What’s wrong with the stories you tell yourself?When something bad happens, we tend to go over it again and again in our head. The more we do that, we expand the facts of what happened with assumptions, hypotheticals, judgments and opinions. But that’s not a great use of our time or energy. Here’s an example. A client came to me for advice following a performance review. He had been in his job about two years, but due to timing and other factors, this was his first formal review. It involved some very positive reviews, some neutral things and one particularly negative piece of feedback. Despite all the positives, the negative really stuck out, and for three reasons: He is human. Despite the positives, he focused on the negative. As we do. He felt betrayed. He’d worked there almost two years and this was the first time he heard this negative feedback. Now, he felt no one cared if he even worked there or not. He was embarrassed. Embarrassment is a biggie. He wasn’t as busy as some other people on his team, and now he worried that was because others thought he was incompetent.
He wanted advice on how to approach it and explain how it had impacted him. He wasn’t looking to dispute the feedback, but he did want a different approach to feedback going forward. I helped him prepare for that conversation. And he had it. Turns out that the person who did his performance review had only included the negative feedback because it was mandatory to provide some “constructive” things for junior employees to work on. In fact, the team lead shared that their own compensation was impacted by how much detail and effort they put into giving feedback, in an effort to ensure meaningful feedback was provided. Perhaps the mark was missed on whether this system provided meaningful feedback, but that’s another story. What is important is how my client reacted. There was the story he told himself, which we now know was inaccurate. By having that conversation, he gained information he would not otherwise have and he avoided further conflict, disengagement and harm to his self esteem. In fact, his confidence was boosted enormously by bringing it up. potential conflict. He understood his team lead better, trusted her more, and had valuable insight into the broader system (albeit an imperfect one). So what story are you telling yourself that has an unnecessarily unhappy ending? Let’s stop doing that to ourselves. Let’s separate fact from fiction. And then let’s find out even more facts through a candid conversation, so we can understand what has really occurred. To do otherwise is to do ourselves a disservice.
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