If you don’t speak up, assumptions will fill the silence

Sonia Wadhwa on confidence, finding your voice and learning to own your impact

Sonia Wadhwa in conversation with host Holly Staff

“If you don’t speak up, people and their assumptions will fill the silence that you create.”

It is a lesson Sonia Wadhwa learned early in her career. Just a few months into her first job in technology, Sonia took two weeks away from work to get married. Without anything being said directly to her, she returned to find that perceptions had shifted. Somehow, getting married had created an assumption that she was no longer as serious about her career. She was sidelined from important initiatives and her performance review suffered.

Rather than accept what had happened, Sonia arranged a meeting with the leader of the team and asked for another opportunity to prove herself. The work would be on top of her existing responsibilities and would mean long hours, but she accepted the challenge, delivered and rebuilt her standing within the organisation.

Around a year later, as she prepared to leave the company, that same leader told her something she has never forgotten:

“Undermining your potential was one of the worst mistakes of my career.”

Today, Sonia is a Senior Director in Microsoft’s AI Transformation Office, an executive coach and an advocate for inclusive leadership. But confidence, she is quick to explain, has never been something she simply possessed. It has been built over almost three decades.

In the latest episode of The Women Behind the Network, Sonia joins host Holly Staff to explore the confidence gap, the habits that quietly undermine self-belief and why helping more women find their voice is not just an individual responsibility, but a leadership one too.

Capability is not enough if nobody sees it

Sonia entered technology with a belief many people will recognise: work hard, keep your head down, deliver good work and people will notice. Growing up in India, she had also been taught a definition of humility that meant not talking too much about herself or her achievements.

Over time, she realised that capability alone was not enough. Visibility mattered too. Sonia saw colleagues confidently articulate their contribution and impact while she instinctively played down her own. Looking back, she believes she was far more capable than she realised, but her inner critic was quick to tell her she did not know enough or that somebody else knew more.

For Sonia, understanding what you are capable of is only part of the equation. You also need to be able to explain how that capability created impact. Without that, excellent work can remain invisible.

“Learn to really own what you create or what you deliver and speak about it.”

That does not mean exaggerating. It means recognising the value of your contribution, understanding what changed because of your work and making sure the right people know.

Confidence can be built

As Sonia progressed into management and leadership, she increasingly found herself the only woman in the room. Getting her voice into conversations could be difficult and, at times, she began questioning whether her ideas mattered at all.

Her instinct initially was to compensate by becoming louder, but she soon realised that raising her voice did not necessarily make her more influential and could instead risk feeding another stereotype: the confident woman being perceived as angry or aggressive. She had to find another way.

Public speaking was one area where Sonia deliberately worked to build confidence. Having avoided the limelight throughout school and university, leadership meant she could no longer stay in the background. She sought help from mentors, prepared extensively and made sure that whether she was speaking to five people, 50 or 100, she knew her content.

Confidence became something to practise rather than something to wait for.

Rebuilding from a low point

One of Sonia's most difficult periods came after joining Microsoft. Having moved her family from New York to Seattle for the role, she found herself in an environment where she felt excluded and undermined. Her confidence began to collapse.

One evening, after a particularly difficult encounter at work, Sonia sat in her car in tears, wondering whether she should quit. Her thoughts went to her mother, whom she had watched navigate cultural bias in India during the 1970s and 80s, fight for her children's education and build a career of her own in an environment where women were not always expected to have one.

Remembering that strength changed something. “I’m not going to let it break me,” Sonia recalls thinking.

What followed was not an overnight transformation. Instead, Sonia began connecting with other women, attending events and volunteering for small roles. One opportunity led to another until she eventually became deeply involved in women's communities, including leading Microsoft’s Women's Employee Resource Group.

What began as a way of finding support during one of the lowest points in her career ultimately became an important part of who she is. Helping other women became part of her mission.

The power of community

Connecting with other women reassured Sonia that she was not alone. Women with far more experience at the company faced many of the same challenges.

That experience made Sonia a strong believer in peer mentoring. A mentor does not always need to be somebody significantly more senior. Sometimes the most valuable person to learn from is somebody at a similar stage of their career who simply has a different set of experiences.

“We all can learn from each other.”

Some of those peer mentors became lifelong friends. Later, Sonia helped create mentoring circles, bringing groups of women together rather than relying solely on traditional one-to-one mentoring. She remembers sessions where the planned agenda disappeared because one woman arrived needing support and the entire group focused on sharing ideas, encouragement and experience.

