You want to be the kind of woman people respect and admire at work.
Not just the woman who:
- Gets things done
- Is dependable, prepared, polished, and professional
- People come to when they need someone capable to clean things up, smooth things over, or take one more thing off their plate
You want to be seen as someone with real authority. Someone who can lead the project, get the promotion, protect her time, speak clearly and confidently in the room, and be taken seriously without having to prove herself over and over again.
But there might be one sneaky mistake getting in the way:
You’re trying to command respect from your coworkers, employees, boss, or other people in the workplace.
Maybe you’ve been trying to figure out the exact right way to show up so people finally see you the way you want to be seen. The right:
- Tone of voice
- Words
- Outfit
- Body language
- Meeting strategy
- Amount of warmth
- Amount of toughness
Here’s what many professional development resources leave out
Frankly, it makes tons of sense that you’ve been striving to pin all of those things down.
The professional development world has trained smart, capable women to employ tactics.
Leadership books, executive coaches, LinkedIn thought leaders, TED talks, and women’s leadership programs are often built around *behavioral* approaches:
- How to negotiate
- How to run a meeting
- How to build executive presence
- How to communicate like a leader
Don’t get me wrong, those tools can definitely be useful.
However, the message underneath all of it is usually this:
“Success is a skill set you acquire and then perform.”
So when you want more respect at work, of course you go looking for better tools.
What if the *real* issue is not that you need a better script, stronger posture, or more polished meeting presence?
What if respect isn’t something you can force from the outside?
What if the kind of respect you want flows from who you’re being, not just what you’re doing?
That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
If you’ve been trying to command respect and it still feels like you’re being overlooked, underestimated, or passed over, there is a better way. And it starts by shifting from performance to self-confidence and self-trust.
Here’s what you need to know.
Mistake #1: Believing You Can Make People Respect You
The phrase “command respect” sounds powerful, but it can also be a bit of a misnomer.
That’s because in reality, you can’t make someone feel respect, admiration, trust, or appreciation toward you.
Other people can (and will) think whatever they want about you. They get to have their opinions, preferences, assumptions, and reactions, just like you get to have yours about them.
You can influence people, of course. You can also:
- Communicate clearly
- Follow through
- Lead well
- Set boundaries
- Make thoughtful decisions
However, you *cannot control* what another person thinks or feels about you.
By the way, trying to do it is exhausting.
This is where so many smart, capable women get stuck. They walk into a meeting already scanning the room:
- Did that land well?
- Did I sound too uncertain?
- Was I too direct?
- Did she think I was being difficult?
- Did he respect what I said?
- Should I have added more context?
- Should I have said less?
Then they leave the meeting and replay the whole thing afterward, trying to figure out how they came across.
When you’re trying to manage everyone’s perception of you, you’re not fully present in the actual work. A huge portion of your attention is being spent watching yourself perform.
That creates a painful loop:
- You want to be respected, so you try to control how you’re perceived
- The more you try to control how you’re perceived, the more self-conscious, careful, and edited you become
- The more edited you become, the harder it is for people to feel your full presence, clarity, and authority… and for you to remember which version of yourself you’re supposed to be in any given moment
This is one reason you may be doing everything “right” and still not getting the result you want.
Here’s what the people passing you by are probably doing differently
You may be prepared, professional, and strategic. Maybe you’re following the career advice you’ve been given. Yet still, *someone else* keeps getting the promotion, the visibility, or the opportunities.
That person may not be more competent than you, but she may be embodying something you haven’t fully developed. That someone who seems to be passing you by is probably:
- Showing up with self-assured energy instead of auditioning energy
- Taking ownership of her place instead of waiting for the room to decide whether she belongs
- Giving herself permission to contribute boldly and imperfectly instead of trying to earn permission to take up space
- Supporting and coaching herself (and also getting it from people she trusts) instead of silently asking, “Am I doing this right? Do you approve of me? Am I enough?”
That way of being is hard to fake. It comes from a deeper foundation: Knowing and liking who you are, trusting yourself, and committing to your personal growth and development.
The first shift toward building that foundation is recognizing that you can’t make people respect you.
Focus on what’s within your control
You could use pressure, fear, or intimidation to make people comply. But that’s not really respect, right? It’s fear. It’s people doing what they need to do to protect themselves.
The kind of respect you want is *way* different than fear.
You want to be respected because people view you as grounded, clear, capable, and self-assured.
That kind of respect can’t be forced… but it can grow naturally when you stop trying to control everyone else’s opinion and start building the inner foundation that makes you feel self-confident, no matter what they think.
