New Role Now What?
Even the most successful professionals can feel the weight of adjusting to a new job. The new work culture, new performance expectations and new fears can lead to immense anxiety and overwhelm. The New Role Now What podcast was created by Erin Foley PhD to help you navigate the complexities of your new work transition. Drawing on her years of experience coaching professionals, Erin shares her insights and strategies on how to adjust to this new opportunity with confidence and success.
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
New Role Now What?
Bonus Episode: My Interview on how to stop overwhelm for good
This week's episode is an in-depth look at overwhelm in the workplace. Tune in to hear Erin interviewed by coach Natalie Fisher on her podcast, How to Land a Six-Figure Job and Thrive.
Learn the critical difference between genuine work challenges and mindset-driven feelings of inadequacy, and discover how mental noise and anxiety can warp your perception of competency. This episode provides practical examples and strategies to help you move out of overwhelm and excel with confidence.
We're eager to hear from. you. Reach out with your queries or topics at: NewRoleNowWhat@gmail.com.
Find information on working with Erin at:
ErinMFoley.com
Other related links:
Podcast website with transcripts
ErinMFoley.buzzsprout.com
Information on working with Natalie Fisher at:
nataliefisher.ca
Over the past 9 years, I’ve helped hundreds of professionals move out of overwhelm and self-doubt and into confidence. I’ve designed this upgraded 12-week 1:1 coaching program for people who are ready to get out of their overthinking and second guessing and back into enjoying their work. If you’re dealing with fear of failure, overthinking, or uncertainty about whether your role is the right fit visit ErinMFoley.com to enroll.
Hey everybody, I hope you're having a great week so far. I am dropping in to share with you an interview episode. I was interviewed by coach and podcaster Natalie Fisher. We had an in-depth conversation over on her podcast, which is called how to Get a Six-Figure Job you Love and Thrive. We dove in to explore overwhelm at work. We looked at the root causes, the most effective strategies to get you out of it. We shared experiences from our own lives, from our clients' lives. It is a great juicy episode. I encourage you to listen to check out Natalie. As always, I'll be back with more great info for you. I hope you enjoy. I'll be back with more great info for you. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone. I'm super excited to be here today with Erin Foley, who is a coach and a speaker, and I was inspired to bring her onto the podcast today because she's going to be sharing about a topic that a lot of people struggle with overwhelm. I'm sure all of us can relate to this topic, and I'm really excited to ask her a few questions about how she helps her clients deal with it and how she deals with it, and to help me deal with it too. Erin, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then I'll get into our juicy questions?
Speaker 1:for today, For sure, Hi, thank you so much for having me on. I'm Erin Foley. I have a PhD in organizational communication. I was a professor for a lot of years and I transitioned into coaching. So for the past nine or so years I've been coaching mostly people in a new job. Sometimes they've been promoted, sometimes they've like switched roles entirely. But I also do get clients who have been in their job for a couple of years but are experiencing a lot of the same struggles, which is, you know, struggling with imposter mindset, feeling overwhelmed, questioning their competence, self-doubt, perfectionism all of that. It tends to rear its head really, really intensely when people are new, which is why a lot of my work focuses on that. But some people carry it throughout their whole career and are in it even years into their job. So that is my work.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's exactly what a lot of people that I coach they get their job. They're basically exactly what you said word for word. It's like struggling with those things. I just had one question organizational communication. What is that? I'm like I haven't heard of that degree before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's within the communication department. I mean, I specifically was focusing on a lot of gender issues, a lot of communication in the workplace, work processes, what's effective, a lot of qualitative studying. Honestly, it was great at preparing me to be able to like read studies, understand science, what works, positive psychology, all of that. But I was just so bored with all the academic. I wanted to like have my hands on people and have my hands on making like tangible ways in which these things would shift. So my organizational communication, my coach training and I kind of brought them together and now use that to help me coach. I feel kind of removed from that PhD because it's been so long, but yeah, it definitely set me up to understand organizational life and organizational communication in a really clear way.
Speaker 2:Cool, yeah, that caught my attention. I was like, yeah, all right, let's dig in. So tell me about the main problems that you see people like struggling with as soon as they get into a new job. What might the main problems be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I see people who. Well, first of all, I want to be clear that sometimes the way the problem presents itself is different from what the problem is. So a lot of times my clients think they're having a problem with their competency, their ability to prioritize. Sometimes they think, oh, I just don't have the capacity for this new role, and so often they will find me while they're sort of Googling all of those things or they're just feeling this like huge sense of overwhelm. And what I talk about in my work is what's happening from a mindset perspective. So there's the actual work that you need to be doing and learning and adjusting to, and then there's the mindset overwhelm that can directly impact our relationship to this new work.
Speaker 1:So a lot of my clients have a ton of what I call mental noise and they've started this new job. Their brain is yelling at them all day and all night and it's telling them that they made it. First of all, it's usually telling them that they made a mistake and they should never left their previous job. You know, lots of times they kind of felt like they had a mastery over the job they were in and so they've started this new thing and now, all of a sudden they're like I've made a terrible mistake, I'm going to fail, I'm not going to learn all of this, I'm not going to be able to perform well, and it just translates into tons and tons of anxiety.
Speaker 1:And so what I really look at is helping people move through. First, I have to kind of show people that the mindset overwhelm is actually impacting their anxiety the most. That it's oftentimes not even the amount of work or the work itself. It's what your brain is making your relationship to that work mean. And so it's. It's tricky, but it's like they're so close to it that usually, as soon as I start to talk about it, they're like oh my God, that's me, that's what my brain's doing. It's on overdrive all the time.
Speaker 2:Do you have like an example that you could point to, maybe from a client or something like that, to kind of solidify what you're, what you mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah, like they'll come. Most of my clients will come in and just say I don't think I'm learning fast enough, I don't think I am going to be able to perform. I can't stop thinking about it. I will ask them what feedback they've gotten so far. Oftentimes they'll say they said I'm doing fine, but I can see that I'm really. I don't know enough to do this and I don't think I'm going to be able to succeed. I'm thinking about it all the time. I'm thinking about it after work. I'm not sleeping as well as I was before and I just like feel like I'm in this constant fight or flight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then that's where the anxiety comes from.
