13 | Q & A: Reclaiming confidence, feeling valued, and knowing when to leave

In this  week's episode, Erin addresses three important questions submitted by listeners: What do you do if you don't feel valued?  How do you know when it's time to leave your job?  And, how do you recover if you feel like you've lost your edge?  Erin takes a deep dive into each question, offering insightful perspectives and practical strategies to help listeners navigate these common roadblocks.

We're also eager to hear from you, so don't hesitate to reach out with your queries or topics you'd like us to cover.  Email us at NewRoleNowWhat@gmail.com

Other related links:
Podcast website with transcripts  ErinMFoley.buzzsprout.com
Find information on working with Erin at ErinMFoley.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Job Value and Knowing When to Leave
• 9:56 Exploring Confidence, Value, and Career Decisions
• 17:28 Regaining Confidence and Overcoming Insecurities
• 26:51 Q&A Episode and Coaching Offer

Transcript

Erin Foley: 0:00

We have our very first Q&A episode, so stay tuned to hear me answer two great questions submitted by listeners. Hi friends, welcome back. I hope you all are having an incredible week so far. I am very excited to be diving in. Today I am doing my first Q&A episode. I put out a call to you all asking you to write in and let me know where you were stuck, what you were wanting me to talk about on the podcast, what questions you had. I got some great questions and I have grabbed two of them for today that I feel will be really relevant to my listeners and that will help so so many of you. So today I'm going to be addressing the issue of feeling valued in your work, when to leave a job and finding your edge after maybe you've been away or leveling up, or maybe you're just trying to find your edge as you're adjusting to this new challenge, this new opportunity. I would love to do another Q&A before the end of this season. So if you have questions, if you have topics, please email me at newrollnowwhatatgmailcom or through my contact page on AaronMFullycom. You can always drop me a message there and let me know what you would love to hear on the podcast.

Erin Foley: 1:19

So let's dive in. Listener 1 asked me the following question How do you know when it's time to move on from a job? I don't feel valued. I don't see growth opportunity in this job, but I like the flexibility. So I want to start with Listener 1 by I love that I'm calling them Listener 1. It sounds like I used to listen to like Delilah love songs. I feel like I'm like hello listener. You're on the air. Anyway, let's dive in with Listener 1 and I want to start with the part you mentioned about not feeling valued. So this is where my coach flag, my coach tentacles, pop up and I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa.

Erin Foley: 2:02

Before I start digging in on how you can figure out if it's time to move on, we need to address this feeling that you don't currently feel valued in the role that you're in. Often, when we don't feel valued, it is a sign that you are struggling to see your own value and you're wanting other people to fill in that lack by showing you that you're valuable. So 90% of the time when I'm working with clients and they're really struggling with this piece of like, i'm not being valued. I'm not being valued. When I really dig in, i discover that they are questioning their value in some way, and what you're seeking outside of yourself is someone in this job to make me feel valuable, and what that looks like is different for everyone. So for some of you, it means you need them to tell you that you're valued. For some of you, it means thanking you more often for the work. For some of you, it means they're not asking me what my opinion is or asking me to contribute or asking me to speak up more.

Erin Foley: 3:06

So it's really pretty subjective. It's kind of like love languages. What we need to feel valued is just dependent on our own personal needs and our own personal preferences for what makes us feel valued, and it can be very, very different from person to person. So the thing I like to do for my clients is take away the need for anyone externally to make you feel valued and to allow that to be internal. So what you're going to hear me talking about today is that confidence and feeling valued are internal states, meaning we don't have to have someone from the outside creating this for us. We can create this internally, and when you create it internally, you are never at the mercy of needing someone else to create it for you And you're able to make cleaner decisions in terms of when you stay, when you leave, which jobs you take.

