The rock of self-doubt, and other stories
Reflections from my conversation with Carmel Peinke, CEO of eRoute2market.
A couple of weeks ago I sat in the studio across from Carmel Peinke, who's the founder and CEO of a tech company called eRoute2Market that she's been running for seventeen years (and which, by the way, she built without ever writing a single line of code in her life). It's the sixth episode in my On Change: Powerful Women series.
Carmel is funny and unguarded and not afraid to talk about difficult topics. Somewhere around the ten-minute mark, she told me a story that I thought warranted more thinking…and my way of thinking is to write about it. Here is the story:
There’s a man in her industry. He started a business very similar to hers, about a year after she did. He took the idea up into Africa first, came back home to South Africa, and a few years down the line sold the whole thing for what Carmel describes as “an insane amount of money.” Carmel’s still running hers, seventeen years in, with three mobile applications, a working AI offering, and a client list across consumer goods, petroleum and township retail that any tech founder would frankly envy.
So what was the difference?
“He just went for the target,” she said. “He doesn’t have that doubt thing. I’ve sat on a rock every now and again, asking myself, am I doing the right thing? Is this enough? Are we really solving a real-world problem?”
…and I’ve been thinking about that rock.
Because I sit on it too and most of the women I coach sit on it.
The rock is where you go when the doubt arrives, when the imposter feeling shows up and asks: “Sorry, but are you sure you’re the right person for this?” (because don’t we just love starting with an apology). You question yourself. You re-read the spec. You ask another smart person to weigh in. You wait for one more piece of evidence before you make the call.
Meanwhile, somewhere, a man with half your knowledge and twice your conviction is closing the deal.
(I know, I know... not all men. And I love the men in my life. But the pattern is the pattern.)
In Co-Active coaching (the model I’m trained in), this voice has a name. We call it the Saboteur. Our brains are hardwired to look for danger, and the moment we try something new or dare something bigger, a part of the brain pipes up with a warning meant to keep us safe. The same warning keeps us small. The Saboteur is the inner critic (that mean little voice) that asks the rock questions. Sorry, but are you sure? Have you done enough? Who do you think you are? It sounds like caution and feels like wisdom, which is exactly why it's so hard to ignore.
A client sent me an article this week by Ling Abson, a coach who works with senior leaders in tech. Ling makes a point that resonated with me. Early in your career, imposter syndrome shows up as I don't know enough. At Director and VP level, the trigger shifts to I feel out of my depth when I compare myself to other (what I think to be) “more worthy and cleverer” people. You actually do know plenty. What gets you is the specific person across the table with the Google badge, or the Rio Tinto resume, or the business they sold in Africa for an insane amount of money. The comparison stops being abstract... it becomes a face, a real person you perceive to be in some way better than you.
Ling says that leaders at this level mistake deep institutional knowledge for inferiority. You discount what only you know because it doesn’t look as impressive on a slide as the imposing CV of the new arrival.
Carmel’s the living example. Seventeen years of relationships with consumer goods executives across South Africa, three iterations of route-to-market change watched up close, a working understanding of which township stores sell what and why... none of that fits neatly on a resume…and she still goes and sit ons that self-doubt rock from time to time!
The deeper insight in Ling’s piece sits underneath all of that. Self-doubt at this level is really an identity question. You’re trying to navigate new ground with an old map of yourself. The work is to redraw the map, and to step into the version of you that this next chapter actually needs.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” - Joseph Campbell
Carmel has a morning ritual for this. It’s a daily bypass of the Saboteur. The voice on the rock keeps chattering. Carmel has a routine for silencing it.
She gets up at the crack of dawn. She makes coffee. She sits with a blank piece of paper. She writes down what matters today, which big issues need attention, which client she needs to land in the next quarter, which one small step she can take right now to get closer.
“It doesn’t mean I stop feeling the lack of confidence,” she said. “It just creates structure for me. So I’ve got a little roadmap. And then I can go.”
I love this little identitity ritual. Who do I need to be today, and what step takes that person closer to where she's going?
Our whole conversation is full of moments like this. Carmel talks about the day she drove home from the office after losing her temper in a meeting, looked at herself in the rear-view mirror and said out loud, who the hell are you, and who are you becoming? That was the day she realised the male-dominated industry she’d spent years learning to thrive in was, very slowly, turning her into someone she didn’t recognise. So she went and built her own thing on her own terms.
She talks about her 2026 plan for getting more women into tech. She wants to walk into first-year lecture halls at South African universities and tell the women sitting there that they are the sample size of one, multiplied by two thousand seats. The seat at the table is already theirs. They just need to stop apologising for sitting in it.
I wonder what would happen if all of us, everyone who’s ever sat on their own version of that rock, just stopped and asked two simple questions. Who do I want to become? What small steo takes me closer to that version of me? Carmel asks them every morning with her blank piece of paper. Ling’s clients ask them inside their identity work. We can ask them too.
Lots of love
And if you’re on the edge of a leap, and you’d like a thinking partner for it, you know where to find me. Book a free 30-minute coaching intro session here.
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