Speaker 1:Yes, 100%. And so they often think it's coming from a true lack of competency or experience, when it's actually coming from the mental noise itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, as I would say, the thoughts. So those sentences like I don't know enough, I'm not going to be able to do this, and those are just sentences that are not reality. It's just, especially because you said, the feedback they got is not even nobody else is saying that to them.
Speaker 1:They're thinking and so there is sort of a disconnect from that. And, yeah, it's interesting. It's like I like to think about it as like, like you said, sentences, like it's all of these opinions that your brain has in that moment that are very, very, very strong. And sometimes they're so strong that my clients will be like I can see why someone else might have imposter mindset, but I actually am right about this discrepancy, so the brain will fight really, really hard for it.
Speaker 2:For sure, and I think what you're talking about is the difference between a fact and something someone said, like their boss said, oh, you're not performing versus just their opinion I can't perform, I'm not going to be able to perform, like and those those things.
Speaker 1:People think that they're basically stating facts, when they're saying that yes, and our perception gets very, very, very skewed when we are in something new or in this anxiety state like our ability to be neutral or to be able to see it objectively decreases substantially. And so all of a sudden you're seeing all these things and it's like I describe it as a funhouse mirror. It's like you can't quite see anything clearly. Your ability to assess yourself, expectations, if you're really a good fit for the job, it all sort of decreases pretty quickly for the job. It all sort of decreases pretty quickly and you're walking around in sometimes a little bit of delusion. Sometimes there are actual things that knowledge gaps that I can talk about, that might be missing. But there's also this sense of being really just connected from your competencies and your capabilities in a way that creates like you've put on a pair of glasses where you're seeing everything around you a little bit off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, which leads me into like the segue of like why, why do you think people are disconnected from what's really going on? Why do you think this is what happens when we enter a new situation?
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a good question and a lot of people will ask me this and a lot of people are kind of fixated on like why do I have this? Like why am I always in this sort of mindset where I'm questioning my competency and capabilities despite the fact that I might be performing well? And there can be, for sure, there can be patterns in our past that sort of lay the groundwork for it. So there are certain types of family structures or pressures, sometimes trauma, that can create a way of relating to yourself and your knowledge and your competency and failure. And I do talk about that in my coaching and make some of those connections.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's nothing intense, like sometimes people just became like a high performer or got really good at something and sort of wrapped their identity into that and then became so connected to that that it became really hard to not feel competent because they felt so secure in that competency, which is kind of what my story was Once I found this sort of route for my academics and it kind of all clicked and I was like, oh, I'm really good at this and I got a lot of positive feedback for it.
Speaker 1:It's like my identity got really wrapped in that, and then that imposter mindset and that perfectionism and those expectations all started to really shift, and I would say that's when my relationship to performance and achievement and failure changed. So what I kind of boil it down to there's lots of sort of reasons why it exists from like a rational perspective, which is you're disconnecting from your skills, and what really happens when people enter something new is they often can't see the difference between their core competencies and all the new information that they're having to take in and learn from the company and the role, and so they lose total, they get totally disconnected from their core competencies and they're like spinning in this new space where they're learning all these new things and they're suddenly feeling like I don't actually know anything, and so they can't see that there's like reasonable gaps in their knowledge that are normal and expected, and so they start to mesh the two together and then they start to panic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some really important things you mentioned there about the student mentality versus real life mentality, where real life doesn't work like school.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:You can't get A pluses on everything all the time.
Speaker 2:And you're not supposed to and you have to try and learn and that's all normal and you know, any company who doesn't accept that isn't a good place to be anyway. Yeah, um, but yeah, and you kind of reminded me of like, when I made a jump from individual contributor to manager and I was, I had all those same feelings. I was like, well, I don't know how, like how to manage people. I don't know. I don't know how, like how to manage people. I don't know this, I don't know that. And then I went immediately to just reading a bunch of books. I'm like the first book called first time manager and then a lot of it kind of explained what you had said in the first chapter.
Speaker 1:So it's like, yeah, this is normal, you're not supposed to know all this yet, yeah, and that's super common for my clients where, if they have shifted into management or you know, they're managing like multiple teams. Sometimes I'll have like project managers or product managers who are managing multiple teams and those teams have very specific expertise and their job requires them to kind of move through lots of different things to keep the project moving forward or the product moving forward, and they will start to really confuse their core competencies with the competencies of the teams and then they kind of create this skewed expectation for themselves and they can get very lost in that.
Speaker 2:Or they think they have to be able to do everything that their team can do Totally and they're not supposed to yeah 100%. So unrealistic expectations is one of the biggest things that causes this anxiety.
Speaker 1:I'm seeing as a theme yes, yes, and so that's the second thing that I see the most, which is skewed expectations, and their expectations are very often inconsistent with the company's and much less forgiving than the company's expectations. Sometimes I get clients that are in like really, really intense companies with high expectations. That can happen also, but for the most part they're in a role where, like people are giving them some time and space to learn. They're expecting that there's going to be an adjustment period. But my client will be really in like a perfectionistic mentality.