When you accept that you cannot control other people’s perceptions, you:
- Get some of your energy back
- Stop treating every room like a test
- No longer turn every facial expression into data that has to be interpreted
- Stop trying to perform the “right” version of yourself
When you release the desire to control what other people think about you, you can begin focusing on what’s actually within your control: What you believe, how you think, how you speak, what you choose, what you tolerate, how you support yourself, how you lead yourself through hard moments.
*That* is where real confidence begins.
Mistake #2: Trying to Look Respect-Worthy Before You Respect Yourself
You might be thinking, “But I do respect myself!”
And maybe you do… but how much? And what does it actually mean to respect yourself?
- How do you treat yourself when no one else is watching?
- What do you say to yourself… when you make a mistake?
- …When you succeed?
- …When you do an average job instead of an exceptional one?
- Do you… criticize yourself internally?
- …Put yourself or your work down in front of other people?
- …Dismiss or minimize compliments?
- …Tell yourself you should be further along by now?
- …Hold yourself to a standard you would never apply to anyone else?
- Do you make one awkward sentence, one missed detail, or one hard conversation mean something terrible about who you are?
Struggles with self-respect are often *way* sneakier than people think or expect.
It doesn’t always look like obvious insecurity.
Sometimes it looks like:
- Being the most prepared person in the room because you’re terrified of being caught without an answer
- Over-explaining because you don’t trust your point to stand on its own
- Hedging because you don’t want to sound arrogant
- Accommodating everyone else because you don’t want to disappoint anyone
- Avoiding conflict because you don’t trust yourself to handle another person’s frustration
- Downplaying your work before anyone else gets the chance to judge it
And here’s why it impacts your work and career:
People pick up on it.
They may not consciously think, “She doesn’t respect herself.” However, they can often feel the gap between your actual capability and the way you’re presenting yourself.
That gap can affect your reputation *and* your opportunities.
You may be highly capable, thoughtful, and ready for more responsibility. However, if behaviors rooted in self-doubt are shaping how people experience you, your reputation may not reflect your true capability.
You might be seen as:
- Helpful, but not authoritative
- Smart, but not decisive
- Dependable, but not strategic
- Easy to work with, but not ready to lead
- Supportive, but not someone who can hold the room, hold a position, or hold a team accountable
That can feel super frustrating because you know you’re capable of so. much. more.
However, the strategy you’re using to be perceived as capable may accidentally be creating evidence that undersells you.
Now, let me be crystal clear: That does *not* mean you need to become colder, louder, harsher, or more dominant.
What it *does* mean is that repairing and developing your relationship with yourself needs to become part of your professional development plan.
So what does it look like to have a stronger relationship with myself?
Before you can command respect in a natural, organic way, you have to respect yourself.
It’s important to do it in a practical, daily, leadership-level way… not in some vague, inspirational, “girl power” way.
What does that actually look like? Working to become someone who:
- You can count on internally (not just for external results)
- Tells herself the truth without tearing herself apart
- Acknowledges a mistake without turning it into proof of inadequacy
- Receives praise without immediately discounting or dismissing it
- Can have needs, preferences, boundaries, and opinions without treating them like an inconvenience
- Doesn’t need every person in the room to validate her before she believes she belongs there
When your relationship with yourself becomes stronger, you stop walking into rooms hoping other people will give you a sense of worth. Instead, you bring that foundation with you. It changes how you speak, listen, make decisions, respond when someone disagrees, and recover from missteps.
It *also* changes how other people experience you, even if they can’t quite explain what’s different.
That’s why “commanding respect” can’t be *just* about tactics.
Your words, tone, and leadership skills all matter, yes.
However, when you try to perform leadership or presence without embodying them, it can ring hollow.
People can tell.
True respect begins to grow when the inside starts matching the outside.
Mistake #3: Trying to Engineer Presence Instead of Building Self-Trust
There’s a level of career growth where being smart, prepared, and polished is no longer enough to set you apart.
If being smart, prepared, and polished has carried you a long way, then that can feel pretty annoying. I get it.
At a certain point, though, everyone in the room is capable. Everyone has experience, knows how to speak professionally, knows how to send the email, lead the meeting, and present the update.
So what separates the people who keep advancing from the people who stall?
Often, it’s something more internal… something that’s identity-level.
Call it presence, settledness, gravitas, conviction… or deeply-ingrained self-confidence, as I like to call it.
Think of it as that hard-to-name quality that makes someone seem steady, trustworthy, and worthy of leading, even when things are uncertain.
Since much of today’s professional development content focuses on behavior, many women try to reverse-engineer that quality from the outside.
They ask things like:
- What words do confident leaders use?
- How do they stand?
- What do they wear?
- When do they pause?
- How do they enter the room?
- What’s their approach to responding when they’re challenged?
- What are they doing to sound so calm?
