“Experience should guide your instincts, not guard your ego.”

Experience is supposed to make us wiser. And usually, it does, until it doesn’t. Because at some point, what once made you brilliant can start making you blind.

You stop asking questions. You stop doubting assumptions. You stop listening to people with less “experience.” And before you know it, your greatest strength , all those years of hard-won wisdom, quietly turns into a trap.

That’s the Overconfidence Trap. And no one, no matter how senior or successful, is immune to it.

The Paradox of Experience

The longer we lead, the more we trust our instincts, and rightly so. Experience gives pattern recognition. It speeds up decisions. It turns chaos into intuition.

But here’s the paradox: That same intuition, if left unexamined, can start lying to you.

You start assuming you’ve seen it all before. You finish people’s sentences in your head.
You make calls based on how something used to work.

And while your brain thinks it’s being efficient, it’s really just recycling.

“What feels like instinct might just be memory in disguise.”

The Dangerous Comfort of “I Know This”

Every consultant, coach, or leader has heard it: “Oh, I’ve seen this before.”

It’s one of the most expensive sentences in business.

Because the moment you think you’ve seen it all, you stop truly seeing what’s in front of you.

I once worked with a senior executive who dismissed early warning signs in a client relationship.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve handled tougher accounts than this.”

Six months later, the account was gone. The client hadn’t left because of incompetence , they’d left because no one listened.

The team had been raising small issues, but leadership was too confident in its “experience” to take them seriously. By the time reality broke through the noise, the damage was irreversible.

The Science Behind the Trap

Psychologists call this cognitive entrenchment, when expertise becomes rigidity.

Our brains crave certainty, and experience provides plenty of it. We start valuing efficiency over exploration, speed over skepticism.

In other words, the more we know, the less curious we become.

That’s why fresh graduates sometimes see problems their managers miss. They don’t yet “know” what’s impossible, so they ask the questions no one else does.

And while they might not have the full picture, their curiosity keeps the conversation alive.

“Expertise makes you faster. Curiosity keeps you honest.”

A Little Too Sure of Ourselves

Let’s be real, overconfidence is seductive indeed.

It looks like competence. It sounds like authority. And it feels fantastic.

That’s why senior leaders rarely recognise it in themselves.

They mistake confidence for clarity, and certainty for leadership. But the two are not the same.

Clarity says, “Here’s what I know, and here’s what I’m still figuring out.” Overconfidence says, “Here’s what I know end of discussion.”

One builds collaboration; the other builds echo chambers.

The Executive Mirage

In large organisations, overconfidence often hides behind success. You’ve built something great. You’ve earned your title. You’ve been right, a lot.

So you start believing your accuracy rate is 100%. Until one day, the world changes faster than your playbook does.

I saw this vividly with a client in the tech sector. The leadership team had been together for over a decade, they were all smart, loyal, deeply experienced.

But the industry had shifted under their feet. New competitors were playing by entirely different rules.

When the younger team members suggested changes to pricing, messaging, and structure, the senior leaders smiled politely and said, “We’ve been in this game longer than you’ve been alive.”

A year later, the company was forced into an urgent rebrand, led by the very team they’d once dismissed.

Experience isn’t the problem. Unquestioned experience is.

The Humility Equation

So how do you avoid falling into the Overconfidence Trap? It comes down to balancing experience with humility, or as I like to call it, The Humility Equation.

Wisdom = Experience × Curiosity ÷ Ego

Let’s unpack that:

1. Experience gives you the data , all the patterns, the lessons, the instincts.
2. Curiosity ensures you still test those instincts against reality.
3. Ego is the variable that can either multiply your effectiveness or divide it.

When ego rises, wisdom falls.

That’s why the best leaders aren’t the ones who have all the answers, they’re the ones still asking better questions.

The Cost of Being “Right”

Overconfidence doesn’t just affect leaders, it infects organisations.

Teams mirror what they see. If leadership never admits uncertainty, employees stop surfacing problems. If every decision is “obvious,” experimentation dies.

Soon, innovation turns into maintenance, and culture becomes cautious.

In one international client engagement, we found that the company’s “expert-driven” culture had created an invisible barrier to improvement.

Every time someone proposed a new idea, someone else said, “We tried that before and it didn’t work.”

But when we dug deeper, most of those “failed” ideas hadn’t been executed in the same context or with modern tools. They’d been dismissed because someone experienced said so.

Once leadership started asking, “What’s changed since last time?”, innovation reignited.

It wasn’t a lack of ideas holding them back. It was the ghost of past certainty.

It is funny when I recall an incident

I once heard a leader say, “We’ve been doing it this way for 20 years.”

My immediate thought was, “That’s not a strategy. That’s a museum exhibit.”

Tradition has its place, but so does evolution.

The difference between the two is whether you’re preserving what works or protecting what’s familiar.

How to Stay Sharp When You’re Experienced

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to abandon confidence, you just need to keep it curious.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Assume You Might Be Wrong: Start every major decision with the question: “What if I’m missing something?” It’s not weakness, it’s basically intellectual hygiene.
2. Invite Disagreement: Ask the youngest or newest person in the room what they think. You’ll be surprised how much insight lives outside your hierarchy.
3. Separate Experience from Ego: Your past success proves capability, not infallibility.
4. Update Your “Certainties”: Revisit your foundational beliefs every year. Markets, people, and systems evolve, your playbook should too.
5. Stay Close to the Frontline: Spend time with customers, junior teams, or operations. The truth is rarely found in dashboards; it’s found in daily reality.

“Experience gives you patterns. Curiosity gives you perspective.”

The Courage to Unlearn

Unlearning is harder than learning , it feels like betrayal.

You built your career on what worked. You taught others to follow it. Letting go of it feels like letting go of part of yourself.

But the world doesn’t pause for nostalgia.

At Vani Malik Consulting, we often help leadership teams navigate this exact tension, between honouring what’s worked and adapting to what’s next.

It’s not about discarding experience. It’s about distilling it, retaining and keeping the essence, losing the ego.

Because the real mark of mastery isn’t confidence. It’s adaptability.

“A true expert is one who knows exactly where their knowledge ends.”

Final Thought

Experience is an extraordinary teacher, until it starts teaching the same lesson over and over again.

Great leaders know that wisdom isn’t static. It’s a living process of testing, learning, questioning, and refining.

So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I already know this,” pause and ask:
“But do I know it for today?”

At Vani Malik Consulting, we help leaders challenge their own playbooks, not because they’re wrong, but because the world has moved on.

Because experience should guide your instincts, not guard your ego. And the most dangerous thing a leader can believe is that they’ve stopped needing to learn.

“The moment you’re sure you’re right is the moment you stop getting better.”