The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 5 minutes

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

  - doubt in the right direction

• The Double edge sword of self-doubt

  - 5 coping pitfalls of self-doubt

  - How self doubt can be helpful

  - Managing your self-doubt

Illustration of the week

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The Double-Edge Sword of Self-doubt

Self-doubt is brutal during career transitions whether it’s

• Not getting invited to interviews and receiving a blanket response from a recruiter;

• Not getting the job after many successful interview rounds;

• Your fear of not being “not having what it takes” for another company;

• The insecurity that you aren’t talented enough after being made redundant;

• Worrying that people will find out you are a fraud after your recent promotion;

we start to doubt whether we are “enough”. Our self-doubt often spirals. This drains our mental and emotional capacity hindering us from fully showing up and performing.

So self-doubt is bad for career performance and outcomes….. right?

Well not exactly.

The maladaptive psychology of self doubt

The first edge of the sword

Here are 5 ‘coping pitfalls’ driven by self-doubt based on research by Bralow, Guerretaz, Arkin and Oleson:

1️⃣ Self-handicapping – is the most used approach to coping technique. When experiencing self-doubt, we can sabotage ourselves by engaging in behaviors or creating obstacles that obscure the reasons for potential failure. This makes it easier to attribute failure to external factors rather than our own perceived incompetence. Ironically the researchers point out that this approach perpetuates feelings of self-doubt and often prevents us from truly testing our abilities.

Career example: You are nervous about an important work presentation, so you go out for drinks the night before. If the presentation flops at least you can blame it on the alcohol and say you had a big night out.

2️⃣ Overachievement - the fear of failure or trying to cover our perceived lack of competence by putting in extra effort to ensure success. Ironically this strategy also perpetuates self-doubt as we may attribute our success to our extraordinary effort rather than our inherent abilities. This can also lead to exhaustion and burnout.

Career example: You are worried that you are not as smart as your peers and are “falling behind” so you work longer hours to get every detail right. You receive praise from your peers and your boss and attribute it to the extra effort rather than your skills.

3️⃣ Impostor Syndrome - is characterized by the persistent belief that our successful outcomes are not a true reflection of our abilities. When we feel like an impostor, we often attribute our success to luck or external factors and fear that others will discover our perceived inadequacies. This phenomenon is closely related to self-doubt and often coexists with self-handicapping.

Career example: You worked long and hard on a presentation where you collaborated with multiple Subject Matter Experts and peers to strengthen the diversity of thinking. The presentation was successful mainly due to your unique creativity presentation style, and structure. However, you attribute the success solely to the “thought leadership” of others and doubt whether you “added value.”

4️⃣ Other enhancement - is a coping strategy where we attribute our failures to external factors or advantages enjoyed by our competitors, even when we perform at our best. This coping mechanism allows us to maintain our self-competence judgments while avoiding the anxiety of attributing the outcome to our own abilities.

Career example: You go for a job interview for a highly competitive role and you don’t get the role. You tell yourself it is because other candidates had a better interview time and they are the boss' favorite (which may be true). But you also fail to admit that you didn’t prepare enough or don’t yet have some of the core skills.

⚠️ NOTE: Tread with caution on this one, especially if you identify as a minority group in your industry. There is a fine line between “other enhancement” and the existing biases and injustices in organizational systems and power structures.

5️⃣ Stereotype threat - refers to the anxiety we experience when we fear confirming negative stereotypes about our social group. This anxiety can lead to self-doubt about our abilities, particularly in situations where their performance is seen as diagnostic of our group's competence. When we face stereotype threat we may adopt strategies like disengagement or dis-identification to protect our self-esteem.

Career example: As a woman in tech, you see and read about more and more female executives resigning, or mysteriously exiting tech companies. You also hear male colleagues and leaders saying it was because they couldn’t handle the pressure or it was hard with women to balance a family and executive positions. You start disengaging by playing smaller when it comes to promotions, transitioning to a more senior role in a new company, or considering leaving the industry.

The potential adaptive psychology of self doubt

The second edge of the sword

Whilst self-doubt can be a vicious cycle, there is also a line of research into times when self-doubt is adaptive and useful.

This study showed that a reduction in self-confidence (i.e., an element of self-doubt) leads to an increase in both effort and performance.  The increase in performance may be due to an element of self-doubt signaling that an increase in effort is required, which can lead to an improvement in performance.

⚠️ NOTE: We don’t want to increase our effort to the point we over-extend ourselves into #4 pitfall overachievement as outlined above.

A nicer way to look at the positive side of self-doubt is from today’s illustration, inspired by renowned meditation and mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzburg, who suggests that “skillful doubt” helps us gain clarity.

Managing your self-doubt

The key is to know when your self-doubt is:

a) adaptive and enabling you to gain clarity and put the right amount of effort in and;

b) when it is maladaptive, pushing you past your boundaries.

3 key ways to do this are through a blend of:

1. Mindfulness When you are silent and observe your thoughts, emotions, and sensations that come up during your doubt loops you can better identify if the doubt is skillful or corrosive.

   This is a great podcast by Sharon Salzberg on dealing with doubt.

2. Soundboarding your thoughts and emotions with a friend, leader, mentor, or coach whom you TRUST and who knows when to give you time and space to come to your own conclusions and when to give you a pep talk and motivation.

3. Embedding practices that help you internalize your self worth.

🤝 If you would like to explore how you can better manage your self-doubt

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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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