Not long ago I listened to interviews with Emma Grede and Lauren Sánchez, two women who on paper seem to have everything: success, influence, recognition, opportunities most people can only dream of. And underneath the achievements, both described something I recognised at once. Even as they built what they built, they had doubted their own worth. Grede has spoken about the early rooms where she stayed quiet when she should have spoken, and the times she underestimated her own value, all of it happening not before her success but in the middle of building it.

That stopped me. If women operating at that level carried the doubt while they were rising, then perhaps it is not something we outgrow on the way up. Perhaps it is simply part of being human. The difference is not whether we feel self-doubt. It is whether we let it run the decision.

Because for most of my life, I did not feel quite enough. Not clever enough, not qualified enough, not capable enough, not worthy enough. None of it was true, but when you hear something often enough, especially as a child, it becomes the voice you carry.

As a vicar's daughter, I moved often. Just as friendships began to deepen and a place started to feel like home, it would be time to leave again. At the time, I thought I was simply adapting. Looking back, I can see that I became very good at fitting in, and not always very good at belonging. There is a difference between the two, and it took me years to understand it.

I loved school. Learning came easily; I was curious and quick, and no one saw a problem, least of all me. Like so many children who still slip through the cracks, I learned to compensate long before I understood what I was compensating for. Then, at thirteen, I was sent to boarding school. At first it felt like a punishment, as though I had been lifted out of everything familiar and told to start again. I can laugh about it now. I could not then.

And then came the teachers who told me, in words and in glances, that I probably would not amount to much. What they did not know is that nothing motivates me more than being told I cannot do a thing. I had a vision for my life, and I was not about to hand it back because someone else could not see it.

So I worked. I passed my exams and won a place at nursing college, and then reality arrived. The academic demands were harder than anything I had met before, the writing was relentless, and every piece of it took me far longer than it seemed to take everyone else. The wards, though, were where I came alive. I could care for people, lead them, communicate, stay calm while everything around me came apart. It was the paperwork that undid me. My notes were scrappy, my spelling wandered, and I could not understand why the written work cost me so much more than it cost anyone else.

Then one tutor saw what the others had missed. He looked past the spelling and the messy notes and recognised that I was dyslexic. Today that might have come as a relief. Back then it felt like a verdict, proof that something was wrong with me, one more label, one more reason to believe I might not be good enough after all. But determination has a way of overriding fear. I carried on, I qualified, and I built a career, first as a nurse, then a sister, then a manager.

Something else shaped that path, quietly and completely: the people who believed in me before I believed in myself. Champions, I call them now. They saw past my weaknesses to the things I could actually do: connect with people, solve problems, think differently, hold a room steady in a crisis. Nearly every real step forward in my life traces back to one of them. That is why I care so much about encouragement now. Sometimes one person's belief in you is enough to change the direction of a whole life.

Thirty years on, I am in a role that still stretches me past anything I once thought I was capable of, working alongside people with extraordinary achievements and presence. And if I am honest, there are still mornings I walk into a room and quietly wonder what I am doing there. Did someone make a mistake? Do I really belong here? Am I qualified enough? Am I good enough? The old voice has not gone. What has changed is that I no longer believe everything it tells me.

Experience taught me something it took most of my life to learn. The biggest obstacle was never the dyslexia, or the constant moving, or boarding school, or the teachers who doubted me, or any of the setbacks that come to everyone eventually. The biggest obstacle was my own belief that they might be right. That is the trap so many of us fall into. We let other people's opinions harden into our identity. We accept their limits as our own and mistake criticism for truth, and somewhere along the way we stop seeing ourselves clearly.

The stories I write now, in my memoirs and through my work with Violet Simon, come from this place, not because my experience is unusual, but because it is not. I have met remarkable people from every walk of life, leaders and founders, mothers and entrepreneurs, survivors, people living with disabilities both visible and invisible, people rebuilding after heartbreak or illness or loss. And the same thread runs through nearly all of them. At some point, they believed they were not enough.

The tragedy is not that we feel this. It is how much is lost because of it. The ideas that never get shared, the businesses that never get started, the books that never get written, the conversations that never happen, the dreams that quietly disappear because someone convinced themselves they were not capable. When I think of Emma Grede and Lauren Sánchez, and the people I meet every day, and the girl once sitting in a classroom being told she would not amount to much, I come back to the same truth. None of us begins as the finished version of ourselves.

We do not begin with confidence or certainty. We begin with hope, with curiosity, with a willingness to keep going. For years I waited to feel ready, qualified, good enough, and none of those things arrived first. The opportunity came before the confidence. The challenge came before the belief. The growth came before the certainty. What changed my life was not silencing the voice that said I was not enough. It was learning not to obey it.

So if there is one thing I would want you to take from any of this, it is that you do not have to believe you are extraordinary before you begin. You simply have to begin before you believe. Greatness was never reserved for a select few. In one form or another, it is in all of us, and sometimes it takes just one person to see it. Most of the time, that person can be you.