Erin Foley: 4:02

It's kind of like it allows you to show up to work a little bit less needy. It doesn't mean that you know. If you're in a workplace and people are like constantly telling you how valuable you are and what a contribution you're making and how much they appreciate you, that's great, like good. I'm happy. I wish every workplace did that for everyone all the time, but a lot of workplaces aren't going to do that. Sometimes people are going to be very busy, very focused on the goals in front of them, and sometimes you're just not going to get a lot of that from supervisors, coworkers, people around you, and what I want for you is the ability for you to stay in the jobs that you like, when you feel connected to the work, without you feeling needy in terms of what you're needing from the people around you in order for you to feel satisfied in your work. So I'm going to start with this. I don't feel value concept from listener one And we're going to try to clean this up before you answer the question of whether or not it's time for you to leave.

Erin Foley: 5:03

So I want you to start by looking at your current role and how your role makes an impact on the larger organizational goals. So I want you to look at why is your role necessary to the organization? and I want you to literally write that down. What does your role do, with or without you in it? Let's just like look at the role independent of you. Why is it necessary? What does it contribute? What outcomes does it produce? Why do they need it? And then I want you to answer the question how are your specific skills you personally listener one your specific skills and your strengths, how are they making an important contribution to this role, to the organization, to your department? and I want you to connect to those answers first.

Erin Foley: 5:55

Okay, we are not going to make it the boss or the company's job to make us feel valued. We are going to connect to our own value, and that is because you always then have the power to feel empowered, regardless of how busy, how competent, how good the people are around you at communicating that value. And one of the things I want you to be weary of is be careful of your own value evaluations. That sounds pretty confusing, but stick with me seeping into this and what I mean by that is if you yourself are having any feelings like I should be doing more, i should be further along in my career. It doesn't make sense that I'm in this role still. I should be doing more than this.

Erin Foley: 6:47

If you have any judgments of the job, the role that you're in, and that you're not measuring up somehow because you're in it, it will become very difficult for you to feel valued in that role because you yourself are potentially judging yourself and judging the role, and these are pieces that I always, always, always want to clean up when I'm coaching before someone leaves a job, and the reason is because I will see people take this with them all the time. So I will see people who are like I left the job because I didn't feel valued and then I got another job and I still don't feel valued, and they're sort of hopping around trying to create that feeling of being valued, trying to get it from the outside, and they can't seem to get that whole filled. If you are someone who has had any emotional history in could be in your childhood, could be in your adult life, where you have had some relationships where you really felt like you weren't valued, where you had some trauma, you will be even more likely to feel this sense of not being valued in the workspace. So it becomes even more important to clean that up so that it doesn't keep coming with you over and over and over again. So, listener one, i really want you to look at your role and why it's necessary. Look at your specific skills and strengths, really connect to the important contribution that your skills and strengths make in this role, and I want you to start from the assumption that if the role exists and you're being paid, then you are being valued. I'm going to say that again If the role exists, the company has chosen to keep this role. You're being paid to be in the role. You are being valued.

Erin Foley: 8:37

One of the things that I find that's really helpful for people is to look at your value as pay exchange. So it's like if someone comes and paints my house, they're going to give me their time, their skills, they're going to give me an outcome that I want and I'm going to hand them a paycheck. Hopefully I'm the kind of person that says thank you so much. I really appreciate your time, but let's say that I'm not. Let's say that I'm really busy and they finish the job and I have an envelope and I leave them their money and I pay them the amount that's agreed upon. The assumption is I've valued their work, which is why I paid them. So if you can really connect to the idea that companies don't keep the job if they don't see the job as valuable and they're not going to pay you if they don't see you as valuable, and that the actual agreement that you signed up for is I'll give you my time, my skills and the outcomes that you're asking for, you give me this paycheck and you let that be the evidence that you are valued. This will clean it up for you and allow you to then look at this job without feeling all of the emotional pieces of oh, they don't value me, they don't value my work.