Speaker 1:Some people think, and people often get skewed by perfectionism and they think like it's the person who's like super detailed and, you know, always gets an A on everything and it can be. But perfectionists are also people that are so afraid of failing that they will only work at things where they know they can achieve and perform well and they're like overly concerned with protecting themselves from other people's feedback. So there's like such an intense fear of getting negative feedback and they're always trying to control for that. So a lot of my clients I find that their expectations are coming from that underlying mindset issue and so they're trying to hold these expectations for themselves of like I need to perform really well.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's. I need to get an A immediately and then sometimes it's like I need to like make sure I don't fail, I don't get any negative feedback, I'm not perceived in a certain way and I need to have this really intense expectation so that I keep myself safe from all those external things that I think I can't deal with. Yeah, and I can see that being a blocker for moving ahead in a lot of ways zone and stay with things that I felt like I knew I could master or were already mastered. And then I'd see other people and I would be like I feel like I could do what they're doing, but I didn't want to sit in the discomfort of doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but like not immediately, right away, without any errors but I could definitely do it if I had a chance and a few tries. Exactly Like they're not more talented than me or they don't have some underlying thing that I don't think I could get, but they definitely seemed braver than I did and they seemed like they were able to have a sense of resilience to that process and that's part of what really pushed me to look more closely at my own positioning and the way in which I'd moved through my career in academics and then, as I was business building and doing all of that, I was sort of hitting up against the difficulty of trying to stay in this sort of perfectionistic, don't fail mindset, which was not effective and was not helping me move forward, which was not effective and was not helping me move forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so, moving on, how do people try to deal with this if they don't have support and they're left to their own devices and they're sitting in this problem?
Speaker 1:What do?
Speaker 2:people usually see people doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of the people I work with, I mean, by the time they've come to me, usually they're burning out a little bit. They're feeling like a burnout in two ways. One is, I see, burnout of just being new, like they're so overwhelmed and they're so exhausted already and they might be two weeks in or a month in or, you know, three months in and this is because they're taking too much time to work on extra hours to try to absorb all the knowledge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they're overworking and overthinking.
Speaker 1:They'll be like I'm spending so much time on every email, I'm trying to learn all of the things. A lot of times they'll be like they're also thinking about, and sometimes even doing, additional trainings, like I realize I need to get a training on this. I realize I need to get a training on this, I need to take a program on this, and so sometimes you know the amount of clients that say to me I'm going to join Toastmasters. Like everybody gets in and thinks like oh my God, my speaking and my presentation skills, they're not strong enough. I need to join Toastmasters right away. And I'm always like let's just hang on for a second before you start diving into more and more and more things. So there's this desire to learn it quickly and like close some competency gap that they're seeing.
Speaker 1:I see some of my clients who are like trying to positively affirm themselves into believing, and so they'll be like I know I can do it. I know I can do it, I'm smart enough. Like they're doing all the sort of bumper sticker slogans to try to feel good enough. You know they'll say to me like I've I've often felt like I'm not good enough, but I know I'm good enough and I've worked on this and their brain is struggling because there are reasonable gaps, there are things that need to be learned, there is a level of discomfort and you're almost trying to talk yourself out of it, and so the brain doesn't buy it and so it just comes back stronger. So they just will find themselves like looping through this, trying to do this positive affirmation, and then it not sticking, and then them going back into the anxiety. Yeah, the other thing I said bumper sticker slogans.
Speaker 2:That's exactly it. It's like when you say the bumper sticker slogan and then your brain says, believe it, believe it, yeah, right, like it doesn't work. It doesn't really believe it, yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't. It's so general, the intentions are fine, it's not like. You know, I'm always like. It's not like I think you're going to hurt yourself by saying I'm good enough. It's just often it's just too removed from what's happening and your brain's looking for something that's more grounded and that addresses what you're feeling in a way that actually is believable, has evidence and, you know, just feels more clear.
Speaker 2:Which is totally doable, which I'm sure you'll get to in one of the future questions, because we're building up to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very doable. The other thing I see a lot is like people swinging. Like some people will be in a lot of resentment when they come to me, like they're swinging between this company's not doing anything, they're not training me, they're not helping me, they're setting me up to fail. And then on the flip side they're just in a ton of negative self-talk, like I should know this, I should be more competent than this, I should be able to handle this. And they'll sort of swing back and forth between themselves and the company and just be in resentment, which frequently will leave people to leave the job. Or when they come to me, they're almost out. They'll say like I'm considering leaving, I've thought about leaving or I don't want to leave, but I can see that it's coming for me if I don't rein this in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen that happening too, and it's like that thinking day in and day out is what creates that ultimate result of ending up leaving the job, and then, when they go to another job, they're going to have to deal with much of the same challenges.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:So it's not the job, it is the mindset that they hold yes, which is good news, because then we can fix it, we can work around it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the mindset often can skew you from understanding the difference between a job that's not a good fit for you and a job that just needs you to stretch your mindset and your confidence. And there is a difference. But it's very cloudy when the mindset is spinning. You really can't see or even assess a fit of a job very well until you clean that up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you have any examples about that, like a job that might. I'm thinking like there could be somebody who makes like a huge jump, like and this probably wouldn't happen, but like, say, you go from like an individual contributor to a CEO or something. It's like, yeah, that would be a huge jump and that like you might not be ready for that, versus if you're going into a, a jump that just your brain just feels like it's really big, but really you do have everything you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all the time. So like I see people and even with the fit, like I have a couple of clients that are in sales and up but also I could see that there was a sense of exhaustion and boredom that was coming from a mismatch in skills the, the focusing on developing the team versus getting to close the sale, versus fighting for you know that, the, the money at the end or the incentive it was like his real deep motivation and strengths really was most aligned with selling, not sort of coaching people or managing people, and ultimately he decided to go back into a sales position. And then I had another client who was in a managing sales role, who had been a top sales performer, who was having a huge confidence crisis because of just the leap of suddenly managing this team. But he was just in a confidence crisis, like he for sure, it was a great fit, he had lots of skills that were going to, that felt good to him once he was confident enough to like relax into it. And so he has since not only been in that position but since we've been working together, he's been promoted to a step above that.
Speaker 1:So you know these things are. I think what's hard about careers is like it's messy, like sometimes it's the right fit, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it was a leap that was like big, too fast, which can happen. It's more rare from my experience, because usually the company itself can assess if it's too big of a leap for you. You have to trust to some extent that they are able to see what do you need and what do you have. But occasionally I will see someone who, like just turned up the water way too hot too fast and that is why they're not performing well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that happened to me, actually. I got promoted into a job and then I failed at it and then now, hindsight, looking back, I was like, oh, I didn't have the tools, I didn't have the knowledge there's no way I could have succeeded at that.
