For nearly six months, I believed I'd lost or even broken something I couldn't see.

I've run an executive coaching practice for senior women in STEM for nearly 20 years, and the work had gone quiet.

Fewer enquiries. Fewer invitations to speak.

Newsletters I was proud of landing softly, without many of the comments I'd historically received.

And I did exactly what I watch my clients do: I decided the silence was about me.

It wasn't.

Turns out, my website's contact form had been broken since January.

This meant every message sent through my website had gone nowhere. Nada. Zilch.

The silence I'd read as a verdict on my writing, and perhaps even my work more widely was a website wiring fault I hadn't known to check for.

In this brave new world of DIY IT technology, I had missed something fundamental.

I'd spent half a year quietly concluding I wasn't good enough, when the truth was a form on my website simply didn't submit messages back to me.

I tell that story not because a 'broken form' is interesting, but because of my poor interpretation of it.

Faced with a problem, my first move wasn't to check the system or even query the person who'd helped me set it all up.

It was to question and even blame myself!

And if you're the kind of woman who's read this far, I suspect that move may be familiar to you too.

Here's the part most people get wrong.

We treat self-blame as a confidence problem.

It's as though women who question themselves simply need to more resolutely stick with that too oft-cited battlecry of 'Be More Confident'!

That misreads the mechanism entirely.

If you've reached a senior role in a demanding field, you most likely got there by being the one who figures things out.

The one who takes responsibility, finds the fix, closes the gap.

For years, that reflex has worked.

Taking ownership (even of problems you didn't create) has been your lever.

So when something goes wrong, your trained, instant response is: 'What did I do, and what can I fix?'

That instinct is a strength.

It's most of why you're successful.

The trouble is what happens when you apply it to a problem that isn't yours.

A dismantled leadership team.

A reorganisation that quietly sidelines you.

A system that overlooks you for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability.

Or in my case; a broken 'contact us' form.

Point that finely-tuned ownership reflex at a structural fault?

It turns inward and becomes a verdict about your worth. Yikes!

Which is why it's the most capable women who are most prone to this, not the least.

The stronger your habit of taking responsibility, the more readily you'll absorb a structural failure as a personal one.

You're not lacking confidence.

You're over-applying a historic strength.