Bernadette BoasExecutive Leadership Coach, Trainer and Speaker, Ball of Fire Coaching · Become the Leader Everyone Wants to Follow and No One Can Overlook.

Building Confidence: My Journey from Humiliation to Self Employment

7 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:20

In this excerpt, Speaker B reflects on the formative years of their early 20s, describing how repeated humiliation and being undermined by weak women leaders in corporate roles severely damaged their confidence. The negative experiences led them to conclude they could not thrive working for others, prompting a decisive shift to self‑employment. Looking back, they recognize that confidence is not innate, especially when entering a new industry, and must be deliberately cultivated—a realization that now drives their mission to help others build strong confidence.

Chapters

Help me understand, what was it about this subject? Maybe what was your life experience as well when it comes to feeling as if you needed to help others become confident as fuck?
My journey with confidence started in my early 20s, and I didn't have great experiences of working with women leaders. And I was put down, embarrassed, humiliated in most of my job roles in my early 20s. And it had such a detrimental impact on my career that I decided that I couldn't work for anybody else and I had to be self-employed. So that took me on a journey of becoming self-employed and Even now, when I look back on that and I think it was a horrible time— early 20s, first time walking into corporate and experiencing weak women leaders— it was— I thought, I can't do this. And so that was the first experience of me really understanding that you don't have confidence in your early years, and especially when you're walking into a new industry, you— it's just, you just don't have it. You have to build it.