Speaker 1:Yes, which can definitely happen, especially if a company is a little bit removed from understanding what it even needs. And then it's not until the person's in the role that the company's figuring out what the role needs and you're figuring out what it needs. So it's like pulling all those pieces apart can be messy, and I think people sort of get overwhelmed and then they start meshing all the things together and they just can't see clearly what needs to be adjusted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think those are two perfect examples of people moving up in sales Like it might be right fit for one person and maybe not for the other, and that's totally individual to them and their personalities and what they want and how they see their future. And sometimes you got to take the leap to know that that's not what was a fit right, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Great example. Thanks, I'm glad I asked for that. So next, going forward. Why do you think it doesn't work to do it this other way? And ultimately, in one to three years down the road, if someone continues to be in this common thought process that they like the default? It sounds like this is default to a lot of people. So if you're listening and you're resonating with this, you're not alone. It's just like how our brains work.
Speaker 2:One to three years down the road, what state is that person's career going to be in? Or what's going to happen if they continue that thought process without kind of getting redirected in?
Speaker 1:the way that we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I see I definitely see a lot of burnout from it, which is will often be the people who maybe aren't new but are experiencing a lot of burnout, and they're experiencing burnout for the same reasons that the person who's in the new job is experiencing burnout.
Speaker 1:They just cannot sustain this pattern of trying to learn all the things, overperform, perfect all of the things.
Speaker 1:So I definitely see people kind of stuck in a burnout pattern and what gets tricky about it is that someone, when they're new, will come in and they have so much anxiety and such high expectations about how well they're supposed to do and how quickly they're supposed to learn it and they start saying yes to everything and they start pushing themselves in ways that aren't sustainable to show up with like great results and your company's never going to not love your great results.
Speaker 1:Like you can work 12, 15 hours a day and produce these things and people will for sure give you positive feedback for it and they're not going to sort of intervene usually and be like, hey, it feels like maybe you're going in too hard and that you're going to burn out or they're just going to be happy with the results that you're giving. So I always tell people like you create an expectation that you then cannot maintain, and so people start expecting that of you. They expect the yeses, they expect you to be stepping in all the time or doing the things that other people don't want to do, whatever it is. And then you have this intense fear of like if I don't keep myself at this pace, I'm not going to get that intense positive feedback, and then I'm going to feel like I'm failing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's kind of like sprinting, like you get in a new job and then you're like right, it's like a sprint is not sustainable.
Speaker 1:A sprint is not sustainable. That's such a good line. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And yeah, and yeah, a client of mine is coming to mind and we were in our call and she's like I got to get off. Right after I get off the call, I got to do this and this. I'm just like what time is it there? I'm like are you not stopping work today? What's going on? And she's like, yeah, I know I should, but I have to get this done. And so it's like she wasn't even noticing that that's where her mind was so focused. And it's like and it comes from a good intention Like you want to do a great job, you want to be like the best, but it's, in the end, it's not for the best, it's because, like you said, it's not sustainable?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not sustainable and you're sprinting and sprinting and then eventually, your body will give out. I also often tell people that it's like dating and you want to show up in a job. You of course, want to show up as your best self, but they've hired you right, not someone else, not someone with a different skillset. You are the skillset and you are dating. You're dating them. You're trying to assess is what this role needs what I bring to the table, or does it need something different? Is this the right setting for me to be thriving in? And when you get in, this like sprinting, overcompensating, trying to show up and pretend you know things that you don't know you are it's like dating, where you show up and you're like I love football and I love all the things that you love, and then, three months down the line, you're like I love football and I love all the things that you love, and then, three months down the line, you're like, I hate football, and I've pretended to be this person that I'm not, yeah, and then you're just tired.
Speaker 1:And then you're tired and you're realizing down the road that it's not a fit. So I like to try to help people sort of slow down, perform sustainably and connect to what they're bringing to the table and to get comfortable with what they don't know and to be honest about what the role needs and doesn't need and be honest with themselves that they're assessing this as much as they're being assessed.
Speaker 2:That's so good, and I love the dating analogy too, because I went through the whole journey of getting out of a bad relationship and getting into a new one and knowing that in the new one I wasn't going to show up as anything other than who I was. But you still want to be, you know, honest but respectful. And so then you know he'd be like I want to watch this show and I'd be like I really like you, but I don't like that show.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly. It's not my or like in the workplace, it's like I really love this job and what I'm doing, but that's not my strength. Something like that, right? Yes, it's so important because we do get into this pattern of like trying to compensate for who we are a lot instead of leaning into who we are. And I think when we're trying to compensate for who we are, we're in constant anxiety and discomfort.
Speaker 2:That's what causes it. Yeah, for sure. And it can be hard to like say those things out loud at first, but then you start just kind of being like okay, they're either going to accept me or you know I'm going to get what I. I'm either going to figure out that this is the right place for me or not. But it's for the best if I just say what's real for me. Yes, but it's hard.
Speaker 1:I get it. Yeah, it's very hard, it feels unsafe for some people, but it is so freeing. Which leads me to the pattern that I see often when people don't get space from this. They will sometimes job hop, so they'll leave the job, they'll go to another one and they hit the same blocks, or they will finally adjust to the job after a year or longer, and then they sort of will stay put like they'll stop risk taking, they'll stop taking on new challenges because they don't want to experience that level of anxiety or burnout again, and so it sort of makes them pull in and not keep moving forward with what they actually want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like staying safe.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:The price you pay. You, you stay safe, and then you don't. You don't move forward, but then you also? Don't have the discomfort. So it's like you choose the kind of discomfort you want to have exactly because if you're staying safe, you're not. You're like there's a part of you, like you said. Like I could do that, I could do more, right? Yeah?
