If we are prone to anxiety, there are few areas of our lives where it does not play its part, large or small. Perhaps where it can affect us most is in our working lives, where so much is out of our hands, and where stress, deadlines and evaluation are part and parcel of the daily routine. This is often a place where we show very little of ourselves at the best of times. For many people, it is certainly not a place where we allow ourselves to appear anxious or nervous.
As we have seen in Chapters 3 and 5, if we are worriers, intrusive thoughts about future events can be all-consuming, and, at the heart of this, is a deep-seated need for control and certainty. In a busy working environment, however, certainty can be in short supply. Much of what we have to deal with in our day-to-day working life is complex, and certainly not always clear-cut and predictable. We cannot always foresee how a future project will go, who we will have to work with or what pressure will be involved. We cannot always anticipate all the obstacles we may encounter or how our manager, colleagues or clients will react.
When we begin to progress at work and things get busier, our anxieties may intensify and our habitual methods of regulating our mood may become less effective. If we get to the stage where our coping reservoir is almost full before we even realise the water level of our anxiety is on the rise (see Chapter 2), we may soon begin to find that the smallest things have become difficult to handle. We start to doubt ourselves and our ability to cope. Every interaction with our boss is fraught with fear and trepidation as we presume we are going to be found out. Before we know it, we are suddenly feeling overwhelmed and unsure of what the hell just happened.
To ensure we do not get to this place, it is crucial to start becoming more aware of, and in turn tackling, the issues that are causing us most difficulty in the workplace. In this chapter, as well as considering how to tackle the anxiety and worry which can directly undermine our everyday, ongoing performance at work, we will look at some of the most common tendencies of the anxious personality – such as perfectionism and Impostor Syndrome. We will see how these traits and tendencies can play out at work and, most crucially, explore how we can go about challenging and countering them to minimise their negative effects in our professional lives, and make our dealings at work simpler, more straightforward and, above all, more fulfilling.
In Chapter 8, we will look at what happens when we get a promotion and at the new set of challenges that comes with managing others and consider how to deal with them and with difficult people in general. We’ll finish off with a look at one of the most problematic areas at work for those suffering with social anxiety – the work meeting – and consider some useful strategies you can put into practice in such situations. The emphasis throughout will be on providing practical steps and tools, which I and my clients have found most helpful in each area.
Getting your anxiety under control and into a manageable state going forward needs to be the goal. It is hard enough to keep on top of your work, deal with the complexities of the modern workplace and have one eye on your career in the longer term, without the constant pain and mental noise of unrestricted worry. If you can learn to manage anxiety as early in your working life as possible, you will feel the positive effects in terms of the nature and quality of the work you do, how you progress in your chosen career, whether you are paid what you deserve, and just how far you can go if you keep pushing beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.
So, before you look around in five years’ time and see that all your peers have moved on, that a new group of young and hungry employees are coming through, and that you have not progressed or upskilled, it is the time to start tackling the anxiety that is stalling your career and keeping you shackled to the familiar and undemanding. If you start addressing your fears, they may even turn out not to be as scary as you think. There is only one way to find out.
The hidden cost of anxiety: how worry steals our attention and concentration
Work is definitely one place where we need to be able to concentrate, take in information and decide on the best course of action with a clear head. There are so many ways in which anxious thoughts can take us out of the present moment and leave us knocking around in our own heads. If we are prone to worry, it’s not just that we resort to worry when we are stressed or under pressure, it’s that we tend to worry even when things are going fine.
As we saw in Chapter 3, worriers have no more thoughts than anyone else. The issue is that they generally tend towards negative thoughts, get much more involved with them and pay them much more attention so that they experience them as loud and disruptive. And if we cannot tolerate feeling anxious, we may look for comfort and escape, which only saps our attention and ability to focus even further.
We will sometimes conclude that we just have a short attention span, are absentminded or simply cannot focus – or even that we are actually just lazy – such is our inability to recognise the distracting power of our anxiety. This can have a huge effect on our productivity and our interactions with other people at work.
Constant task switching
One of the ways anxiety can seriously hamper our levels of efficiency is that it can result in a tendency to flit constantly from one task to another in our rush to get everything done. If, for example, we have four tasks to complete in a day, worrying we won’t get them all done may cause us to switch rapidly between the four, without getting much traction on any of them. The more we fret about not getting anything done, the less able we will be to settle on one job and just churn through it until we have it under control. The less traction we get, the more distracted and anxious we become – and so the cycle continues.
During times like this, it can be helpful to practise some of the thought separation techniques from Chapter 6 (Anxiety Toolbox II), and make ourselves stay focused on one task.
