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Confidence Series - #3

What does it actually feel like to work in a highly political environment?

There are environments where the work itself is not the only thing people are trying to understand. They are also trying to understand people: who has influence, who is aligned with whom, whose opinion carries weight, how decisions are actually made behind the surface of process and communication.

In these environments, competence alone does not always feel sufficient to explain outcomes: sometimes highly capable people are overlooked, visibility appears uneven, and decisions feel difficult to fully interpret from the outside.

Over time, this creates a particular kind of uncertainty. Not necessarily uncertainty about our ability, but uncertainty about the environment itself: about what is truly being rewarded, what is being protected, what matters officially, and what matters in practice.

When those signals become difficult to read, something else often starts to shift quietly underneath, our sense of confidence.

The question becomes: what happens to confidence when the environment itself becomes difficult to interpret?

What is often happening to confidence in political environments?

Political environments expose something important about confidence: they expose that confidence does not only rely on competence, it also relies on interpretability. On our ability to understand how value, influence, recognition, and decisions operate around us.

In more transparent environments, there is usually a clearer relationship between contribution and outcome. Expectations feel easier to interpret; the rules of progression, visibility, and evaluation are more explicit.

In highly political environments, those relationships become less visible: influence can operate indirectly, alignment can matter as much as performance, information can become unevenly distributed, decisions may make sense strategically, while remaining difficult to fully understand operationally.

This creates a very specific psychological experience where people begin second-guessing not only their actions, but their reading of the environment itself.

Am I misunderstanding something?
Am I focusing on the wrong things?
Is performance enough here?
What am I not seeing?

And because these questions are often internalised privately, confidence can begin weakening without any obvious external failure.

Not necessarily because capability has changed, but because the environment has become harder to interpret consistently.

So what do we do when political environments start unsettling our confidence?

The instinct is often to personalise the experience immediately, to assume we are less capable, less valued, or less effective than we thought.

But highly political environments can distort perception itself. Because when influence, recognition, and decision-making become difficult to read clearly, people can start measuring their worth through signals that are incomplete, selective, or inconsistent.

This is why the first step is not overreaction, it is separation.

Separating our actual competence from our interpretation of the environment around us. Understanding that political environments often require a different kind of awareness: not only awareness of the work itself, but awareness of how visibility, influence, communication, and alignment operate within the system.

Because confidence becomes fragile when we use environments we do not yet fully understand as the sole measure of our value.

Here’s the shift:

Instead of asking ourselves, “Why is my confidence changing here?”, we may need to ask “What exactly is this environment rewarding?”

Because sometimes confidence does not weaken because we are less capable. Sometimes it weakens because we can no longer clearly connect competence, contribution, and recognition together.

And when that relationship becomes difficult to read, even highly capable people can start questioning themselves.