Speaker 1:and sometimes it's fine to stay safe, and sometimes I'm like, yeah, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, but it's fine to stay safe. And sometimes I'm like, yeah, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. But it's also like when you are staying safe but you're longing for the thing on the other side. That's when you know that pushing your safety is probably what you're really wanting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's why coaching is so valuable, because it can help you talk through these things, so that you can be like I know what I want now and I know why. Otherwise, you just don't question yeah, all right. Moving on to the next question, so what are some alternative options, different ways, useful ways to think about this that will create a new pattern and cause more focused and effective behavior in the job? So now we're getting to the meaty stuff, where we're going to talk about some solutions and some things that you do and put into practice.
Speaker 2:if you've been resonating so far, so what you?
Speaker 1:got, yeah, so there's lots of different tools and different things that I use in my coaching. I think when I sort of zoom back and look at what ultimately all those different tools and different approaches are using, it's disrupting that mindset pattern in some way, and when I disrupt it, sometimes we're just sort of letting it go and sometimes it's shifting to see it in a totally different light. And the other thing that I often see that is so necessary is learning how to neutralize and depersonalize your work experience, which can be very tricky because it is a space where performance meets acceptance. It's like you're walking into a group of humans. You are a human. You're designed and built to want belonging and acceptance. Plus you're literally being evaluated on your performance. Plus that evaluation is attached to money, which is attached to food, water and shelter.
Speaker 1:So it gets dialed up very quickly in the brain and people lose the ability to neutralize or depersonalize, and so the brain can go into so much drama about things that are happening, where sometimes you're literally pulling in a past trauma or complicated relationship with a parent or a teacher from your past or I will see this all the time and it's being projected all over people at work, often onto, like bosses and other people. So it's learning how to really neutralize, learning how to fit in the discomfort of not knowing and having to learn the new thing, and learning how to like build your resilience around the failure and the mistakes, and just that feeling of I you know I'm not totally clear and comfortable and there's a level of uncertainty around what I've taken on. So that's sort of the big picture of what it is that I'm trying to do. I'm trying to not I'm trying to deal with the truth of where people are, so like I'm not there to be, like let's just push you to pretend like you know what you're doing Right, Like I'm here to look at what are you really feeling and what's really going on, what's behind that and how can we disrupt that and how can we get your brain to see things that it's not seeing.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I describe it with my clients as they're in like a corner of the room and they're really really close to that corner and they've lost perspective completely and I have to pull them out, like one session at a time, until they can see the whole room and suddenly things literally look different. So it's not like they're trying to talk their brain into seeing it different or they're trying to, like, convince themselves to feel different. So it's not like they're trying to talk their brain into seeing it different or they're trying to convince themselves to feel different. They actually can see it in a more neutral, depersonalized way. They see themselves in a different way. They see the way that they connect to their work in a different way. So the goal is always to disrupt it in a way that is grounded in real things and real experiences and get you to experience those differently.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's take an example, For example, like I thought, of this. So say, your boss says something to you like you hand in some work, and they say, oh, that's not what I expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could be like a trigger for a lot of people and that's something that could totally be neutralized and depersonalized but yes well most of the time be taken on like and all that, like trauma from other bosses or other teachers, will come in and and like, you'll all of a sudden start feeling not good enough, when the sentence wasn't meant to make you not feel good enough, it was just a sentence of like oh, that's not what I thought yeah, hand in right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I have actually two episodes on this in my podcast and that sort of walk you through, but I'll give you the cliff notes of it. When you're getting negative feedback, the first practice that I try to have people do is, before it even happens, I want to get you into an understanding of what skills you're willing to push on and like do you want to evolve your professional skills? Do you want to evolve the skills that you're bringing in? What are the skills that you don't know? Like getting your brain already primed to understand that it's normal to be getting feedback before anyone even gives it to you, because sometimes people will get the feedback and their expectation of getting negative feedback is that, like I should never get it, I should already know how to do all these things. So I like to try to set you up.
Speaker 1:Sometimes will change the way you experience it, sometimes it won't.
Speaker 1:It just depends on how far in you are.
Speaker 1:And then I always say, once you get the negative feedback, the first thing you need to do is not deal with it for 24 hours, if you can, because the first initial reaction will be like primitive, especially if you haven't gotten a lot of feedback, negative feedback in your career, and you don't have a lot of practice with that, it will just immediately go into a primitive response of like fear, of like feeling rejected, and it just becomes irrational.
Speaker 1:And so I mean, and sometimes in that phase, like if I'm in that 24 hour phase which that phase for me now is probably a couple hours like I can get out of it pretty fast now, but even in that first couple hours I let myself be in the primitive phase.
Speaker 1:I sometimes will find myself arguing it in detail and like in my brain I'm in like total defense mode and I sort of let that drain out of me because it's like it's just freaking out and I let it have like a full temper tantrum about it. Then I want to get you to a more neutral space about that feedback and this is when you want to start looking at like if I took all my drama out of my head about this workplace, if I took away these ideas that they should be training me better or that they're setting me up to fail, or I should have known that, if you quiet all that drama and you just look at that sentence, you can start to assess what's like a generous interpretation of the sentence that they gave you, so I can't remember what was the feedback you said.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's not what I expected. Like you hand in some work and they say that's not what I expected. Okay, that's not what I expected. Like you hand in some work and they say that's not what I expected.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's not what I expected. So your job then becomes like what's a very rational, generous interpretation of this. So part of how you can get to that quickly is to be like if your best friend gave you that feedback on the same assignment. What would you feel like she meant?
Speaker 2:And what happens. I would feel I would take it at face value. I guess I'd be like oh, what did you think? What did you think or what did you expect?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, totally. And the difference is, with your best friend, you have like a level of trust and you feel like they want you to succeed, and so you can just interpret it at face value without getting it all mucked up that puts it in such a perfect perspective, Because for me I would be like oh, I'm sorry, I guess we weren't on the same page.