In my own case, when I worked in IT, I used to feel that I was never good with tight deadlines and the challenge of having to complete lots of tasks within a short space of time. The uncertainty around whether or not I’d manage to hit the deadline always caused my brain to ramp up the worry thoughts. When I figured out that what my brain actually needed and what I thought it was looking for were two different things, I was able to quieten the worry. I was operating under the mistaken assumption that what I craved was a comforting response to all the ‘what if’ questions – when, in fact, what my brain really needed was simply to see me making progress. When I engaged less with the thoughts and put in some productive time on one task, my brain began to calm down.
Most often, the problem is not that the job in hand is beyond our usual remit or our competence, but rather that we will just not allow ourselves to get to it. We simply need to put everything else aside and truly focus. In this context, a phrase from my time working in tech companies always comes to mind: ‘Stop starting and start finishing!’ It’s much more productive to stay on one task until it is finished rather than jumping constantly from one thing to another.
Another helpful strategy when we are finding it hard to maintain focus is to try working in short, twenty-five-minute bursts. Even those of us who don’t have to contend with anxiety can find it hard to concentrate for extended periods. Removing the expectation that we should be able to focus for an hour – let alone hours – at a time can really help us maximise productivity during these shorter bursts of activity. After a short break of five minutes or so, we then return to the task for another twenty-five-minute stint. It is always surprising how much you can get done in a short, focused period of time.
In Chapter 9 (Anxiety Toolbox III), we will be looking at some mindfulness techniques that can come in very useful when we have a lot of tasks to complete within a short time, but find that our thoughts are scattered. At the core of the discipline of mindfulness is the practice of regularly returning to the present moment each time our mind begins to wander and the rabbit-hole of worry beckons. In this context, we consciously bring our focus to the task at hand and then, when we feel ourselves inevitably drift away with our thoughts, we gently bring ourselves back to the present, to our physical environment and to the task we are engaged in.
Sometimes, we feel we cannot start something because we only have a small window of time and it’s a major piece of work. In this instance, try not to listen to your brain when it tells you that there isn’t enough time to do something on it. Short bursts of work in small increments can really get us moving through a task, rather than us feeling we need to spend a long time with something to be productive. In this scenario, it’s important to break the work up into smaller sections or tasks, so we can actually complete some parts of a bigger job. As we observe ourselves getting started and getting through work, our brain will lower the threat level and our anxiety will diminish accordingly.
Funnily enough, as I am writing this very section, my mind is constantly reminding me how much work I have to do to finish this book! This kind of thinking is something I have always struggled with when it comes to tackling major, long-term projects. I’ll find my brain firing off a series of questions and conundrums. What about the other chapters? Should I get some of them done first? Will I have enough time to get everything finished? Will it be good enough? Noise, noise, noise!
If I allow myself to get caught up in these thoughts, they will become louder and more persistent, since I have acknowledged the danger they’re trying to alert me to. At this stage in my life and career, I am generally able to keep them at bay, by not engaging and simply concentrating on what I am doing – but I’m aware that they are always there, looking for attention, waiting in the wings for the moment when I’ll give in and finally listen to them! I’ve learned to treat them like that eager puppy, by saying something like: ‘Not now, Worry Thoughts – I have a book to write. Join me if you must, but we’re doing this at the moment.’
Avoidance and procrastination
As I’ve said previously, there is nothing that lowers anxiety about a task more quickly than the feeling that we are getting through it. Equally, however, if we feel we can’t start something or are getting nowhere, excessive worrying can affect our ability to tackle the job head-on. If we fear a piece of work is too large or difficult, we may put off starting it. This can become the slippery slope of procrastination, where we will find a way to distract ourselves from the task at hand. Alternatively, we might start another easier, lower priority job to try to make ourselves feel like we are still being productive.
Our priority work, however, remains untouched – and now we have even less time. We may find ourselves thinking that this task is too difficult and begin doubting our ability to complete it. We may stray even further down the rabbit-hole of worry, fretting about what will happen when we inevitably mess up the whole thing and everyone is angry with us.
As we have seen in Chapter 3, intrusive thoughts about future events can be all-consuming. As our thoughts become intolerable, our concentration is shot to pieces and so we might pick up our phone and start looking at social media for a sense of momentary relief. For a while, it works and we distract ourselves from our thoughts, but as soon as we put down the phone, we know that the problem is still there.
This method is about learning to trust our own capacity to understand what needs to be done and our ability to get it finished. Our anxiety is making us see the threat as insurmountable and our ability to cope as insufficient. It’s our dread of uncertainty that is at play here again. When we start a task, we may not know what we need to do but surely we trust ourselves to figure it out? We may not have done this task before, but surely we have confidence that all the skills and experience we already have will help us? Once again, we must learn to become more accepting that uncertainty is a natural part of life and that we cannot avoid it in work, just as we can’t in any other context.
