Young women, do you need more confidence? Here's how to get it | Gaby Hinsliff

For most of my professional life, I have relied on the advice of older women. But nothing they told me - about what other people were actually getting, or how to handle the scariest times, or all the unwritten Westminster rules that no one explains - was preparation for the shock of being myself recently invited to a party for career advice. It's the professional equivalent of glimpsing a haggard-looking woman in a passing mirror and briefly wondering who it is before realizing it's, in fact, you. You were the future once. Now you're the mom-to-be.

On reflection, there's a lot to be said for embracing old woman status, and with it the great unsung pleasure of no longer see everyone, rather exhausting, as competition and start getting indirect kicks on young women's triumphs instead.

But, caught off guard this week, I only realized when I got home what I should have said. The issue mainly came down to trust; and the fact that, like experience, confidence is something that professional life seems to constantly demand of young women without specifying where they are supposed to get it. "Do it until you do it" is reasonable advice in an emergency, as is realizing that most people also fake it, including most born networkers and natural extroverts who rush with all career awards from the start. But ultimately, 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 work) for me.

Except for highly educated people, trust is not something you buy. Nor should it be confused with the kind of boundless self-confidence that, for example, led a former health secretary to entrust all of his private WhatsApps to journalist Isabel Oakeshott on the blithe assumption that she would only use them for make him look good. What you are looking for is a mindset that is both strong and flexible - a mindset that is not constantly plagued by self-doubt, but is realistic and open to challenge.

And that only comes - or it did for me - from doing the homework. Be prepared, then prepare more to be sure. Take notes, keep receipts, embrace what Boris Johnson has called your inner female swot. Flying it around and crossing your fingers might work for those born to rule, but not for the rest of us.

Seize every opportunity to master small things , things that seem like it doesn't matter, outside of work; learning to put up a shelf will suffice, or small tests of courage like going to the cinema on your own. Confidence comes from fear being misplaced.

But it can also come from the rare times fear was justified. You won't get everything right, but failure is mostly survivable. Mess up in small ways and learn to put it back in order. There will be days when you feel completely mortified, but to your surprise, the sky won't fall. Realize that pretty much everyone cries in the bathroom at work at some point (I certainly have). Tomorrow is usually another day.

Recognize that you absolutely don't have to become a parent, but if you do, it will first cause you to lose all confidence before to construct another genre instead. I can still remember standing on the steps of the hospital with a newborn baby, convinced that any minute someone would come rushing to stop me from coming home with a baby whose I had absolutely no idea how to deal with myself.

Sometimes I feel pretty much the same way about having a teenager. But over time, doing parenthood builds her confidence, until eventually you look back and be baffled that having a baby seems hard, at least compared to having a toddler. The same is true in professional life, where confidence grows by looking in a rear-view mirror. spacefinder- type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement" class="dcr-11ra563"/>

It took me half a life to realize that I will probably never feel as a confident person, so confident means being able to press "send" on an article without at least briefly freaking out that it will be the one that will end your career. My first reaction when asked to do something new will probably always be to worry that I can't.

But confidence is not the absence doubt. It's recognizing that some things will never be as comfortable and doing them anyway; that it's completely normal to never feel quite above absorbing work and that it's okay to ask for advice. Although maybe not, as it turns out, from me at a party.

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