How looking back builds future confidence

Acknowledging your accomplishments — and even the rough patches you’ve survived — isn’t selfish. It’s a practice that will build the self-trust you need to reach your future goals — while staying aligned with your values.

I was talking to a manager recently who really struggled over the last year. It wasn’t just the pandemic: plans for growing their team had hit roadblocks, and they felt drained from months of difficult employee situations. “This next year I need to really get back on track,” they told me.

That’s when I stopped them. “You survived a lot last year. What can you acknowledge about yourself and how you showed up through all those challenges?”

“Acknowledge myself? I don’t do that,” they said (well, something like that — I’m going off memory here). It felt self-centered — and a little fake — to pat themselves on the back. After all, when they looked back, they didn’t see many high points. They saw heartache and unfinished plans.

“I’m not asking you to do this to inflate your ego,” I told them. “You’ve got big goals. You’re going to need to trust yourself as you face all kinds of new challenges. That’s really hard to do if you can’t acknowledge who you are and what you’ve already overcome.”

“Ooooh,” they said, their eyes widening as something clicked in their brain. “You should write about that.”

So here we are.

Self-acknowledgment can be challenging — but it’s necessary.

If you’ve been taught to be humble — to not make too much of a deal out of your accomplishments, to always focus on what’s next — the idea of acknowledging yourself can feel uncomfortable. But what I have learned is that it’s not selfish or petty. It’s actually crucial.

Don’t just take my word for it. There’s a concept in psychology called self-affirmation theory, first put forward by a researcher named Claude Steele in the 1980s. What he found was that we all have a sense of self-integrity, a sense of who we are. When things don’t go our way — like when we get negative feedback — it threatens our sense of self, which creates cognitive dissonance.

This causes stress, and brains try to avoid stress. Often, the brain does this by acting defensively — shutting the new information out entirely. Unfortunately, this prevents growth and learning. The second thing brains do is called accommodating. That’s where we take in the negative information, and simply believe it — telling ourselves that we’re a failure, that we don’t deserve things, that we should give up. This is where the inner critic has a heyday. (More on both of these concepts in this paper.)

So self-affirmation theory outlines a third way to restore our sense of self when we feel threatened. And it’s not about having a cheesy mantra you say in the mirror. Instead, Steele’s research shows that when we call upon concrete examples of our values and strengths from the past, whatever’s threatening our sense of self in the moment feels less powerful. We don’t have to immediately reject it or believe it to get our sense of self back.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to grow your team’s headcount. You make a brilliant case for it…and you’re turned down. That’s a psychological threat. When you’re accommodating that information, you might tell yourself that it’s all your fault and you suck at your job. Because once you do that, you can restore self-integrity: you got turned down because you’re a crap manager. Or, perhaps your brain goes on defense. You start assuming everyone’s out to get you. You push all the blame away. And again, your self-integrity is restored: you’re brilliant, and they’re the problem.

We don’t have to choose between a self-doubt spiral and an irresponsible tantrum.

Instead, this is the perfect time to rely on self-affirmation — to pause and remind ourselves of what we know to be true about us — even if it’s totally unrelated to the issue at hand. For example, perhaps you remind yourself of times when you’ve been a great collaborator, or times when you’ve learned from past setbacks. When you do that, you can restore a sense of self — you’re a collaborative leader committed to personal growth. From that place, you can now look at the situation with more distance, and choose what you want to take away from it.

That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge past-you — so that future-you has something to call upon during hard times. Because without those concrete examples, self affirmations tend to fall flat — like an inspirational Instagram post that’s cute but shallow.

So back to this manager: they paused and looked back at their year, and saw that they’d repeatedly faced challenges with integrity and humanity. They’d held themselves accountable to missteps, and learned from them. And they’d continued to act in alignment with their values of equity and compassion, even when it would have been easier to shut down or get petty. These are real strengths — strengths they’ll need for whatever’s ahead. And by allowing themselves to acknowledge and own those strengths, they now have them at the ready.

So what are your values, and when have you shown up in alignment with them? What can you acknowledge about how you’ve faced past challenges? Take some time to think about it — your future self will thank you.

This post originally appeared in the September 1, 2021, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.