In this kind of situation, a quick Thought Record (Chapter 6, Anxiety Toolbox II) can be very helpful in terms of settling your nerves. It can be great if we get to the stage where we can do this in our heads. As I pointed out in Chapter 6, the more Thought Records we do on paper, the more practised we will become at them and the more able we will be to run through this technique mentally and in as close to real time as possible.
Firstly, instead of desperately trying to push the thoughts away, try to work out what you are saying to yourself. Can you look back on the evidence of other jobs you have done? This one is no different. Have there been previous jobs where you didn’t know what to do initially, but, when you gave yourself the time, you were able to figure it out? Are there any gaps in your knowledge or is there any information needed that you could ask a colleague about? Can you allow yourself to ask questions without feeling stupid or that you ‘should’ already know the answer? If one of your colleagues was just starting something and wanted to talk it over, would you immediately think they were not good at their job or would you just see it as a normal part of the process and be more than willing to help?
This may be a time when you need to hand over the problem to your future self. As we discovered in Chapter 3 (Worry) and in Chapter 6 (Anxiety Toolbox II), your future self will handle any situation when it arises to the best of its ability. It is the present version of you that has to deal with the doom-laden fantasy of all the ‘what if’s’. The worst thing you can do is avoid starting a task or, if it’s required, not reach out for some guidance on where you might go with this. If either of these options seems too difficult, have a think about how the conversation would go if you just left things until the deadline and had to explain why you haven’t finished the assignment!
The key principle here is that when we allow ourselves to start a task and get our teeth into it, it begins to get more manageable. Starting is half the battle. If we can quieten the voice that is telling us we are not good enough, and use the evidence of previous jobs we have got through as reassurance that we have what it takes to handle something, then we are well on our way. There is nothing like showing ourselves we can cope to allay anxiety.
Worry and interactions with others at work
Just as anxiety negatively affects our productivity, it can also have a major impact on our focus and concentration in our interactions with others at work. When we are talking to a colleague or manager, and they are giving us information on an upcoming task or project, worrisome thoughts can play havoc with our ability to take in what we are being told. We might hear the first part and then lose ourselves in imagining the worst-case scenarios or trying to solve problems that do not yet exist. All the while, we have mentally checked out of the conversation and will potentially miss further crucial information, such as possible solutions, useful ideas or suggestions about people who may be able to help.
It is important to be aware that this is how anxiety can affect us in conversation. Can we stay focused on the person we are talking to and what they are saying, rather than running off immediately with our own thoughts? We have to be conscious of this in order to tackle it. It may take much trial and error in order to make real progress here. We can start off by simply noticing when we start to head off into our thoughts and then bring ourselves back into the conversation each time, without harshly judging the fact we wandered. Harsh judgement never helps.
We need to allow ourselves to fail and slowly get better because, if this is a problem, it can be a difficult one to work through. Again, this is much the same process that is used to bring ourselves back into the present moment in mindfulness, which will be outlined in Chapter 9 (Anxiety Toolbox III).
In order to stay focused and take in important information, we can repeat back to the other person a brief summary of what they have just said, which also clarifies things for both parties. If we leave a conversation feeling that we have missed some important parts, we need to go easy on ourselves and acknowledge that this is a difficult problem to overcome. We need to bear in mind that we can always go back to the source of the information for further clarification.
Social anxiety at work
As well as our anxieties about taking in the details of and being able to handle the work assigned to us by others, social anxiety – fear of embarrassment or judgement from others – can hamper our interactions with colleagues hugely and affect how well we are able to do our job on a daily basis. When we are constantly worried about what people think of us, it can affect how we operate and take our attention away from the environment around us, as we focus inwards on how we feel, how we are being viewed and what we might say.
This can play havoc in meetings. If our main focus is on the possibility of being asked a question and how we might respond or how we might look if we don’t know the answer, we are very likely not concentrating on what is actually being said. We may believe our answers have to be of the highest standard, otherwise we will be judged harshly, which means that, when put on the spot, it is very hard to come up with a spontaneous answer that meets these expectations.
This type of internal focus can actually make us appear spaced out or uninterested. If we are talking to a colleague or manager, instead of listening to what they are saying, our main concern is about saying the right thing or making a good impression. This, in turn, may leave us with our mind going blank when we need to respond. Much of the work that is needed here is covered in Chapter 5 (Socially Anxious), which I would advise going back over when looking at handling interactions with colleagues. Some positive experimentation, as outlined in Chapter 5, may be very useful here.
Another key part of getting better is to not destroy yourself in the post-mortem. If you come away from an exchange with a boss or colleague, feeling that it could have gone better, can you at least go easy on yourself and not presume it was the worst thing that could have happened and that everyone now thinks you’re an idiot?
