Confidence trick
Why it falls and what you need to do to get it back
I’m a bit of a butterfly. I’ve started a few businesses over the years. Bought countless website addresses after I got excited about my next big thing. And dropped most when the going got tough.
But the ones I stick with always have a problem at their root; a mission I really care about.
The mission for Corporate Escapology is all about rebuilding confidence.
People who aren’t in corporate jobs see people in corporate jobs as life’s winners - the ones who’ve really made it. The corporate career ladder is an extension of the education ladder, with most, tho’ not all, corporate people these days having done well at school, probably university, and some even have post graduate qualifications related to their job.
Getting a good corporate job is something of a pinnacle.
So, anyone with one, surely, must feel pretty proud of themselves, brimming with self-confidence, right? Right?
That’s not my experience. And it’s rarely the experience I see in others.
My experience was of a gradual erosion in self-confidence, despite the fact I was successful; despite the pay rises, promotions, bonuses and regular attaboys.
When my motivation slumped, as it did every few months, I invariably found myself on LinkedIn checking out marketing director job ads. But I didn’t get very far. I doubted whether I could get anything close to the job I had at bp. I looked unfavourably at my own skills and experiences, certain they wouldn’t match up to those in the adverts. And I retreated back to my job, feeling a begrudging gratitude for the job I had and relief that no-one had yet found me out.
Does any of that sound familiar?
I know it does to a lot of people, because I speak to a lot of people about it. We don’t talk about it, because it makes us feel bad. But it’s there.
Gandhi says:
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it.”
Gulp. Luckily he continues…
On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Phew. There’s hope. But probably not if you stay put.
Like me, you probably know people who switch companies every couple of years – most people in fact work like this. These people often do well financially by moving, but, more interestingly, these people often have more confidence, because they’re doing two things every couple of years:
1) They’re forced to evaluate themselves and write it down on a CV or application form.
2) They put themselves, and their skills, experience and knowhow up to tested by someone reasonably independent to see if they’re valued.
These two (quite honestly not very appealing things) don’t happen if we stay in the same corporate job for more than 10 years.
The lack of self-evaluation and semi-objective validation is part of the reason our self-confidence falls.
Just as if we stayed indoors all-day every-day our anxieties about the outside world would increase and our self-confidence would decline.
Getting out is good. Because then we start to believe the sky isn’t falling in and we can cope because we’re not inept.
Another factor in our declining self-confidence at work is the increasing specialisation we see in corporates. When I joined bp in the early 2000s, I met people who had worked in marketing, strategy, finance, government relations, been executive assistants, worked in ten different countries, etc. Generalists were prized.
By the time I joined Generalists were everything that was wrong with declining shareholder value.
Specialisation and his ugly brother Functionalisation are a dream for HR because everyone can be placed neatly into a cell in a spreadsheet and they can only move in pre-approved directions. Like chess but only with the pawns. The controlled organisation. It’s like something out of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management:
“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”
Motivating.
Anyway, the point I’m really making is the same as Ghandi’s, that if you believe you only fit into a small box with limited options, you start to believe that’s true.
And the more senior and specialised you get, your options become even more limited as fewer roles exist, so your space gets smaller.
I see it ever so much in people I speak to today. And it makes me sad.
It’s for those people I’m writing Corporate Escapology. Because I want to help them see that they don’t need to see themselves this way. They have choices. They have power. They are hugely valued and valuable to others.
But they need to do some work to unlock that value. They need the right mindset, which includes un-learning somethings about themselves, they need to properly audit their skills, experiences and knowhow. They need to open their minds to different ways of working and reposition themselves for a new future.
Then they’ll be ready.
With the self-confidence that people who don’t work in corporate jobs always imagined they had.
I’m working with a few people now going through some of the models and tools I’ve developed for the book to prepare to leave corporate life. To give them a kick and help me refine them.
I can take on one or two more people if you want to leap - but not into the dark with your shoelaces tied together.