Guest post written by Kim, Inspire Ambitions
I have sat in hundreds of promotion panels. The skill that separates who gets the job from who deserves it is not what you think.
A few years ago, I sat in a promotion panel for a role that two people had applied for. One had better credentials. More years, more qualifications. The other walked in, told her story clearly, handled every question without flinching, and left the room owning it.
The second person got the job. By a wide margin.
I have spent over 20 years in HR, working across Africa and the Gulf, managing hospitality groups with 600 staff and 40 nationalities. I have seen this happen more times than I can count. People with average CVs outperform brilliant people who do not back themselves. The gap is almost never about skill.
It is about confidence. Almost always.
Nectar’s 2024 research on workplace promotions found that 79.5 per cent of full-time workers say they understand how to get promoted. But understanding the mechanics and acting on them are two different things. The same research showed a 7 per cent confidence gap between men and women on promotion readiness. That gap is not about ability. It is about self-belief.
The reason this matters is that most people have it backwards. They wait to feel confident before they put themselves forward. That is the wrong order. Confidence does not arrive before the action. It shows up because of it.
Confidence is not a personality trait
You were not born with it or without it. It is a skill, like any other. You get better at it by practising it deliberately, the same way you would get better at presenting or writing or managing a team.
The people who seem naturally confident? Most of them have just had more practice. Or they have learned to act despite the nerves. There is a difference between feeling confident and choosing to move anyway. The second one is what actually builds the first.
PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Survey found that employees with high psychological safety are 72 per cent more motivated than those who feel the least safe. Confidence and psychological safety feed each other. When you feel safe enough to speak up, you practise confidence. When you practise confidence, you build the internal evidence that speaking up works.
Here are five things that have consistently worked for the professionals I have coached. These are not motivational tips. They are practical, repeatable steps.
1. Know your own story before anyone else does
Most people cannot clearly articulate what they have actually achieved. They know their job title. They know their duties. But ask them what changed in the business because of their work and they fumble.
That is a confidence problem before it is anything else.
Write down three specific outcomes you delivered in the past two years. Not tasks. Outcomes. What improved? What cost less? What worked better? What got done that was not getting done before?
When you can speak about your work in terms of results, something shifts. You stop sounding like you are asking to be believed. You sound like you are stating facts. That is an entirely different energy, and people feel it.
I coach professionals through this exercise regularly. The ones who struggle most are often the highest performers. They are so busy delivering that they never stop to document what they delivered. That documentation gap becomes a confidence gap when the promotion conversation arrives.
2. Visibility is not self-promotion
I understand why people resist this one. Self-promotion feels uncomfortable, especially for women and for professionals from cultures where modesty is a value. I grew up in one of those cultures. The idea of talking about yourself felt wrong.
But visibility is not the same thing as boasting. It is showing up consistently where decisions are made. Speaking in meetings even when your point is half-formed. Volunteering for the project that stretches you. Connecting with the people one level above your current role.
McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women were promoted. That broken rung has barely moved in six years. Part of the problem is structural. Part of it is that women are less likely to put themselves forward for stretch assignments, not because they lack capability but because the cultural expectation to wait to be asked is stronger.
Quiet excellence gets noticed eventually. But deliberate visibility gets noticed now. And in most organisations, now is when the opportunities are moving.
3. Stop running from failure and start reading it
A candidate I worked with once turned down three internal opportunities in a row because she was afraid of failing publicly. Her reasoning made complete sense to her. What she did not see was that she was already failing, just privately, by staying still.
Failure is data. That is the whole reframe. When something goes wrong, the question is not “what does this say about me?” The question is “what does this tell me about what to do differently?”
Mental Health America’s 2024 Mind the Workplace report found that 63 per cent of Gen Z employees do not feel confident expressing their opinions at work. 60 per cent said they cannot be themselves in the workplace. That silence is not humility. It is fear. And fear of failure is the engine behind most of it.
That one shift, treating failure as information rather than judgement, changes your relationship with risk. It does not make risk comfortable. It makes it survivable. And survivable risk is what confidence is built on.
4. Your environment either builds you or drains you
I cannot overstate how much the people around you shape your self-belief. Not your skills. Not your experience. Your belief in what is possible for you.
Find one person who has done what you want to do and learn how they think, not just what they did. Find one peer who will tell you when your reasoning is weak, not just support everything you say. And mentor someone, because the fastest way to remember how much you know is to teach it.
Workforce Science Associates’ 2025 State of the Workforce study found that employees who believe in their company’s future are 25 times more likely to be engaged. Those who lack confidence in the organisation’s direction are 75 times more likely to be disengaged. Your environment is not a backdrop. It is a multiplier. It either amplifies your belief in what is possible or it quietly erodes it.
Your confidence circle is not about networking. It is about building an environment where growing feels normal rather than exceptional.
5. Keep the evidence. You will need it.
There will be a day, probably more than one, when everything in your head tells you that you are not ready, not good enough, not qualified enough to go for it.
Do not argue with that voice. Show it proof.
Keep a document, a note on your phone, a folder in your email, anything. Every piece of positive feedback. Every result you delivered. Every time someone said “you handled that well.” When the doubt shows up, open it.
A Devlin Peck analysis of employee training data found that 51 per cent of workers said training gave them more confidence in their roles. That finding tells you something important: confidence is buildable. It responds to evidence. It grows when you feed it proof of your own competence. The workers who felt more confident were not different people. They were the same people with more evidence.
Confidence anchored in evidence is different from confidence based on how you feel on a given day. Evidence does not change depending on your mood. That makes it far more reliable when you need it most.
The Waiting Trap
The most common thing I hear from talented professionals across every industry is some version of: “Once I have a bit more experience, I will go for it.”
That day does not usually come. Not because the experience does not arrive. But because the confidence does not arrive automatically with it. You have to build the confidence separately, deliberately, starting now.
Frontiers in Psychology research on promotion decisions found that men are more often promoted for potential while women must demonstrate hard performance results first. If you are waiting for permission to feel ready, the system is not designed to give it to you. You have to give it to yourself.
Start before you are ready. That is the whole strategy.
About the Author
Kim Kiyingi is an HR Career Specialist and published author based in Dubai, UAE. With over 20 years of experience leading people strategy across Africa and the Gulf, Kim has coached hundreds of professionals through career transitions, leadership challenges, and building real workplace confidence. She is the author of From Campus to Career (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2024), available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. She writes about HR, career growth, and people leadership at inspireambitions.com.
Reading this I felt deeply aligned with what You Deserve to Shine stands for, because it gently challenges the quiet belief so many of us carry – that we need to feel ready, confident, or “enough” before we take up space. It resonates in that soft but powerful way, reminding us that confidence isn’t something reserved for a select few, but something we build through action, self-trust, and recognising our own worth. There’s something really grounding about seeing confidence reframed not as loudness or perfection, but as evidence, practice, and choosing to show up anyway. It reflects that core message of your blog-that you don’t need to become someone else to shine, you just need to start believing that who you already are is worthy of being seen.
Keep shining,
Madeline
youdeservetoshine.blog 