Whether you are returning to work or study after a career break, looking to change careers or progress in your current role, rebuilding confidence may be your best first step. A loss or lack of confidence can impact anyone, and it’s far more common, amongst women in particular, than you may realise.

If you think you’re alone in suffering a loss of confidence, be assured you are not. When starting work on their book, Womenomics, journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman talked to dozens of extremely successful women. As they wrote in an article for The Atlantic, they discovered they “kept bumping up against a dark spot that [they] couldn’t quite identify, a force clearly holding them back.” They identified that dark spot as the confidence gap.