Speaker 2:Can you elaborate and tell me? It would be so easy to have a response to that that wasn't defensive, it would just be like oh, what do you mean Exactly?
Speaker 1:And what happens when it's your new boss especially is your brain is attaching a level of distrust, a fear of judgment, all of those things. So when it gets that feedback, it's like it's in the middle of a pile of junk in your head, and so you will. Often it's almost like the, the thing we do when we're driving.
Speaker 1:We're like if autopilot yeah, no, I'm the idea of like if someone cuts us off when we're driving, we give like the worst interpretation of who they are and why they cut us off, whereas, like if we cut someone off, we're like you know, oops, like I made a mistake, it was a whoopsie. You know, I'm a responsible driver. We just have we tend like, for whatever reason, behind the wheel. I feel like we kind of all turn into these monsters who can't see people as like humans.
Speaker 2:That's like my partner. He's like the nicest person in the world. He gets behind the wheel and it's like, oh, what happened?
Speaker 1:to you and everything feels intentional, like everybody tends to think, like everyone's trying to intentionally drive rude.
Speaker 2:So everyone's a bad driver.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think we kind of do that with the managers. Like we tend to think when they're giving us that feedback, we give a lot of very sort of negative assessments of them and who they are and why they might be offering this feedback can drop into the best friend mode. It will sometimes give you the ability to at least see it more clearly and try to understand where they're coming from and try to understand what you want to take from that. But the other thing that I feel like so good you just have to remember to get there.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:Like you said, the primitive response is what comes first.
Speaker 1:And it's normal for it to come first and it can also be helpful, like this is literally what I do in coaching, because sometimes, sometimes I'm I'm in something that I just cannot get myself out of. Like I can't see out of the forest. I have to call my coach or someone else to like move me through it, because I'm in the corner and I I can't back up, and that's also normal, like there's nothing wrong with you, because that happens. It's just a very intense situation with stakes that your brain is seeing as high stakes and a lot of fear, and so it's like we have a strong grip on it when that's happening. The other thing that I encourage people to look at this can be harder, but this is, you know, the like sort of next level of it is what you're making the feedback mean about your career, the job and your competencies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and about you as like a person yes, yeah, and yeah, we could make it mean so many things Like someone could make that mean easily, like oh, you're not, you didn't try hard enough or you didn't do a good job of interpreting what I said. Or like just so many yeah, and that's what the brain is so good at doing is like giving you, like you said, the worst case scenario, and it would have a really long list of what that could mean Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you want to like. Part of what I want to help you do is pull back from that and be really careful of making it mean something extreme, that this feedback doesn't mean your boss doesn't think you're competent. It doesn't mean you can't succeed in this role. It doesn't mean you're not going to be successful in X right. It might just mean they expected one thing, you expected another and your expectations were mismatched.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe you didn't have a piece of information that you find out later it wasn't your fault and like, yeah, all these other things are open. So that's yeah, and that's so great. Where where we have coaching to kind of open up all these other possibilities. I have this one coach who would say to me what are, what is, 10 other things this could mean. And then it made me think I'm like okay.
Speaker 1:And your brain is, it will fight it. It will often fight wanting to come up with those other things, because the other fear part is so strong that it's like it wants to argue for something that's pretty specific.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cause it's easy to come up with 10 awful things that it means yes, very easy. All right. So was that we're still on the useful, more useful ways to create new patterns. Was there?
Speaker 1:anything. Yeah, I can give another example of that if you want.
Speaker 2:So the first one was neutralize and depersonalize, and we kind of gave some examples and then yes, I just wanted to check that there wasn't anything else from that. I think there might be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, the new, the neutralizing and depersonalizing is, you know, helping you. There's a lot of like shame that people come in with and I see, like I see shame sneak into this, where they literally feel shame around what they don't know. So they will. It gets. It can get messy and mucky because it can be connected to you know things in childhood or sometimes it's people had one bad job experience or their previous manager or a previous experience with feedback where it sort of created a bit of shame around it. And so I see people come in and they start to feel deep shame around like all the things that I don't know. Since I've stepped in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I relate to that and something that's helped my clients has been the thought that I was given was you don't know what you don't know, you can't.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You can't know what you don't know, and that's not your fault.
Speaker 1:Yes, which is great and true, and what I want to do is like literally go to the next level on that. And so, in order to get your brain to literally operationalize what you just said, I will ask my clients to get clearly connected to their competencies and the knowledge gaps, so, like if we're starting this new job and they're in it and they're spinning and they're in this shame spiral, I will start to look at the core competencies that they're entering with, like why were you hired? What did you do at your last job? What are the skills you've developed throughout your career? And all of them soft skills and hard skills, because sometimes people only get connected to their hard skills and they lose connection to all those soft skills which are equally as important, sometimes more important, in certain roles.
Speaker 2:Very underrated those soft skills.
Speaker 1:Very underrated, so we literally need to list them out and you need to see them on paper in front of you, and then we look at what are the knowledge gaps and the thing that I like to do is break those down into what's the company knowledge that you need to learn, the systems that you need to learn and the people slash culture that you need to learn, because these are the three givens. If you leave your company and go to a different one, you 100% have a knowledge gap in these three areas, always.
Speaker 2:Anybody. Anybody no matter how smart they are.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and a lot of people can't see this and they forget about this, and so when they see the two columns in front of them, they can see that you've opted in to not knowing the company knowledge, the knowledge of the systems and the culture when you took the job.
Speaker 1:That is just what happens when we take a job, so we want to get them out of the shame by showing them like this is totally normal and it is overwhelming, because oftentimes there's a lot of things in company knowledge, there's a lot with systems. Sometimes our core competencies cannot be applied until we close this knowledge gap of the company and the systems and the people, which can feel very disorienting for people, and so I sometimes will have to help them slow down enough to see the reason why you feel like you can't use these core competencies yet is because they don't make sense to use until you've closed some of this gap, and then we look at if there's any professional skill gaps that need to be developed. So it's like the person who went from sales to management there's going to be some core competencies that are going to have to be developed in terms of coaching people and giving feedback, and so it can really help to pull it all apart so the brain can see like the sentence. I should know that makes no sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it really doesn't. And then seeing which ones are the ones to work on, because, like you said, everybody wants to take like all these different trainings and a lot of them are not needed.
