Managing Yourself: How to Calibrate Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses

Smart self-assessment plus clearly defined requests for feedback can prevent imposter syndrome—and being caught off-guard by hidden weaknesses.

Photo by athree23 via Pixabay.

After I had my first baby, I took three months off from work before returning. I knew the transition back would be hard, but I was not prepared for a “Winter is Coming” kind of difficult. A few weeks in, I found myself overwhelmed by every little thing. My mind felt like the aftermath of a fourth-grade volcano project, all thick and sticky and slow. When I was at home, I thought about work, and when I was at work, I thought about home. My inability to focus became a source of debilitating stress.

Convinced that I had suddenly transformed into a weepier and less capable person, I asked my manager Chris if I could get an executive coach. That’s how I was first introduced to Stacy McCarthy.

The first thing I blurted out to Stacy after we introduced ourselves was that I needed to fix everything. In increasingly high-pitched tones, I began listing off one tangled issue after another: areas that were desperately understaffed, people who wanted a change in their roles, a product strategy I didn’t agree with, and so on. I imagined her helping me unravel each problem until they were simple, soft balls of yarn ready to be reknit with purpose.

Instead, Stacy listened calmly until I was done. Then she said, “We’ll get to all that later, but first, why don’t we take a step back? Tell me about you.”

I could only blink. Talk about me? But how would that help any one of the seven fires that needed putting out?

But Stacy persisted. She asked me about my past and the road I’d taken to get here. We talked about the future — the way, way future — where she asked me to picture myself at eighty, sitting on a beach and looking back on my life. What did I want to remember? Then she asked me if I would be okay with her interviewing several people who I worked closely with.

I said yes. Two weeks later at our next meeting, she showed up with a twenty-page report all about me. There was nothing about the specific problems at hand. Instead, this…