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A good result feels like information about you. It confirms the plan, the team and the judgement behind them, so the next forecast starts from a higher sense of what you're capable of. What rarely gets asked is how much of the result you caused.
Overconfidence grows in that gap. When a result has outside causes, such as a rival stumbling or a market lifting everyone, the confidence it produces has nothing underneath it. The forecast that follows rests on a cause that may not come back.
For a leader, it shows up as certainty that travels downwards. A target set with conviction at the top reaches the people closest to customers as a number to deliver, and their quieter view of what each account can do goes unheard.
The check is to set the forecast against your base rate: how often have you grown like this, over how many years, and what was different each time? One year is a single case, and a single case can't tell you what's normal.
The practical tell is a forecast defended with "we did it last year". That line is your cue to look harder at last year before you count on it again.
The year after a rival's distribution collapse handed us a 25% jump in sales, Andrew, our Managing Director, wanted another 20%. I'd been working through my accounts to see where growth could really come from, and I could find only a few customers with room to spend more. Andrew's case was simpler: we'd done it the year before, and nobody in the room asked how much of that year had been ours to repeat. We finished the year 6% up, and most of that came from customers we hadn't had twelve months earlier.