Erin Foley: 9:56

My hunch is there may be some part of you that's not valuing the work or valuing the contribution that's seeping in and making it more evident to you that you're not getting enough thank yous or whatever it is from the company in terms of valuing this. So I'm going to reiterate again confidence and value are within your control, their internal states. We think they come from others, but they actually come from us and it's easier to believe we are valued when everyone around us is saying it, but you can actually believe it when no one is saying it. So this podcast right now, i'm offering you information. There is no reciprocity on this. I can't talk to you in this moment. People may or may not respond to this episode, but I believe that what I am offering here is valuable, even if no one says that after I put this episode out into the world, even though I'm sitting here in a room by myself offering you this information and I'm not getting any reciprocity, that it's great, that it's valuable, that it's really helpful, because it's an internal state, i can believe that what I'm offering is valuable, whether or not you tell me that, okay.

Erin Foley: 11:16

So here's the question I want to offer you to my listener. If you felt confident and valued, if you woke up tomorrow and all the people around you told you exactly what it is you want to hear, if your supervisor told you what you wanted to hear, if your coworkers told you what you wanted to hear, you felt 100% confident in where you are in your career and the contributions that you're making. If all of that happened tomorrow, would you still want to seek a different job? I want you to answer that question for yourself and really sit like slow down your brain and sit with that answer. If your answer is, i would want to stay in this job. If I woke up tomorrow and my supervisor behaved the way I wanted him or her to behave and people gave me the appreciation that I feel like I'm not getting and people told me I was contributing. Well, if your answer is yeah, i'd want to stay then your work is to really focus on connecting to your value and your own confidence so that you're not dependent on people externally to provide that for you, and that is going to help you feel so much better in this role. And I do find that for some people, when they really lean into their value and lean into their confidence and lean into their strengths, sometimes it actually creates new opportunities for them in their places of employment, because you start showing up really as your highest potential and sometimes we get opportunities or offers because of that.

Erin Foley: 12:46

If your answer is no if your answer is, i would still despite my supervisor telling me how much they appreciate me, despite everyone around me telling me how much they value my work, i would still wake up tomorrow and feel like I am ready for a different opportunity. I think I want to leave this role And I think it's time for you to explore other options. Okay, sometimes we want to leave a job because we really just want to utilize different skills and strengths, and that's a perfectly fine reason to leave your job. We feel like what we're offering is not what we want to be offering. The skills that we want to be utilizing on a daily basis are not the skills that we're currently being asked to utilize. We're ready for a new challenge. We're ready to utilize different parts, or to grow, or whatever that is.

Erin Foley: 13:39

I want to make sure that this is clear. I'm not saying you're doing this listener listener one, but a lot of you might be which is, you don't have to dislike the people or the environment in order to leave. What you have to be careful of is, sometimes the brain wants an out, and so it will start fixating on. The people aren't good enough. People don't value me. This place is too toxic. I don't like this environment. It's really just wanting an excuse to get out because it really just wants to spend your eight hour day utilizing a different skill doing something else. What can happen is that you can create a lot of I call it dirty thinking or muck on your way out where you feel resentful and you start showing up in a self-sabotaging way, and then you can bring that into your next job. It's always best if you can leave feeling really clean and calm that maybe the preferences for how they work or how they function don't align with yours, which is fine. Maybe you're wanting to spend your day focusing on something else. Maybe you feel like it's time for a new challenge and you're not seeing opportunities in this current company to take on those new challenges. Once you clean up this piece of the value and the confidence and you make sure that you feel confident and you know how to create that feeling of being valued for yourself, then you're able to get to a really clean and clear answer for yourself. For listener one, i just want you to know that if you feel like coming into work and knowing that you are confident and everyone around you is valuing your contributions and you still feel like you would like a new opportunity and something different than I think you are on track in terms of starting to explore that. If not, then I think your work is in feeling valued and working on your confidence.

