How often do you find yourself facing a challenge and berating your abilities? If this happens repeatedly, have you considered that unlearning beating yourself up could make your life easier and improve your performance?
Many people believe that if I’m not hard on myself and feel guilt and shame
- I’ll become complacent.
- My work product will suffer.
- I’ll hurt someone inadvertently.
- I won’t learn.
Things that strike us emotionally stick in memory better, but when we are in a stress response, our ability to learn is diminished. We see our mistakes but not how to fix them. We can get caught in a fixed mindset because we fear taking risks.
If instead you increase your comfort with discomfort, we become more willing to hear the bad news, see the impact of our actions, and get curious about how to approach the problem differently in the future. We develop a growth mindset. Here’s one way to do this.
1. Break down the challenge into distinct skills and behaviors. What do you do well? Where do you have room for improvement?
2. What is the hierarchy of skills? Which are needed first so you can acquire the others?
3. What assumptions are you making that are blocking you?
4. Create safe to fail opportunities to develop your skills, test your assumptions, and learn.
For example, I had a client who started mentoring more junior people on his team, and he was # burning out from working crazy long hours. He needed to learn how to # delegate effectively and to stop taking on other people’s work. His assumption was that if he didn’t take control, it wouldn’t be done right, and he would fail. We identified low risk items he could delegate to the engineers and how to delegate them effectively. The real breakthrough came as we worked on ways to trust that he would be ok even if the work produced wasn’t how he would have done it. Within 6 weeks, he was leaving work 2.5 to 3 hours earlier a day, stopped taking on other’s work, the skill level and output of junior people had increased dramatically, and he was starting to get recognized further by leadership.
What situations make you uncomfortable? What would change for you if you were no longer uncomfortable?
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