Why do I keep second guessing myself in business? (It's not a confidence problem)

If you keep second guessing yourself in business — your strategy, your direction, your own instincts, the culprit is rarely low confidence. It's a pattern. And for sparky-brained women in particular, it has a very specific trigger: other people's thinking.

Not bad thinking. Not wrong thinking. Just… other people's.

You arrived with a plan. You left with someone else's.

You're clear about your direction. You know what you're working on and why it matters. Then you have a conversation - it could be a peer catch-up, a mastermind session, a networking event, or even just listen in on one - a podcast or at an event, and somewhere between listening and leaving, your own thinking starts to feel less certain.

By the time you get home, you're questioning everything.

The strategy you felt good about this morning now seems inadequate. The approach you've been building suddenly feels small compared to what someone else is doing. You open your laptop and instead of continuing the work, you start researching a completely different direction.

Sound familiar?

This has a name. I'm calling it goal smuggling, and I know it all too well because I've lived it.

How goal smuggling shows up - and why sparky-brained women are especially vulnerable

I've sat in rooms with brilliant, successful women and left quietly tucking their direction under my arm, having abandoned mine. I'd arrive with tentative clarity and leave confused, not because the conversation was bad, but because my sparky brain had done what it does so often and so quickly: absorbed everything, pattern-matched at lightning speed, and got pulled off course because I’m now tethered to a new possibility. Not surprisingly, somewhere in the process, I lost myelf again.

It took me a while to see this experience for what it was. For a long time I thought it was indecision. Or a lack of backbone - a deficit of commitment. Or just more evidence that I was simply incapable of sticking to anything - a story I'd been telling myself for years before my ADHD diagnosis gave me a different lens.

Once I named it and built practices to work with it, it my solutions became a core part of my own self-leadership framework. And when I started noticing the same pattern in other women - actually seeing it happen in real time at mastermind calls and retreats I was facilitating, I realised this wasn't just my experience.

It was ours.

Why goal smuggling is more insidious than it first appears

This isn't just distraction. It isn't just the infamous shiny object syndrome (though it’s in the same family). It's more of a cascade. And it happens fast.

Here's how it typically unfolds for a sparky-brained business woman:

• Someone else's thinking enters your orbit - their success, their certainty, their approach.

• Your pattern recognition fires immediately. Your brain maps it, connects it, sees how that could work for you. This happens in seconds. The speed at which you can recognise patterns and connect dots is one of your greatest strengths - but in this moment, it's working against you.

• Then black and white thinking kicks in. They have ALL the answers. You have NONE. They are SO clear. You are SO lost. This is one of the most common cognitive distortions for those of us with ADHD brains - and even though the thought is patently untrue, it feels completely true in the moment.

• Your self-trust quietly steps aside. You start outsourcing your authority to whoever seems most certain in the room. Or on the podcast. Or in the Instagram reel you're watching at 11pm.

• You feel crappy. Lost. Inadequate. The emotional hit is real - and when you have ADHD, emotional dysregulation means that hit lands harder and faster than it does for most.

• And then, most critically, you lose touch with your Why.

For sparky-brained women, connection to your Why isn't optional. It's the thing that keeps you anchored and committed when the novelty of any direction inevitably wears off. Lose that thread and the doubt spiral can run rampant through your world.

But there is good news! If you catch this cascade early -and you absolutely can, you can stop it from drowning you.

Where it happens (It's not just in group settings)

Goal smuggling doesn't only happen in masterminds or peer groups, though those are common triggering environments. It can happen anywhere you encounter someone else's thinking, success or approach:

• A one-on-one coffee with a business friend who seems to have it all figured out.

• A conference keynote from someone whose clarity makes yours feel murky.

• A podcast episode that sends you down a three-hour research spiral.

• A LinkedIn post from someone whose business looks exactly like what you think yours should be.

• Even a well-meaning conversation with your partner about someone else who's "doing really well."

The trigger is the same every time: exposure to someone else's certainty when your own self-trust is even slightly shaky.

The three hijacks that pull you away from your own thinking.

Within the goal smuggling pattern, there are three specific ways your sparky brain gets pulled away from its own thinking. I call them hijacks because they can all feel like positive, useful research or engagement. But they’re far from that.

• The Comparison Slide.
  She's so clear, so articulate, so good — and suddenly you're not in the room anymore. You're on the Confidence See-Saw, wondering why you can't sound like that, why your project feels small by comparison, whether you even belong at this table. She's still sharing. You've left the building.

• The Thought Spiral.
  Their idea sparks one of yours, which sparks another, which takes you deep into something that feels urgent and exciting and possibly more interesting than what you were actually working on. This is your popcorn brain doing what it does brilliantly - switching into creativity mode at exactly the wrong moment.

