Hesitation shows up in small ways. When you soften a sentence so it doesn’t sound too challenging. Or let a flawed idea slide because you’re tired and you didn’t want to be that person. When you downplay your experience instead of claiming your space, even though you’ve lived this work, studied it, and tested it over years.
It’s not insecurity or lack of confidence. This type of hesitation happens when you’ve been close enough to the work to know that certainty can be dangerous because you’ve seen what happens when decisions are made quickly, loudly, and with conviction by people who have half the experience and insight as you… and then have to sit back and watch the consequences.
After more than twenty years in education and behaviour support, I still catch myself pausing before I speak in leadership spaces. Not because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I do. I’ve seen policies designed to look good on paper unravel when push comes to shove. I’ve watched confident solutions create bigger problems.
Now, running my own business, I see how often the people who hesitate most are the ones who carry the deepest understanding. Especially women, mothers and those of us who have built services, from the ground up.
As I try to understand why I do this, I find articles on imposter syndrome, mindset and the confidence gap but feel this framing is about blaming the person, and lets the systems off the hook far too easily.
Hesitation is often a rational response to responsibility. When you understand complexity, you’re careful. When you’ve lived the consequences of bad decisions, you don’t rush to simplify. When you’ve worked with children, families or communities at their most vulnerable, you learn quickly that bold declarations without substance cause harm.
Yet, the systems we operate in reward the opposite. They reward certainty over insight. Confidence over competence and volume over proximity to the work. Lived experience is celebrated as a concept, then sidelined when it disrupts the status quo, or the carefully thought out and documented policies and procedures, or slows things down.
I see it constantly in conversations about behaviour. Behaviour is discussed as if it belongs solely to the child; something to manage, fix or contain. Rarely is it framed as a response to environment, pressure, or adult regulation. Rarely do I hear the questions being asked about what kind of system produces the behaviours it claims to be struggling with.
When you’ve spent years inside these realities, it becomes hard to speak about them, so many of us don’t. I know many women whose businesses are built on their drive to change the system and make the world a better place for the vulnerable and disenfranchised.
We soften our language, qualify our statements and say things like ‘this is just my experience’, even when that experience spans decades. We wait for another credential, another win, or a signal that it’s safe to speak plainly. While we wait, systems continue unchanged.
Hesitation doesn’t just protect us. It protects the status quo and creates space for people with less experience, but more certainty, to shape decisions that affect lives they’ll never understand.
I don’t think women need to perform confidence or turn themselves into brands built on bravado. I do think we need to be honest about the cost of staying careful for too long.
Founding Spear & Arrow Therapeutic and Wiluray Gunyah came from realising that waiting to feel completely ready was a luxury the work didn’t have. The systems failing children and families weren’t going to pause while I refined my language. I realised imperfect leadership grounded in reality was better than polished ideas detached from consequence.
Leadership isn’t meant to be neat and tidy. It shouldn’t fit into 25 word quotes on social media or a five-step framework. It’s slow, relational, and often uncomfortable and opens us up to saying we don’t know everything, but know enough to challenge what isn’t working. Years of working with institutions and government has challenged me to let go of the idea that authority is something granted by titles, funding or permission.
Maybe the question isn’t why we doubt ourselves. Maybe the question is who benefits from that doubt and what it’s costing the people you care about.
by Chantelle Ryan, Director of Spear & Arrow Therapeutic