For almost all my working life, I have relied on the advice of older women. But nothing they told me – about what other people were actually getting paid, or how to handle the creepier moments, or all the unwritten Westminster rules that nobody explains – was preparation for the shock of being asked recently at a party for career advice myself. It’s the professional equivalent of glimpsing some haggard-looking woman in a passing mirror and wondering briefly who that is before realising that it is, in fact, you. You were the future once. Now you are the future’s mum.
On reflection, there’s much to be said for embracing crone status, and with it the great unsung pleasure of stopping seeing everyone else, rather exhaustingly, as competition and starting to get vicarious kicks out of younger women’s triumphs instead.
But, caught off guard this week, I only realised on the way home what I should have said. The question boiled down mostly to confidence; and the fact that, like experience, confidence is something working life seems endlessly to demand of young women without making clear where they’re supposed to actually get some. “Fake it till you make it” is reasonable advice in an emergency, as is realising that most people are faking it too, including most of the born networkers and natural extroverts racing off with all the career prizes early on. But eventually, everyone needs a bit of the real thing. So after a quarter of a century of working life, here’s what worked (and didn’t) for me.
Except for the very expensively educated, confidence isn’t something you buy. Nor is it to be confused with the kind of boundless self-belief that, for example, leads a former health secretary to hand over all his private WhatsApps to the journalist Isabel Oakeshott on the blithe assumption that she’d only use them to make him look good. What you’re after is a mindset both sturdy and flexible – one that isn’t constantly racked with self-doubt, but is realistic and open to challenge.
And that only comes – or it did for me – from doing the homework. Be prepared, and then prepare some more to be sure. Take notes, keep receipts, embrace what Boris Johnson called your inner girly swot. Winging it and crossing your fingers might work for the born-to-rule, but not for the rest of us.
Take every opportunity to master small things, things that seemingly don’t matter, outside work; learning to put up a shelf will do, or tiny tests of courage like going to the cinema alone. Confidence comes from realising fear was misplaced.
But it can also come from the rare times fear was justified. You won’t get everything right, but failure is mostly survivable. Screw up in small ways, and learn how to put it right again. There will be days when you’ll feel utterly mortified, but to your surprise the sky will not fall in. Know that practically everyone cries in the loos at work at some point (I certainly have). Tomorrow is usually another day.
Recognise that you absolutely don’t have to become a parent, but if you do, it will first knock all the confidence out of you before building a different kind instead. I still remember standing on the hospital steps with a newborn, convinced that any minute now someone would come rushing out to stop me going home with a baby that I had absolutely no clue how to look after.
Sometimes now I feel much the same about having a teenager. But over time, actually doing the parenting builds confidence in it, until eventually you look back and are baffled that having a baby seemed hard, at least compared with having a toddler. The same is true of working life, where confidence grows from looking through a rearview mirror.
It’s taken me half a lifetime to realise that I’ll probably never feel like a confident person, if confident means being able to press “send” on an article without at least briefly panicking that this will be the career-ending one. My first reaction to being asked to do something new will probably always be to worry that I can’t.
But confidence isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s recognising that some things will never be all that comfortable, and doing them anyway; that it’s quite normal never to feel quite on top of an all-absorbing job, and that there’s nothing wrong with asking for advice. Although possibly not, as it turns out, from me at a party.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