• The Magpie.
  The ideas in the room, or on the podcast, or in the feed, are SO good that you go into full collection mode, furiously writing everything down. It feels productive and urgently essential. But you've stopped filtering any of it through your own knowing. You leave carrying their goals, not yours.

All three have the same result: you lose touch with your own thinking, and the doubt spiral begins.

Notice. Name. Now.

When you feel the pull this one simple practice can interrupt the cascade before it gathers momentum.

1. Notice: something shifted. You're not quite here anymore. There's a restlessness, a sudden dissatisfaction, a feeling of inadequacy.

2. Name: which hijack are you in? The Comparison Slide? The Thought Spiral? The Magpie? When you can name it, you're no longer fused with it. It's a pattern you're observing, not an absolute truth.

3. Now: come back. To your thinking. To your project. To your Why.

This is a micro self-leadership practice. It takes seconds. And it can save you days, or weeks, of chasing a direction that isn’t yours, and would never be a good fit for you - your strengths, your values, your vision.

The discernment question

Once you're back on solid ground, there's one more step. Before you act on anything new - any idea, pivot, or strategy that arrived via someone else's world, ask yourself:

What did I think before?

If your original thinking still has merit, return to it. Trust it.

If something genuinely shifted your perspective, that can be useful. Note it, sit with it, and return to it tomorrow. Good insight will survive a 24 hour pause. Borrowed fizzy-pop excitement rarely does.

If you can't remember what you thought before, that's definitely a sign that you’ve been hijacked. Pause and ground yourself before you take any action - before you change a thing.

A note on staying open

I want to be very clear that the goal isn't to stop listening to other people. Seeking an outside perspective is often genuinely useful and one of the most valuable things a business owner can do. We don't know everything. Other people's experience, insight and challenge can shift our thinking in ways that can really matter.

The problem isn't being open. The problem is being unguarded when you're open - going into conversations or environments without an anchor, and coming out carrying someone else's luggage.

Other people's thinking is a resource, not a replacement.

Stay curious. Stay in conversation. Stay in rooms with brilliant people.

Just stay YOU while you do it.

Why self-trust is the real reason you keep second guessing yourself in business

I've come to understand through my own skinned-knees experiences and through working with fellow sparky-brained business women is that goal smuggling is a self-trust problem.

And self-trust isn't a fixed trait - some sort of magical superpower you’re either lucky enough to have or unlucky enough to have to suffer without. It's a practice. One that many ADHDers have had less opportunity to develop, because a lifetime of being told, either subtly or overtly, that we were too much, too scattered, too inconsistent, too… (fill in your blank here) has made us prone to ignoring our instincts and distrusting our own knowing.

Self-trust is one of the outcomes of the self-leadership framework that’s a core component of my client work, because without it, you can tend to build a business and create strategy that’s often a pale imitation of someones elses.

Building self-trust isn't actually complicated. But it has to be intentional.

It starts with noticing when you've left yourself, and deliberately choosing to come back. Again. And again. And again. Until the tendency to leave becomes less ingrained. Less automatic.

A self-trust practice for sparky-brained businesswomen: The Self-Trust Protocol

When I first noticed and named this pattern in myself and started seeing it in lots of other spaces and women, I created a simple resource to work with it. It’s first iteration was “The Brains Trust Protocol” that I started using at the Business Retreats I host as a way to help my guests to be both open and remain connected to their own thinking during mastermind sessions.

Then I realised the need extended beyond retreats. The same hijacks, the same cascade, the same loss of self-trust, it could just as easily happen in coffee catch-ups and conference rooms and late-night social media scrolling.

So I developed a second version.

The Self-Trust Protocol is a two-page resource for sparky-brained women who know their own thinking is valuable, and keep losing it anyway. It covers the three hijacks, the Notice Name Now practice, the discernment question, and how to ask for input in a way that allows you to stay connected to your orginal ideas and thinking.

It's free. And it works whether you're in a mastermind, a one-on-one conversation, or just you and your own brain staring at the socials…

[Download The Self-Trust Protocol here →]

And if you'd like to go deeper on this - self-trust, self-leadership, and strengths-based strategy so you can (re)build a business that’s sustainable, profitable, enjoyable, and anchored in your own knowing, I'd love to have a conversation. You can book a connection call with me here.

P.S. If you're not sparky-brained or an ADHD businesswoman, but this landed anyway, please know that you're very welcome here too! Goal smuggling isn't exclusively an ADHD experience. It just seems to hit harder and happen more often for those of us wired this way.