Those aren’t bad questions.
However, presence comes from becoming someone who operates in self-confidence and self-trust. It’s not something you create by copying the outer behavior of someone who operates from those emotions.
That’s a *big* difference.
When you try to manufacture presence, you’re still performing… trying to look settled, confident, self-assured.
When you build self-confidence and self-trust, though, you don’t have to work so hard to look that way.
You become more settled because you know you can navigate whatever comes up.
Goal: Always get it right Always get through
That doesn’t mean you always get everything right, always have the perfect answer, or that you never feel nervous, disappointed, embarrassed, frustrated, or unsure.
What it DOES mean is that you trust yourself to lead yourself through those moments.
You can say, “I don’t know yet, but here’s how I’d approach it.”
You’re able to receive feedback and decide what’s useful without collapsing into shame.
You can be challenged without immediately becoming defensive or apologetic.
You have the capacity to make a mistake and repair it without making it mean something negative about you as a person.
People can misunderstand you, and you still know who you are.
You can advocate for yourself without feeling like your entire sense of self is on the line.
*That* is what real presence looks like in action.
If you’ve hit a career ceiling and you’re not sure why, this might be the reason.
You may have reached the point where more behavioral competence isn’t the answer. You don’t need another script as much as you need a stronger inner foundation. You don’t need to keep trying to manufacture the intangible.
You need to build the self-trust that naturally creates it.
This is especially important for smart, capable women who look confident on the outside but secretly struggle with self-doubt or impostor syndrome on the inside.
From the outside, people may assume you’re fine.
Internally, though, you may be spending enormous energy managing the gap between how you appear and how you feel.
That effort takes a toll. It affects your:
- Energy
- Clarity
- Willingness to speak up
- Boundaries
- How much risk you’re willing to take
- Willingness to put yourself forward for the promotion, project, leadership opportunity, or the conversation that needs to happen
Self-confidence and self-trust change *all* of that.
When you trust yourself, you can stop watching yourself so closely.
You can walk into rooms focused on what you are there to do, not just how you are being received.
You think more clearly. Your presence grows. The work itself gets better because you’re actually *in* it, instead of observing yourself from the outside.
It’s all a result of shifting from performing confidence to being rooted in self-trust.
What to Do Instead
Instead of trying to command respect from the outside in, start building self-confidence and self-trust from the inside out.
You can absolutely continue learning communication skills, leadership tools, or career strategies. However, those tools need to sit on top of a stronger foundation. That foundation is self-confidence and self-trust built at the identity level.
Inside my 1:1 coaching program, The Self-Confidence Edit, this is exactly the work we do through my 3P Self-Confidence Method: self-Perception, Potential, and Perspective.
Here’s what that looks like.
1. Shift Your Self-Perception
Self-perception is the identity-level foundation you take into every interaction. It shapes how you see yourself before anyone else says a word – and after they say something to you or about you.
If your self-perception is built on self-criticism, comparison, and constant self-monitoring, then every workplace interaction can start to feel like a referendum on your worth:
- A meeting isn’t just a meeting… it becomes a test of whether you belong
- A mistake isn’t just a mistake… it becomes proof that you aren’t as capable as people think
- Feedback is more than just feedback… It defines who you are
In The Self-Confidence Edit, we work on repairing and rebuilding your relationship with yourself so you become a source of self-support and encouragement.
You won’t be pretending like everything you do is amazing. Instead, you’ll:
- Learn how to be honest with yourself without being cruel
- See yourself more accurately
- Let your wins count
- Allow your mistakes to be part of growth instead of proof that something is wrong with you
When your self-perception shifts, you stop needing every room to give you approval and validation… instead, you bring approval and validation with you.
2. Build Belief in Your Potential
The Potential phase is about building belief in your capacity to navigate whatever comes up.
That’s completely different than believing you’ll always know exactly what to do – you won’t. No one does!
Becoming someone who always has the answer isn’t the answer.
What *is* the answer, then? Becoming someone who trusts herself even when she doesn’t have the answer yet. It sounds like:
- “I can figure this out.”
- “I can ask for what I need.”
- “I can handle discomfort.”
- “I can recover if this doesn’t go perfectly.”
- “I can make a decision and adjust if needed.”
- “I can navigate this conversation even if it feels hard.”
This is where that authentic presence you’ve been trying to replicate starts to grow organically.
The more you believe in your capacity to navigate situations, the less you need to perform certainty.
You can be honest, steady, thoughtful, and stay connected to yourself under pressure.
That is the settledness people often admire in great leaders.
3. Change Your Perspective on Other People’s Opinions
The Perspective phase is where we work on how you view other people’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions about you, *and* what you make them mean about you.
