There are a few things I want to talk about this week. I am really good at listening to people and getting into the thoughts alongside them, helping them poke around what is bothering them and get a bit more understanding about what is going on. I am rubbish at doing it myself, and I am often reluctant to let someone else help me rummage through my jumble of thoughts in my head. I much prefer to work with other people’s thoughts and feelings. I imagine most of us do, its much easier helping someone with their life laundry than dealing with the ever growing washing basket in your mind.
Last weeks long awaited blog started to put me in a reflective mood, and I started to think about how I would go about finding a willing participant to work through this massive pile of discarded thoughts and feelings that are starting to get in my way. If I am completely honest I am still not quite sure how I go about this. I am kind of hoping that by the time I have finished writing today’s blog I will have made a firm conclusion. I can but hope. To help me though I want to mention a few things that have been happening this week.
I might have mentioned last week, that I have been feeling really anxious for a few weeks now. Every time I started thinking about work that knot in my stomach would arrive. The thing is I love my job, when I am talking with different staff whether that is coaching them, delivering to teams or discussing future work I am in my element. This feeling of anxiety I know is in part a result of my bandwidth being narrowed as I mentioned last week. I have realised this week that my relationship with my new role is playing a big part in this anxiety.
Yesterday myself and my colleagues supported a timeout for a team, we were asked to help a new team come together and prioritise some of their workstreams. Standard stuff for an OD team, nothing out of the ordinary. But for the past 2 weeks every time I thought about this event I felt really anxious, even when I wasn’t thinking about it, I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about how it was going to go. I was working with my fellow Head of OD and an OD Manager in the team. Between us we have years of experience of working with lots of different teams in different situations. This isn’t even my first session as Head of OD. I think the combination of the new role and other events had conspired to create a heightened anxiety. For the past few months since starting the role I have been able to manage the difficult feelings of anxiety about having a new job, but recently that has been more challenging, and it has highlighted that I was only partially addressing those feelings. I was clearly pushing them to the back of my mind so I could crack on with the work and not fully addressing the lingering feeling of being an imposter. There it is I have said it! Lets be clear though, it is not a syndrome, it is a feeling, that I have that is routed in my past experiences as a leader and the narrative I decided to attach to my life when I was a young man.
So lets talk about this feeling of being an imposter. This week I have been helping a few people with interview prep, and the subject of imposter syndrome came up. When coachees bring up the subject I am always interested to hear what they experience, and how they describe it. Most of us have feelings of being an imposter from time to time that can be used as a motivator, a few people will experience something far more intense and debilitating, that can seriously get in the way of their work and life. With the people I spoke to this week it was clearly the former, and what they experienced was self doubt and a lack of self-compassion. Reframing those feelings of not being deserving of the role they were applying for into seeing themselves through a compassionate lens, and examining their career journey to this point and how that is going to help them grow in the future. As I was in a reflective mood after last week I recognised that I could probably do with some self compassion, and that my feelings of being an imposter were starting to get in the way again.
Thankfully I have a truly compassionate boss. Recognising that I was struggling with my thoughts we had a life laundry 1:1, where she gave me the space to examine what is going on in my head. During our conversation (bear with me this is related to feeling like an imposter) I examined how I learn. Being in a new role requires us all to unlearn old ways of doing things and learning new approaches. My learning style is quite slow at first, I struggle with logic, it takes me a long time be able to accomplish tasks that require logic, however once I understand it I fly. However I am an instinctive learner, so when it comes to emotional intelligence and understanding culture and context I learn really quickly. This is where the feelings of being an imposter comes in. This role requires high levels of competence in logic and instinct. It is taking me a while to pick up the logic, where as I have not noticed a deficit in instinct, therefore I am feeling like I am not up to the job. It is knocking my confidence causing the feelings of anxiety. This is where I need to do my work, reconciling my potential areas of weakness and reframing them to areas for development. Definitely not doing what I have been doing which is feeling shame and embarrassment, and trying to ignore it hoping it will go away. It never goes away, it lingers and sits in the pit of your stomach.
I have decided on the routes I am taking to work through the feelings of being an imposter and the resulting shame, by engaging a coach. I will let you know how I get on.
Connected Coaching 