Speaker 2:Like I was thinking, yeah, when I moved into management, I read that first time manager book and that was huge, just like, like as a first step, right, yeah, and so just, and that, like doing that would have been better than me trying to learn all the things that my team was working on and like get technical and like things that they were really good at so that I could manage them. Like that made no sense. It made more sense for me to focus my time on learning how to be a manager and coaching and teaching and helping a team thrive, right, so I can see how that could often get like. And that's where I'm guessing you would point your clients in that direction when they're kind of cause I've had clients like that too. They think, oh, I need to learn what they're doing, I need to get really expert at that technical thing, and it's like, well, who said you need to know everything they do? Like you're not doing their jobs for them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and sometimes I have to show them how they can move through to the result without being lost in the technical weeds.
Speaker 2:And that's possible Like you don't have to know it to get to the result Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly Because people can get so lost in the mindset and so lost in this feeling of incompetency that they literally stop. They get lost along the way and it's almost like they're heading towards the wrong thing and they forgot that they're supposed to be heading towards this house and they're going towards a different one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're like oh yeah, I'll get to that other one after, but first I've got to stop here. It's like you actually don't have to. Yeah, awesome, yeah, so tell us why these these ways work better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's. I think the key that has been, you know, the game changer for me in my life is the specificity. So, like I think before coaching I tried to. Anytime I was trying to work myself through something, it was always kind of from this feel good, high view of it instead of actually getting into and moving through a real scenario like exactly why my feelings got so hurt by that friend and what I made it mean.
Speaker 1:And I think the biggest thing that happens when you're doing that is like when I'm coaching people, I can often see the context from which it was born, so like something from their past that's probably showing up here, and then the correlation that people are creating.
Speaker 1:So it's like it's like somebody is anxious about not achieving at the job and when I keep digging I'll realize, oh, sally thinks that if this job doesn't fit, that she's not going to make it as a designer. And people often can't see that they're making it that strong of a correlation. They just are so in, they're on the hamster wheel like no, it has to work, it has to work, it has to work. And so I think that when you can get into specificity, you can get into things that your brain's making it mean you're really getting at the root. You're getting at assumptions that you have about yourself and about the world and about what the outcome of this means that often really need to be challenged. They need space and they need to be looked at. And so I think what I love about coaching so much for my own life is that when I'm self-coaching or getting coached, I can see the third layer that I can't see when I'm hanging out on top just spinning in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also you said assumptions. I was like I think assumptions is just spinning in it. Yeah, and also you said assumptions. I was like I think assumptions is like interchangeable with beliefs Completely. So I'm going to say beliefs, that I'm just like yeah, we're just making all these assumptions is what we believe. So that was kind of a light bulb moment for me.
Speaker 1:I'm like, because the beliefs is kind of an overused word that people are like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so overused and it's not clear of what that means for people sometimes. But yeah, assumptions about ourselves, assumptions about the job, assumptions about our capabilities, assumptions about other people, that whole thing becomes the recipe for just spinning and suffering.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's also it kind of takes the coachy voice out of it, which I like, because it's like if I were to ask somebody, well, what do you assume, that person means, yeah, that's it kind of is a better question to ask for many reasons because it's a more relatable word, like you can know right away. It's like if I'm saying what are you making that mean? They'd be like well, I don't know, I'm not making it mean anything. Right, like assuming. That means like is is just a more yeah Cause I think we often I as a coach, get coach, get into that coach speak, and so that was just a really good light bulb moment there, replacing that word for beliefs, for assumptions. I love it. All right, so what skills do you think are needed to put these into practice, to put these things into practice that you've taught us today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you have to First. I think there's just the awareness phase, which is like getting clear that this is what's going on right and understanding that you're moving through the world like this, understanding that you might be stuck in a perception that's not totally objective or neutral.
Speaker 2:And being willing to be wrong about the perception.
Speaker 1:You have to be willing to know that there is possibly a perception shift that is doable and can happen. And then I think it is really figuring out the best ways to neutralize and slow down. People have to slow down to move through this. So part of like people often ask me in my consults like what do you do in coaching, and I'm like part of what I'm doing is slowing you and your brain down because it moves through these assumptions so quickly that it just keeps spinning in them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it needs to be disrupted.
Speaker 1:Question them. Yeah, yes, and it needs. It's almost like meditative. Meditative, it's like you are slowing down and really looking at the fear, the anxiety, the situation, what happened in that situation, what deeper fears that's bringing up, and then neutralizing that in some way or disrupting that in some way. And you can do some of the exercises that I've given you here. You know you can use writing to move yourself through these things.
Speaker 1:I think that it's understanding that most of us don't know how to do it and we've not been taught how to do it. And it's not something that we should just know how to do, mm-hmm, should just know how to do Like. I think people have an assumption that I should just be confident, or I shouldn't be experiencing this much anxiety at this stage in my career, or I should just be able to connect to my competencies and I'm like I mean, you're like a human being with a human brain which is pretty messy and you're getting thrown into all these different situations, with a human brain which is pretty messy and you're getting thrown into all these different situations. The fact that any of us can move through careers without coaches, therapists, support systems is bonkers, because it's tough. It's a tough space to move through, and so I think you want to be aware and you want to like understand that developing that mindset is a skill, in the same way that your professional skills were.
