Do you believe you’re great at what you’re doing?
I often don’t.
“Why am I so bad at what I’m doing?”
I don’t know about you but I’ve asked this question probably a thousands times in my life. While this particular thought is generally task-specific and usually goes away when I’m done with that, I started to look deeper into it couple of days back and started analyzing different situations since my early school days. I actually have done this almost every step of my academic and professional journey, but got accustomed to it in such a way that I never really thought about it holistically.
Fortunately after hours of looking into my ceiling and thinking about how I’ve managed to overcome those sticky situations, I have a much better understanding of what makes you feel this way and how to handle that upfront. Sharing this in case it helps anyone who feels the same way and has been looking out for some answers.
The problem
To illustrate the problem more clearly- It starts with a feeling that you were doing perfectly fine in your immediate prior task/role/institution but not doing that great in current one. Cases in point-
- I was a constant topper up to class 6 — but after a change of my school, I suddenly found myself among the bottom 25 percentile
- Was consistently among the top performers in my first four years of career in technology division of Robi. But, then when I moved to digital services division of Grameenphone, immediately all those inferiority issues started crawling in
- Or in case of skill, I was pretty happy with my formal writing skill from previous experiences but only after joining Pathao, got to learn about The Pyramid Principle and found out how I’ve been doing it absolutely wrong my whole life
- And many more… but you get the idea
Now, interestingly, in all of these and other cases, I eventually figured out the way and moved on — passed out school with a decent grade, got recognized as a top performer in the new environment and, yes, corrected the way I write emails. But that’s not the point of this discussion, it’s about the time it took and super sad period meanwhile where you start to question yourself.
What worked for me
Coming down to what actually causes this problem and makes us feel that way: I think these are the three core areas we need to focus and take specific actions to address those.
The (wrong) perception of goodness – I know pretty much every textbook asks you to be adaptive to changes but frankly it’s not that easy. While I’m immensely grateful for being able to study/work in increasingly greater organizations throughout my life, it has dramatically challenged my perception of quality (goodness > greatness). Be it the quality of classmates in my new school or super smart colleagues in a new team or product design/presentations in the new organization, it has always fundamentally questioned the existing bar of goodness and kept raising it. I believe the unlearning and relearning process we always talk about take a good amount of time in each of its steps.
Taking direct feedback personally – I won’t lie, there’s been a lot of times when I just couldn’t handle negative feedback. It’s partly because like many of us, I do generally give 100% (what I believed, at that point of time) in things I care about and when someone directly criticizes that effort – it crushes you, it makes you feel helpless and your defense mechanism kicks in. But going back to earlier point, almost always we don’t know the scale of our own capability and end up selling ourselves short. The sooner we realize and start working on the actual feedback, the lesser amount of time we will spend in figuring out why things are not working out as expected.
Preconceived notion on learning – This is the most important area to focus on, in my opinion. It might sound awfully obvious, but we actually don’t even try to learn a good number of skills purely considering those are really hard and probably “not-for-us”. I used to thought TED speakers are amazing storyteller by born only to find out it’s nothing but sheer practice of months after months. I’ve seen product managers quit learning SQL before even trying it out saying it’s too code-like. These ideas often keep us from actively seeking out learning materials when we are stuck with something and genuinely try to develop ourselves.
The obvious solution of these problems often seem pretty straightforward — changing one’s mindset to accept new standards and adapt, be more receptive towards feedback and more focused on learning new things. While all of these are correct advice that I often come across, they can be a bit of vague. Here are some specific actions you might try that worked out for me to handle these situations so far and I plan to follow it precisely going forward.
- Don’t sweat it if you suddenly find yourself surrounded by a team of rock-stars, it’s obviously a good thing. Don’t feel uncomfortable saying what you feel — no matter how stupid it might sound, stay original. Past experiences and learning are always helpful but at the end of the day every single organization is different and it needs to be treated that way. In such situations, I would highly recommend to think about the strategy/objective of current organization first before pouring down existing thought process. Consciously observe and make list of things which are significantly better in the new organization. In next step you would take all the good things from both and create your own playbook.
- In case of feedback, I’ve come up a pretty simple formula to follow. When it is a personal feedback of any kind (work/culture/leadership/behavioral) from anyone in the organization, accept the feedback instantly without any question. Isolating yourself from your role is extremely important here, meaning it is not about you as a person rather it’s a feedback for the role. Anyone in the organization occupying this role would get the same feedback at this level of performance. Considering this and deeply thinking about the feedback at a later time will most likely show you the way what needs to be done. And even after that, if you actually think the feedback was inappropriate, please have an open discussion with the colleague directly. But the core message remains same: accept the feedback without any question the first time and truly think about it.
- The one and only action point for learning/development is to actively look out for your development areas and great contents. That applies to soft/hard skills apart from your core functional areas as well. There are brilliant courses/materials out there for practically any subject right now. All you have to do is to find them. I just completed an amazing course on designing presentation slides at Coursera. It was wonderful to learn really simple yet absolutely necessary techniques to create high-impact presentations. This is one area I thought requires sophisticated design skills but turned out to be quite opposite. So, find out what you need help with, search for materials with great review and finish strong.
So yeah, that’s about it. I found these techniques to be really useful to avoid falling into the trap of doubting yourself. But as always, it is not about knowing them rather practicing them everyday. Would love to hear about your ideas on this topic, please share!
And oh yes, this is my first Medium article. So, kudos to me!
