Do You Feel Confident in Some Areas of Life but Not Others?

Aug 22

-Confidence isn’t missing — it may simply be waiting to transfer.

Do you feel confident in some areas of your life but not others?

Perhaps you can lead a meeting, run a business, manage a household, or handle a major life change — but freeze when you need to speak up in a relationship, promote yourself, or be seen by people you admire.

This can feel confusing. If you are capable in one part of your life, why does confidence disappear in another?

There’s a particular kind of woman who comes to my online sessions convinced she has nothing much to say about confidence, because she doesn’t feel like a confident person. She’s underplaying a career pivot she made alone. She’s brushing past the year she rebuilt her life from scratch. She’s calling something “no big deal” that would have overwhelmed her too — not because it was easy, but because she worked hard and got through it anyway.

There’s the woman who stepped away from her career to raise her family, and years later turned back toward the thing she was actually passionate about — starting a business, writing the book she’d shelved, launching a nonprofit that mattered to her. There’s the woman who built a business on the side while working full-time, then packed up and relocated to Asia to make a proper go of it. There’s the woman who stood on a stage and gave a TED talk to a room full of people.

These are women I’ve had the privilege of working with.

What I see again and again is that confidence isn’t one fixed trait that a person either has or doesn’t. Someone can be entirely sure of herself in a boardroom and still freeze up on a first date. She can run a household, a team, a whole relocation to another country — and still not trust her own voice in a room full of people she sees as more accomplished than her. Confidence tends to be domain-specific. It gets built in one part of life through repetition, proof, and evidence she’s collected over time — and it simply hasn’t been given the chance to show up yet in the other parts.

But here’s what matters: the confidence she’s built somewhere is real. It’s not a personality trait she’s missing — it’s a skill she’s already demonstrated. Which means it’s transferable. The steadiness she found the year she rebuilt her life applies just as much to the conversation she’s avoiding with her partner. The nerve it took to move to another country is the same nerve she needs to speak up in that meeting. Confidence built in one arena isn’t stuck there. It’s proof of capability she can point to and borrow from, wherever she needs it next.

This happens so often that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. What I have started doing is pointing out —

Why confidence stays locked in one room

Psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy helps explain this. We build confidence partly through experience — especially when we do something difficult and discover that we can handle it. But that confidence often develops around a specific area of life. You may have strong evidence that you can cope at work, while having very little evidence that you can trust yourself in relationships or public speaking.

That’s why the belief “I’m just not a confident person” rarely holds up under scrutiny. It’s almost never true across the board. What’s usually true is narrower and more specific: I haven’t built proof of myself in this particular room yet.

The good news is in the research too. Studies on self-efficacy transfer suggest that confidence built in one area can move into other, similar domains — and some researchers have found the relationship works from the ground up: task-specific and occupational self-efficacy beliefs can predict later changes in a person’s broader, general self-efficacy beliefs. In plain terms, proving yourself in one arena doesn’t just sit there. Over time, it can quietly raise the floor everywhere else.

Why it doesn’t transfer on its own

If confidence could transfer automatically, none of this would need saying. But it doesn’t happen by osmosis. It can help to think of the mind as keeping different areas of confidence in separate files. It doesn’t cross-reference “handled a relocation to another country” against “needs to speak up in the team meeting” unless something actively draws the connection.

This is where most confidence-building advice misses the mark. Generic pep talks and affirmations aim at a general sense of positivity, but the specific fear response in that specific room — the tight chest before the meeting, the frozen silence on the first date — runs on its own wiring. It was built through specific experiences, usually early ones, and it responds to specific new evidence, not broad encouragement.

When your nervous system still feels unsafe

Sometimes the issue is not that you lack confidence. It is that your nervous system still associates a particular situation with risk.

You may feel capable in a familiar work environment but become tense, blank, or withdrawn when you need to speak about yourself, ask for what you want, or let someone see you more closely. Your body may have learned that visibility, disagreement, or making mistakes leads to criticism or rejection.

A woman might come to me only wanting help with public speaking, convinced that’s an isolated problem to solve. But when we look underneath it, she’ll often describe the exact same bodily response — the same racing heart, the same urge to shrink — that once showed up in a childhood classroom, or in a family where speaking up wasn’t safe. The nervous system learned, a long time ago, that being seen in that particular way was risky. Everything else she’s built since then — the career, the relocation, the business — happened in rooms where that old alarm never got triggered.

This is why you can understand that you are capable and still feel unable to act from that knowledge. The intellectual part of you has the evidence, but your body has not yet learned that it is safe to use it here.

How to borrow evidence on purpose

You don’t need RTT to start doing this for yourself. The next time you catch yourself feeling unsure in a specific situation, try asking: where else in my life have I already done something this hard? Not as a comparison to shame yourself with, but as evidence to draw on. The woman who relocated her whole life to another country already has the nerve required for a difficult conversation. The woman who built a business on the side of a full-time job already has the discipline required to keep showing up somewhere new. The proof already exists. It’s simply filed under the wrong heading.

Try transferring the evidence

Consider these questions:

Where in my life have I already done something difficult?
What qualities did I use there?
Do I need those same qualities in the area where I currently feel unsure?
What is one small action that would allow me to practise confidence in that area?
What evidence could I collect this week?

For example, if you have successfully built a business while working full-time, you already have evidence of discipline, courage, and persistence. You may be able to draw on those qualities when asking for a promotion, raising your prices, or speaking about your work more visibly.

How RTT may help

This is where RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy) can do something a pep talk can’t. Rather than layering encouragement on top of the fear, it can help explore the earlier experiences and emotional meanings that may have shaped a particular fear or belief. By working with the emotional pattern beneath the surface, it may become easier to respond differently in the situations where you have felt stuck.

As with any therapeutic approach, results vary from person to person, and RTT is not a replacement for appropriate medical or mental-health support where that is needed.

FAQ’s

Why do I feel confident at work but not in relationships (or vice versa)?

Because confidence is domain-specific. It’s built through direct experience and proof in a particular area, so skill and self-assurance in one part of life doesn’t automatically carry over to another — especially if the other area is tied to an older, unresolved pattern.

Can confidence really transfer between areas of life?

Yes, though not automatically. Research suggests that mastery in one domain can gradually influence a person’s broader sense of self-efficacy over time, and it can be actively drawn on — by consciously connecting the evidence from one area to the area where you feel unsure.

Why doesn’t general confidence-building advice work for a specific fear, like public speaking?

Because the fear response in a specific situation is usually rooted in a specific past experience, not a general lack of self-belief. Broad encouragement doesn’t reach that root, which is why the fear often persists even in people who are visibly capable and accomplished elsewhere.

How does RTT help with confidence that’s stuck in one area?

RTT works by identifying where a specific fear or belief was first formed and helping the subconscious mind update it, rather than simply adding positive messages on top of the old pattern. This allows evidence of capability from other areas of your life to finally reach the area where you’ve been feeling stuck.

You aren’t starting from zero

You are not a person who lacks confidence. You may simply be someone whose confidence has been built in certain rooms and not yet carried into others.

The evidence that you are capable already exists. The next step is learning how to recognise it, trust it, and bring it with you.

If you understand that you are capable but still feel stuck in one particular area, RTT may be able to help you explore the deeper pattern behind it. The best place to start is a conversation about what you are experiencing and what kind of support would be right for you.

Maria x

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