Erin Foley: 15:39

Okay, listener two wrote in and said I want to get back on a trajectory to the next level, but I lost the edge I used to have. She had put in her question that she was away from working outside of the home because she was working within the home raising kids. I'm having imposter syndrome. I am petite, so I have to work harder on my executive presence. How do I gain my confidence and clean up some of the feelings from past negative situations? Okay, listener two, i want to pull apart a few things that you said in your question and help you get out of this imposter syndrome mindset and help you move forward.

Erin Foley: 16:16

The first thing that I want to talk about is this thought that I've lost the edge, that you're feeling like you used to have an edge and that you've lost it. This is so interesting because this sentence is such a sneaky sentence that sounds somewhat harmless, because what your brain's doing is it's offering you a perspective that it believes is objective and your brain thinks that by offering you this objective perspective, you're going to be aware and you're going to work really hard and you're going to know how to overcome whatever you need to overcome. But what's actually happening is your brain is offering you an opinion on yourself, not a fact. I'm going to say that again. Your brain's offering you an opinion that you think is a fact and it is not a fact. This opinion is working against you. So let's explore this sneaky little sentence that I've lost my edge.

Erin Foley: 17:28

I'm going to guess that this thought or this belief that I've lost my edge, it's showing up, dressed up in all different kinds of ways. So when you wrote the question in, you might have said I lost my edge. And on another day you might say these people are ahead of me. And on another day your brain might offer you I've just been out of the game for a while. It's probably dressing this up in lots of different ways and telling you the same overall message in several different types of sentences and beliefs, but I just want to be able to work with this one right now, because this is the one that you wrote in and said when you're thinking I've lost my edge, you're going to feel likely panicked, probably some level of anxiety, and there's a sense of inferiority in that sentence that, if you believe you've lost your edge, there's this assumption that other people have an edge that you don't have. So that makes you inferior to them. And when you feel panicked, anxious, inferior, you're going to show up to work, to meetings, nervous, not speaking up, second guessing yourself a lot, overthinking what you're saying, and the outcome of this is going to be you showing up with less edge. Okay, that, the actual thought I have less edge is going to lead you to showing up with less edge because you're operating from the space of anxiety and panic and inferiority.

Erin Foley: 18:59

So the first thing I want to do is challenge this little sneaky opinion that your brain has given you that you've lost your edge. Your edge is not lost. All that's happened is your confidence has gone down because you have a little less practice. That's it, okay. Your brain has less evidence of your competency and your capabilities in this setting simply because you've had less practice. Okay, and I would argue that, as you have dove back in because of this feeling that you've lost your edge, you're practicing even less, like it's probably holding you back some from showing up fully, which means that you're not able to actually be practicing your competency, your capabilities, your communication, your speaking up. You're contributing all of it. Your edge is in your experience, your approach, your competencies, your capabilities, your ability to learn, and it cannot be taken from you. It is yours.

Erin Foley: 20:04

So I want you to start playing with this assumption that your edge can never be lost. Okay, it's yours to keep. You have it forever. You may be a little out of practice in this setting applying it, but it is there, and part of what I want you to do is I want you to list out your edge, all the ways you have edge right now, today, based on your experience when you were in your professional work, your experience parenting and managing your household, your experience now back in the workplace, all of the perspectives that that trajectory has offered you, all of the competencies that you have, all of the capabilities that you have. I need your brain to see in black and white the edge that you have and I need you to write it out as thoroughly as possible so you can start connecting back to that.

Erin Foley: 21:02

The second thing that you said, which I would argue is like another version of this, dressed up differently. You said in your question that I'm petite so I have to work harder on executive presence, and I would say this is another sneaky belief that alerts me, as a coach, that a lot of your insecurities are kind of running the show right now and that the imposter mindset is taking over, and I know that there is some research on things like how deep is your voice or how fast do you speak or how tall are you in terms of persuading people, presence, all of those things. I know that that's out there. From a coaching perspective, focusing on this and connecting to this I'm petite, so I have to work on my executive presence is only going to create anxiety for you. It is not offering you motivation as much as it's going to offer you a feeling of needing to overcompensate and a ton of pressure.

