Why a confidence dip after maternity leave isn’t actually a confidence problem

If you have returned from maternity leave feeling less like yourself at work, the most likely explanation you will have reached for is that your confidence has taken a hit. That you need to rebuild it and that it will come back with time and with evidence that you are still capable.

That explanation is understandable but I think it is the wrong way of looking at it, and the reason that matters is because the wrong framing can lead you to focus on the wrong things.

Confidence, as most people use the word, refers to your belief in your own capability and the difficulty with framing the post-maternity return as a confidence problem is that, for most women, capability is not what has changed. You are not less skilled than you were before and you have not forgotten how to do your job. You know that rationally, even when it does not feel that way, and so telling yourself that confidence will return as you accumulate evidence of your capability does not quite work, because the evidence was always there. There is something else is going on.

What is actually happening, in most cases, is an identity transition. Before maternity leave, you had a professional identity made up of a sense of who you were at work, what you were known for, how you operated and what a good day looked like. This wasn’t something that you thought much about, if at all, because you just inhabited it.

But then you went through one of the most significant personal transitions of your adult life, came back to the same role and discovered that the professional identity you left behind does not quite fit the person you are now. Your priorities have shifted, what you are willing to tolerate has changed, the way you measure success, the things that matter to you and the kind of professional you want to be have all moved in ways that are real and significant, even if they are difficult to articulate.

Performing well in a professional identity that does not fit anymore is genuinely difficult. It requires a kind of constant, low-level translation between who you actually are and how you are presenting yourself at work and that effort is exhausting in a way that the work itself is not, and it is what tends to get misread by you, and by the people around you as a loss of confidence.

Naming it accurately does not make it easier immediately but it does change what the solution looks like. If the problem is confidence, the solution is evidence and exposure but if the problem is identity, the solution is something more deliberate. This shows up as understanding what has actually changed, being honest about what you want to keep and what no longer fits and building something intentional which is a professional identity that represents who you are now.

Forming a new identity is harder work than simply waiting for confidence to return because it requires structure and honesty about where you actually are, rather than where you think you should be by now. But it’s worth it because it is the work that actually moves things forward.