it’s not permanent. The confidence you had before isn’t lost. It just needs to be re-exposed again. You’ll never feel truly ready to start taking those actions, but you don’t need to be. Just start. It’s pretty impressive how quickly things can start to change.