Erin Foley: 22:01

The thing about executive presence is that that I know to be true, based on my own experience and all of the clients that I work with, is that your executive presence is based on your mindset. Any executive presence that comes from your height, your voice, your look, your appearance, is going to happen in the first 30 seconds of someone seeing you and it's going to be erased by what value you offer in the following 10 minutes. Okay, so I don't want you outsourcing your executive presence to your height. It is your mindset. I am petite. I have been petite my whole life. This just doesn't happen to be a belief that I've had. Certainly I've had my own imposter mindset beliefs I've had to overcome. I've had my own insecurities that I've had to overcome For whatever reason. This is not one for me.

Erin Foley: 22:52

I have always had a strong presence. I have always believed that I have strong communication skills. I have always believed in the crux of where I offer the most value, that the value is undeniable. So for me, there is no thought about my size, my appearance, in terms of whether people will find me credible or think my executive presence is strong, because any size or appearance bias is quickly erased by my confidence and the value that I offer. It's undeniable, right? So for you, the thing that your brain is doing is it's kind of taking circumstances that you feel like you have little control over and it's focusing on that, like I've been out of the game for a while. I can't control that, and so now I'm going to have a ton of anxiety that that's the reason why all of this feels bad, and then it's telling you I'm petite and I can't control that, so I'm going to have all this anxiety that I have to overcome that. So it's just offering you these perspectives that are focusing on the things that are outside of your control, and what is in control for you is the value that you're able to offer, and your executive presence will follow from a strong mindset.

Erin Foley: 24:13

Always, always, right, you can do all the tips and tricks you want to try to increase your executive presence, but for my clients, when I get them connected to their competencies, their capabilities, their contributions, and I have them showing up in service of the outcome of whatever it is they're working on, their executive presence cleans itself up immediately. Right, because you just show up with confidence, you show up contributing and everyone in the room can feel that. So, for you, you do not need to work on executive presence. You need to work on connecting to your value and your contributions. Your height is not an issue. Okay, your height will be squelched by I don't know if that's the right word, i think it is by the value that you offer, 30 seconds after you offer it, okay. So I want you to shift out of thinking about your height. I want you to shift out of thinking about how long you've been in or not in the game. Instead, we're going to connect you back to your edge right now, based on your skills, your insights, your knowledge and your contributions.

Erin Foley: 25:19

I want you to write down. I control my impact based on the value I bring. I control my impact based on the value that I bring, and your job is to get up to bat. So the thing we want you doing most is we want you practicing. So, as you work on really listing out all of your contributions, all of the value that you bring, all of your skills, then I want you getting up to bat. I want you focusing on offering value and service of whatever it is that your role focuses on the product, the client, whatever you're contributing in a meeting, your job is to practice. It is to practice offering your insights to practice, offering your value. Practice, practice, practice. That's all we need you doing is getting up to bat from a space that is connected to your contributions and from a space that is focusing on the out what is best for the outcome that's in front of you.

Erin Foley: 26:16

The second part of your question you asked about how to clean up stuff from previous jobs. That is something that I get often from my clients. It's a little bit more complicated because it depends on what it is that you experienced in those previous jobs and what that might have left you feeling. So feel free to write back in if you want to focus in on that specifically. My hunch is that as you clean up some of what I've offered you today in this coaching, you're going to be feeling so much stronger that those issues that you had in previous jobs may not be showing up so much for you.

Erin Foley: 26:51

Okay y'all, so that is today's first Q&A episode. So fun diving in and answering y'all's questions. Thank you so much for the two listeners who wrote in. Gave us great questions that will be helpful, i know, for so many of you who are listening. I am here for you all. If you are struggling with feeling value, connecting to your edge, showing up in your full potential, being focused and confident at work, hop on over Aaron M as in mindset fully dot com and grab a consultation session. I will be back with more coaching for you. In the meantime, i hope y'all have a great week.