For Sonia, it demonstrated the real power of community: not simply networking, but showing up for one another.

Recognise your confidence saboteurs

Some of the habits undermining confidence can be surprisingly small. Sonia encourages women to pay attention to their language: the unnecessary caveat, the “maybe”, the “perhaps”, the instinct to over-explain or the apology that did not need to be made.

Individually, these things can appear insignificant, but collectively they can change how somebody's expertise is perceived. Sonia describes these behaviours as “confidence saboteurs” and recommends effectively auditing yourself: listen to your words, notice your tone and pay attention to how often you soften an idea before you have even presented it.

Another confidence saboteur is something Sonia describes as “comparisonitis”. Earlier in her career, she would see somebody producing brilliant ideas and immediately compare that strength with what she believed she lacked. They were the ideas person; she was “only” the doer.

Eventually, Sonia reframed the comparison. Perhaps the person generating ideas and the person capable of turning them into an executable plan were not competitors at all. Perhaps they were an excellent team.

She began to recognise execution as one of her own strengths rather than evidence that somebody else was more capable. Confidence does not require you to be the best person in the room at everything. It requires understanding what you bring to it.

Perfection can become paralysis

Then there is perfectionism. For Sonia, striving for quality matters, but striving for perfection is different.

“Pursuit of perfection is a constant uphill battle, which can never be won.”

Mistakes will happen and small failures are inevitable. The problem comes when the need to feel completely ready prevents somebody from acting at all.

Sonia sees it in the way women can approach job descriptions. Faced with ten requirements, a woman who meets eight may focus on the two she lacks and decide she is not qualified, while somebody else may meet far fewer and concentrate instead on why they could still succeed.

Waiting until you feel perfectly qualified can mean waiting while somebody else applies.

The same intentional thinking applies to the work women take on once they are in a role. Sonia encourages the women she coaches to ask whether a project supports where they want their career to go, builds useful experience or creates valuable visibility. It is easy to become the person who is always asked, “Can you just help with this?” and accumulate responsibilities that consume time without necessarily helping you progress.

Sometimes confidence means speaking up. Sometimes it means having the confidence to say no.

Make space for quieter voices

For Sonia, responsibility for building confidence cannot sit solely with the individual. Leaders have an important role in deciding whose voices are heard.

“The loudest or the most heard voice in the room is not necessarily the one with the best insight.”

A quieter engineer, an early-career designer or a data analyst may have the information that changes an entire conversation. But if meetings are dominated by the same confident voices, those insights can disappear.

Sonia encourages leaders to manage the airtime, ask quieter people direct questions and give them enough space to formulate an answer. When necessary, she says, “interrupt the interrupters.”

She also recommends giving people opportunities to showcase their work rather than always presenting on their behalf. Put the quieter person in front of the important audience, let them present what they have created and give them the chance to develop the confidence that only experience can provide.

Then go one step further: advocate for them when they are not in the room.

That is where mentoring becomes sponsorship. Advice matters, but so does having somebody willing to use their own influence to create opportunities for you.

Confidence is something we build

Looking ahead, Sonia sees reasons for optimism. When she began her career, female role models in technology were harder to find. Today, professional communities are stronger, mentoring is more accessible and women can connect, share experiences and support one another in ways that simply were not possible when she was starting out.

Most importantly, Sonia believes women are no longer simply waiting for the environment around them to change. They are changing how they show up within it and putting themselves in positions where they can help reshape it too.

Her own career is a reminder that confidence does not have to arrive before action. Sometimes action is precisely how confidence is created: speaking up, recognising your strengths, owning your impact and finding people who will support you, while doing the same for somebody coming behind you.

Self-doubt may occasionally be part of the journey, but it does not have to decide where that journey takes you.

Listen to the conversation

In the latest episode of The Women Behind the Network, Sonia Wadhwa joins host Holly Staff to discuss confidence, leadership and the experiences that shaped her determination to help more women recognise their own potential.

They explore navigating male-dominated environments, overcoming self-doubt, the power of mentoring and women's communities, learning to communicate with authority, perfectionism, visibility, sponsorship and why leaders have a responsibility to make space for quieter voices.

And perhaps most importantly, why confidence is not something you need to wait for.

It is something you can build.

Connect with Sonia on LinkedIn here.