The failure happened. That is not the question anymore. The question is what comes next, and more specifically whether you can do anything at all before feeling like yourself again.
Most advice skips the hard part. Get back on the horse. Learn from it. Fail forward. None of that addresses the specific problem you are sitting with: you do not trust yourself anymore, and you are not sure how to rebuild that without some guarantee it will not happen again.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would each take a different approach. None of them would offer reassurance. They would offer something more useful.
Angelou: confidence follows the doing
Maya Angelou would say the confidence you are waiting for is not coming first. She did not rebuild herself after profound trauma by first feeling capable. She returned to the work. She spoke and wrote and made things in public before the feeling was fully there, and she would tell you that you are misunderstanding where confidence actually comes from. You are waiting for it to arrive before you act. She would say the order is reversed.
The variable, in her view, is not the failure itself. The failure already happened. The variable is the story you are now telling about what it means. Whether it defines you is not something the failure decides. She returned to this repeatedly: identity is something you construct, not something that gets handed to you by events. The failure is a chapter. Whether it is also the conclusion is your call, not the failure's.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Aurelius: the judgment was always yours
Marcus Aurelius would not be gentle about this. He would draw a clean line between two separate events: what happened, and the interpretation you have been building on top of it. The failure is the first. The conclusion that it means something permanent about your capacity, your worth, or your judgment, that is the second, and it is entirely yours. You built it. Which means you can revise it.
He wrote about this throughout the Meditations. The space between what happens and what you conclude from it is where your freedom lives. He would not tell you to ignore the failure or pretend it cost you nothing. He would say to look at it precisely, with no more drama than the facts require: what did it teach you, and what did you add to it that the facts themselves did not put there?
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
James: what do you actually believe
William James would not start where the other two start. He would want to know what you currently believe about your own capacity. Not what happened, not how you interpreted it, but the belief you have been carrying since the failure and treating as settled fact.
He suffered from debilitating depression and years of productive failure before finding his footing. He came to see that beliefs are not passive observations. They are interventions. What you believe about what is possible for you shapes what you will try. What you try shapes what becomes possible. He would not tell you to feel confident. He would ask: if you believed confidence were available to you right now, what would you do differently? And is there any actual reason not to proceed on that basis?
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
Where they disagree
Angelou would say the path forward is through doing. Stop waiting to feel ready. Confidence builds in the making, not before it.
Aurelius would say the work is cognitive first. Until you separate the failure from the permanent judgment you layered on top of it, rushing back into action will not fix the actual problem. Clean up the interpretation before you return to the arena.
James would say both of them are pointing at something real, but neither is asking the foundational question: what do you believe right now, and is that belief serving you? The belief is driving both what you try and what you conclude from the trying.
All three would agree on one thing: what you are calling a confidence problem is at least partly a story problem. They would disagree on which lever to pull first.
The question you came here to avoid
You searched this because you want to move again but you do not feel like you can trust yourself. That makes sense. The failure cost you something, and now you are waiting for some signal that it is safe to try again.
There is no signal. There was none before the failure either. The question all three of them would eventually bring you to is not how you recover confidence before you act. It is whether you are willing to act without it, and what you think that would tell you about yourself.