Taking responsibility has always come naturally to me. Long before I entered the professional world, I was already doing it.
I grew up with a brother who is two years older than me and deaf. I learned sign language before he did, and from an early age, I found myself looking out for him, helping him navigate situations and making sure he was okay. I didn’t think of it as taking responsibility. It was what I did.
Looking back, I can see how much that shaped me. When I started working, I didn’t set out to become a leader. I saw what needed doing, found solutions and took responsibility. Leadership followed, not because I was chasing a title, but because people trusted me to get things done.
That eventually led to more that 25 years in leadership, including executive positions and running companies. But I didn’t spend those years collecting titles or adding responsibilities to my CV. I developed something far more valuable. Judgement.
And if you’ve spent years building your own career, you know exactly what I mean.
You can walk into a meeting and recognise within minutes where the real problem lies. You can hear what’s being said and what’s being avoided. You know when someone needs direction, when they need support and when they need to get on with the job.
You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room. You don’t need to demonstrate that you know the answer to every question. And you certainly don’t need to take responsibility for work that belongs to someone else.
You know what you’re doing.
So why, when the conversation turns to something you want for yourself, does that certainty disappear?
The Evidence Doesn’t Always Help
Behavioural economists Christine Exley and Judd Kessler studied how men and women describe their own performance. In their paper, “The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion”, about 1,500 people answered 20 analytical questions. Men and women both averaged 10 correct answers. Women, if anything, did slightly better.
Then they were asked to rate their own performance out of 100. Men gave themselves an average of 61. Women gave themselves 46.
What stayed with me was not the gap itself. It was what happened next. When the women were told their exact score, they still rated themselves 19% lower. When the researchers took away the employer and the incentive to impress anyone, the gap remained. Women still rated themselves 22% lower.
The evidence was in front of them, yet the difference in how they described their own performance remained.
One study involving a specific task doesn’t tell us how every woman thinks about her abilities. I have known exceptionally confident women, and men who questioned themselves constantly. But it raises a question I can’t ignore. If the evidence doesn’t always change what we believe about ourselves, what happens when there is no track record yet?
When the Work Becomes Your Own
I see it in conversations with accomplished women who are considering building a business, an independent practice or something that belongs to them. Women who have led teams, made difficult commercial decisions and spent years solving problems suddenly begin to question whether they know enough.
They look for another qualification, another course, another piece of reassurance. They want to be certain everything is in place before they begin.
I understand the instinct. When you have spent years accountable for decisions and results, you don’t become comfortable with uncertainty because the next project has your own name on it.
But look at what’s happening. We treat our experience as proof of competence when we work for someone else, and as insufficient preparation when we work for ourselves.
The experience hasn’t disappeared. The judgement hasn’t vanished. What has changed is the environment. Inside an organisation, there are structures, expectations and measures of success, even when you built them. When you begin something of your own, many of those reference points go, and years of professional evidence can feel strangely irrelevant.
They aren’t. They simply need to be applied differently.
That doesn’t mean building a business requires no new knowledge. There are things to learn, assumptions to test and commercial realities that experience alone won’t solve. But learning what you need is very different from preparing endlessly because you don’t yet trust what you already know.
What I Learned About Proving
Early in your career, you need opportunities to show what you can do. You haven’t yet built the track record, so you earn responsibility by proving you can carry it.
Experience changes the equation. You don’t need to prove you can solve every problem. You need to know which problems are yours to solve.
The girl who looked after everyone around her learned, over decades, which responsibilities were hers and which belonged to others. That wasn’t a loss of commitment. It made me a better leader.
I still want more. I want to build things, learn, contribute and challenge myself. I have more ideas than I have time to pursue.
What has changed is how I separate ambition from proving. Achievement is about something I want to accomplish. Proving is about demonstrating that I am capable of accomplishing it. For much of my career those two travelled together. They don’t need to.
Last week, I wrote about the decisions we keep postponing. This is what comes after the decision. Deciding to build something of your own doesn’t mean you will know how to do everything. It means you have enough experience to begin, enough judgement to recognise what you don’t know and enough ability to learn what comes next.
You don’t have to approach every new ambition as though you’re applying for your first job. And you don’t have to collect another decade of evidence before acting on the decades you already have.
The question was never whether you’ve proved enough. It’s whether you’re prepared to believe the evidence.
