The Nature of Leadership and Career

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The Nature of Leadership and Career is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey more naturally.

Today at a glance

• Illustration of the week

  - self-critique vs self-doubt

• The Nature of Career

  - 2 powerful questions and the sound of silence

  - 5 reasons why relying on external validation is the quickest way to self-doubt and impostor syndrome

  - What this means for you

  - 10 ways to build your self-worth and career capability

Illustration of the week

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The Nature of Career

How do you know you are good enough without the external validation of others?

What can you do to affirm yourself?

These are the two questions I asked my team during our weekly meeting a couple of years ago.

I noticed that several members had a dip in confidence because they weren’t getting the usual level of feedback or praise from customers, stakeholders, or leaders.**

The response?

After about 3 minutes of awkward silence, someone spoke up and we discussed ways to validate your own career progress, capability, and self-worth.

Before I let you know about some of their tips as well as my own ….

….Let’s consider 5 reasons why relying on external validation is the quickest way to self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

** I should mention that we had built a high level of trust and open dialogue in our team through several teaming sessions, coaching, and creating a safe feedback environment before having this level of conversation.

5 reasons why relying on external validation is the quickest way to self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

1. People are busy (not a great excuse but a reality) and forget to give praise or positive feedback.

2. People are more likely to dish out constructive criticisms than they are positive feedback.

3. People are jealous, envious, and/or feel threatened. This is a dark reality that most of us don’t want to face, especially if it is people we like and respect.

4. Leaders feel that giving too much positive feedback can soften their team. It is crazy that this is still a prevailing line of thought.

5. Relying on others for your self-validation is addictive.

   You keep needing a bigger hit and often push yourself past your time and energy boundaries to keep pleasing and achieving.

Each of these reasons highlights why placing your self-worth in the hands of others is a dangerous game.

Where the odds are not in your favor, based on recent work by Donald Sull, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig.

Their extensive multi-modal research methods indicate that toxic corporate culture and failure to recognize employee performance were two of the biggest predictors of employee resignation in the last few years.

What this means for you

❌ Don’t rely on external validation as your primary source of confidence and progress.

✅ You need to be your biggest fan.

✅Find your voice, champion your progress to yourself.

✅Then champion your voice and progress to others.

❌ You are not “full of yourself” or stuck up if you do. On the contrary, you are courageous because so few people find this easy to do.

✅ By all means, understand your gaps and areas of growth. I am not saying go too far the other way.

💡 But be aware of the fine line between self-critique and self-doubt.

10 ways to build your self-worth and career capability

1. Journal your work wins daily or weekly.

2. Review your past work from over 1 – 2 years to see your progress.

3. Share your wins with someone else and say what you are proud of.

4. Use meaningful daily affirmations to rewrite your “broken-record” self-doubts.

5. Make time to just be and feel pride when you create, deliver, or solve something.

6. Write up each minor and major piece of progress to an ongoing resume (This also helps for future resume writing which most of us dread!)

7. Give yourself the feedback as if you were giving it to a friend. Often, it’s easier to show that compassion to others than to show it to ourselves.

8. Dissociate your self-worth and capability from your work product succeeding or failing. When it succeeds feel pride in your process and effort, not in the output. When it fails use techniques of self-reflection and mindful self-compassion to be able to constructively improve your process.

9. Schedule a weekly or monthly personal review of your progress based on your work and life goals. This serves as a great backtest for when you get external feedback.

10. Track your thoughts and behaviors and see if they fall into a category of healthy self-critique to help you improve in a COMPASSIONATE way or whether it is self-doubt that weakens your resolve.

🤝 If you would like to explore how you step into your career confidence.

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Catch up on recent issues of The Nature of Leadership + Career

• What bold career moves are you avoiding?

• Leader As Gardener. 2 Steps To Help Employees Find Their Roots And Thrive

• "It's not me, it's you". Gaslighting - the corrosive organizational disease

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