Mentor - Mentee Wednesday: What’s the Secret to Building Professional Confidence?

For Amina Bajramović, a Software Engineering student and BHFF Mentoring Team Lead, confidence did not come from having all the answers. It started to take shape in the moments where she chose to ask a question instead of staying silent. The ones she initially labeled as “basic” or “too obvious” often became the turning points in her understanding.

Through her mentorship with Željka Hassler, Senior Manager of Product Design at Fleetio, those moments became more frequent and more intentional. The conversations shifted her perspective from trying to appear certain to becoming comfortable with curiosity. Over time, asking questions stopped feeling like uncertainty and started functioning as a tool for clarity.

For Željka, mentorship was shaped by what she describes as a balance between warmth and rigor. Working with Amina showed her how professional growth is often less about correcting direction and more about creating space where thinking out loud is acceptable. She observed how Amina’s combination of kindness and ambition translated into steady, visible progress throughout the cycle.

One of the most consistent themes in their exchange was the intersection between engineering thinking and product thinking. Discussions often moved between design decisions, system-level reasoning, and personal development. In that overlap, confidence did not appear as a fixed trait. It developed through repetition, dialogue, and reflection.

Their in-person meeting at FLS added another layer to the relationship that had already been built online. It reinforced something both of them had been experiencing throughout the cycle: that mentorship works best when it removes the pressure of having perfect answers and replaces it with the discipline of asking better questions.

For Amina, one lesson stood out clearly. The questions she hesitated to ask were often the ones that unlocked the most progress. What once felt like uncertainty gradually became a method for learning faster and thinking more deeply.

For Željka, the experience reinforced that effective leadership is not only about expertise, but about accessibility. When people feel safe to explore ideas openly, confidence grows as a byproduct of that environment.

In the end, their story suggests that professional confidence is not something you wait to acquire. It is something you build through conversation, through questions, and through the willingness to stay open while learning.