Speaker 2:So well said. Yeah, I totally agree, and it's. It's becoming more, more normal now for people to have coaches for their career, but it's not still not everybody has one, which is, I think, why our work is not done yet We've got a long way to go but because you're absolutely right with that. And so biggest challenges, biggest challenges people might have, putting these new ideas into practice.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest is just this feeling that you should already know, so you don't consciously develop it. I think the other biggest challenge is that you're convinced that it's your competency and you just keep solving for that. So you keep doing everything you can to try to solve for the competency. I just need another training, I just need another thing. I just need to switch to a job where I am more confident. I think that really keeps people from just addressing what's actually going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And then you end up moving absolutely and then you end up burning out, like you said, and then you end up in that cycle of burnout. So this goes into what would happen in one to three years if you keep going down that path. So one thing is burnout that cycle. How does that feel if you just keep doing that? I don't know if you've been in that cycle for a while before you found coaching or if you know clients who have been, but could you describe how that would, what that would look like if you've been?
Speaker 2:in a profile so people can listen and hear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like people who tend to have work patterns that are built on cycles of anxiety performing and then relief, and then anxiety performing, relief. There's no sense of like, calm or status, deep satisfaction with the achievements. It's more like oh cool, like I, I've kept the facade or I've, I haven't been caught not knowing or I haven't been caught failing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you're just trying to like maintain the status quo of quote, knowing what you're doing, versus feeling like a calm confidence that you are connected to your skills, connected to your capabilities and willing to learn the things that you need to learn. So it definitely like it's much less satisfying, like you don't really feel satisfied in the job. You kind of feel like you're always chasing something and then you just have this temporary relief where you crash out after you've like done the thing and then you start all over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like you've been approved. If you did a presentation, it went well. You're like oh okay, I can relax now. And then you're like and then you get the next thing and you go. So it's like it's like a constant underlying anxiety. Basically.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, constant underlying anxiety. Temporary relief for a second, and then it just spins back again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then also, I think a lot of people probably don't know that what you're describing is possible like having a peaceful, deeply satisfying, and I feel like for me that comes from being able to make mistakes, knowing it's okay if I fail, knowing that you know we're all human and like making mistakes publicly and having me not die Like it comes from that, for me at least.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, it's the same for me. I feel like I'm I'm now a person who it's not that I never have anxiety or never have imposter syndrome, Of course like if I'm leveling up, if I'm doing something that I haven't done before, that's pretty far. It's like a bit of a push for me. Immediately my brain will start offering me kind of rationalizations for why it's too far, it's too outside of my competency. I know it so well now, having worked with it, that I have a sense of being removed from it and like I almost am amused by it. It will come up and I'm like, oh, that's interesting, it's doing it again, but I'm not buying into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you can expect it, because you've leveled up enough times to know okay, yep, this is what the brain does, let's go yeah.
Speaker 1:So I feel kind of removed from the thoughts and a little bit removed from the anxiety, like I'm watching it from the outside and I can get space from it pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:And basically you've done the neutralizing, depersonalizing step.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, A hundred percent, which helps me take more risks. It's like how I was able to build my business. Yeah, it helps me feel okay. I feel just so much less reactive to things if something doesn't work out or if you know, I get some piece of feedback or something I don't know how to do and it's like my relationship to like performance anxiety is just different. It's like I might feel anxious going into something, feel like, oh, I'm not going to know what I'm talking about or I'm not going to know, but just sort of being like, oh, I always feel this way and being able to sort of tolerate that level of pressure in a way that removes it pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then yeah, being able to have the discomfort, sit in the discomfort, as you had noted, sit in it and know that failing is okay and that's what resilience is, completely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my self-expectations are very different than they used to be, and what's interesting to know is my achievement's even higher. So I think a lot of people think that it would be the other way around. Like, well, if I don't expect all these things and I'm not super hard on myself and I'm not going to be able to like be a high achiever, I'm like, oh no, no, no, I'm a higher achiever now than then. It's more, it's more fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and putting it really easily, it's like saying that you're going to get up and run a hundred miles every morning or something and then failing at that every day yeah, it's not, it's not sustainable, and then like that's exhausting. Versus saying I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna run a mile and then I'm gonna do a little bit more and a little bit more, and then I'm gonna feel really accomplished and I'm gonna feel good about that. Yeah, versus failing at trying to do this big, like all these trainings all at once and like so, yeah, it makes perfect sense, and it's great to hear your example of it too, so that people can be like, because I think it's hard for people to realize that this is possible for them, right?
Speaker 2:If they've been living in a constant anxiety state for a really long time. They're like oh no, this is just how I am.
Speaker 1:I completely was that person. I mean, I thought everyone felt some level of self doubt the way I felt it, or I thought it was normal, or I thought my perception of myself as like kind of sneaking in or getting by on my personality, or maybe I'm just likable, or maybe I thought that was just objectively true. So I really was very disconnected from understanding that I had this deeper self-doubt that was exhausting me and that I wasn't really connected to my capabilities or connected to a healthy way of learning and evolving. It was like someone lifted a veil and I was like, oh my God, I see myself in the whole world differently. So it was like extremely life-changing for me and it really it pulled the rug out from under me because I was so in it that I had no concept that I was even in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like that's what coaching does. It kind of shows people that it's like putting up a mirror, like being like, yeah, this is what's really going on, totally Amazing. Okay, well, that's all I had. We've gone. This has been a long episode. It's amazing. It's like it's going to be a masterclass in so many things. I'm so excited. Was there anything else you wanted to add that I didn't ask you about?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. All of that is really a great synopsis of a lot of the main things that come up for people. Anybody wants more information on, like, moving through that overwhelm, yeah, and they want to like self-coach. I have a guide on my website that you can get for free if you hop over there and it will literally, you know, take you through a pdf that will help you self-coach your way through neutralizing something, um, and if you feel like you need one-on-one support and you want to do some coaching, feel free to grab a consultation. You can find everything at erin m as in mindset foleycom. So it's erin m foleycom awesome, amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll put that in the show notes of my podcast and it's been great having you and interviewing you and I've learned a lot and I could tell that you're an amazing coach just by how you answer these questions and how you go through and and I already knew that, but it was awesome. I'm so glad and yeah, it's been so great. Yeah, maybe we'll do another one sometime.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no problem at all Okay.