This is where you stop expecting yourself to control something you simply can’t control.
Other people may respect you, understand you, and approve of your choices… or, they may not.
Your job isn’t to control their internal experience. It’s to decide who you want to be, how you want to show up, and what you want to make their opinions mean.
When you stop organizing yourself around other people’s perceptions, you gain the freedom to be more honest, more present, and more fully yourself. Not careless, but not abandoning yourself for the sake of external approval or validation.
That’s often when the respect you were trying so hard to earn starts to happen more naturally.
A Personal Note
For a long time, I didn’t like myself… my quirks, my perceived shortcomings, all the ways I thought I didn’t compare or stack up to the people around me.
Because of that, I thought I needed to act a certain way.
I thought I needed to show up as a version of myself who had the traits I believed other people wanted to see and would garner respect.
So I tried to manage how I came across. I tried to be the “right” version of myself, to become someone who would finally be approved of.
However, it wasn’t until I:
- Released the desire to control what people thought of me,
- Started liking and respecting myself, and
- Developed the self-confidence to get through whatever came up
…that I finally felt comfortable showing up as who I really am.
I realized that, by building up respect for myself, I had truly gained the respect and admiration of many of the people around me.
I hadn’t forced it or performed it. I was just… settled in myself and confident in who I am.
That is the kind of confidence I want for you, too.
“But What If My Workplace Really Is Toxic?”
You might be wondering, “This all sounds great in theory, but my workplace is actually toxic. If I don’t act the part of someone who commands respect, I won’t get it.”
That’s a valid question, and there are really two separate questions inside it.
The first question is:
Is the environment fair?
The answer may genuinely be no.
Some workplaces *really are* unhealthy. Leaders can be biased. Workplace cultures can reward the wrong things. Some environments punish honesty, boundaries, differences of opinion, or direct communication.
You’re right: Building self-confidence doesn’t magically fix a toxic workplace.
The second question is:
In any environment you find yourself in, what’s actually within your control?
The one thing that is always within your control is you.
- What you believe
- How you think and feel
- What you do or don’t say or do
- Your choices
- What you’re willing to tolerate
- What you decide to do next
A stronger internal foundation doesn’t suddenly make an unfair workplace fair. However, it does change your perceptions, your boundaries, and what you’re able (and willing) to do about it.
When you’re operating from genuine self-trust and self-confidence, you’re better positioned to assess whether a situation is worth staying in. You become a better advocate for yourself. You’re better able to leave if leaving is the right call, without making that decision from fear or self-doubt.
I’m not pretending that workplaces are always fair, or that working on yourself will somehow make a toxic workplace all better.
Instead, I want you to be able to make your next move from clarity, self-confidence, and self-trust… not from panic, self-doubt, or the belief that you have to put on a performance to be respected.
The Real Path to Being Respected at Work
If you’ve been trying to “command respect” at work, it makes sense. You’ve been taught to gather the right tactics: The right words, tone, strategy, and leadership behaviors.
Again, those things can be helpful, but they aren’t the foundation.
The most impactful work is becoming the kind of woman who doesn’t need to perform respectability, confidence, or leadership, because she’s building those qualities from within.
You can’t control whether every person respects you, but you *can* stop abandoning yourself in the effort to earn that respect.
You can stop treating every meeting like an audition, using so much energy to manage how you come across, and making other people’s opinions the measure of your worth.
You can build self-respect, self-confidence, and self-trust. You can develop the kind of presence that comes from knowing you can navigate whatever comes up. When you do, things start to feel different. You:
- Walk into rooms with more clarity
- Speak with more steadiness
- Set and enforce boundaries with less guilt
- Recover from missteps more quickly
- Lead with more of yourself available
In summary, you stop trying to manufacture the intangible quality you see in other leaders and start recognizing it as something that can grow naturally in you, too… not because you become someone else, but because you become more deeply rooted in yourself.
Oh, and those people who seem to keep passing you by? You start catching up.
Ready to Build the Self-Trust Behind Real Confidence?
If you’re ready to stop performing confidence and start becoming the kind of woman who naturally carries it, I’d love to support you.
Inside my 1:1 coaching program, The Self-Confidence Edit, we’ll work together using my proprietary 3P Self-Confidence Method to help you shift your self-perception, build belief in your potential, and change your perspective on other people’s opinions of you.
This is highly personalized coaching for smart, capable women who are ready to trust themselves more fully at work, lead with more presence, and stop letting self-doubt run the show behind the scenes so they can lead the project, get the promotion, and do it all while protecting their boundaries.
To take the next step, schedule a free coaching consultation so we can discuss becoming a 1:1 client. Visit https://www.amyschield.com/book to get on my calendar.