We will also be looking in more detail at strategies for handling important work meetings in Chapter 8 (Anxiety in the Workplace – Part Two).
The anxious personality
Let’s take a look at some personality traits and deep-seated beliefs that are most common in worriers and which can have a negative impact on our working life in much more general, long-term ways. In considering these, we’ll also be exploring some techniques and strategies for overcoming some of the difficulties associated with these traits, and how we can avoid making our working environment more stressful than it needs to be.
Impostor Syndrome
Many of us who are anxious struggle with a fear of being found out, which is known as the ‘Impostor Syndrome’. This is a recognised psychological pattern, whereby someone constantly doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent, internalised fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.
Here’s how Impostor Syndrome works.
Everything we have achieved in our lives, and every position we ever have held in our careers, can be explained away by sheer luck, good timing, the kindness of others or even the intervention of a divine power. Everyone else out there is so much better than we are, in every sense – more deserving, more accomplished and more confident. We are convinced that the people who have hired us have been duped, taken in, had the wool pulled over their eyes. We are also absolutely certain that when we are finally – and inevitably – found out, we will be utterly humiliated, and that, before we are escorted from the premises, we will also have to suffer the guilt of looking our boss in the eye, as they reel at our deception. ‘And to think I trusted and believed in you,’ they might say with a disappointed shake of the head, as we are led away.
OK, so maybe I’ve gone a bit too far – but you get the picture!
Ultimately, we feel fraudulent and that it is only a matter of time before we are exposed as exactly that. And in our minds, what is worse than exposure, public humiliation and embarrassment? Other than, perhaps, death, this kind of exposure is one of our greatest fears as humans.
Impostor Syndrome plays havoc in our working lives. It makes downtime impossible to be comfortable with or enjoy, as we always feel people are looking over our shoulder, wondering what value we are bringing.
Constantly doubting your abilities makes it hard to have a good working relationship with your boss, and, if you do manage that, you are haunted that the inevitable sense of betrayal this individual will feel when you let them down will be too much for you to handle. How can you push yourself forward and progress in your career if you believe everything about you is a lie?
While all sorts of people are affected by Impostor Syndrome, it is particularly prominent in people who struggle with social anxiety or general anxiety. If we are already a worrier and constantly preoccupied with what others think of us, this fear of exposure is likely to be part of our daily mindset at work.
It’s time to confront this fear, and get our Impostor Syndrome under control and out of our lives. Acknowledge it, challenge it – then let it go.
Here are some guidelines to help you manage this process.
Acknowledge that this is how you are feeling and that Impostor Syndrome is a very common thing – it’s something that a lot of people struggle with, including many successful people. This way, you can begin to normalise these feelings and stop seeing yourself as ‘different’ or ‘not normal’. Acknowledge that Impostor Syndrome is a common human experience and that a lot of people suffer from it, but that it is not real.
Anxiety thrives on vagueness. Walking around with an undefined, anxious feeling or a vague sense of unease, is the perfect environment for an anxious mind to go into overdrive. You need to start looking at the actual facts, but to remove yourself from the picture as you do so (since you are an expert at dismissing positive evidence about yourself).
You can achieve this by imagining you are talking to a friend who is struggling with Impostor Syndrome. How have you actually been doing over the past few months or years? What has your manager said about you? How have appraisals gone? What have you been trusted with? How are you seen by your peers? What have you accomplished?
Try to do this objectively, and not through the ‘I’m rubbish’ filter. Sometimes, talking about yourself in the third person, even using a different name, can help. ‘Janet/Peter has actually been doing pretty well recently …’
Keep finding things you do well, and reasons for which you may be valued. Keep a diary, if needed, or a weekly achievements sheet because if you are prone to worry, you will tend to focus on your weaknesses and lose sight of or overlook your strengths. As you do this work, you need to be always conscious of the power of Impostor Syndrome – ‘I am struggling with feelings of fraudulence, therefore, I will always doubt my own abilities.’ Keep pushing through any resistance, finding things you do well and reasons colleagues may value you (whether these qualities have explicitly been acknowledged by others or are things we do or qualities that we would value in a workmate).
Continuing this evidence-gathering approach, you can now ask yourself if it’s possible that it is you who are underestimating your own talents, and if those who hired you, and have kept you on, might have a more objective view of your strengths and abilities? Are you saying that it’s obvious that you are fooling everyone and that so many intelligent people have been hoodwinked and are blind to your ineptitude? Maybe, just maybe, you need to trust the judgement of those above and around you on this one. Perhaps, at this moment in time, you are the one whose judgement is skewed.
A key feature of Impostor Syndrome is that, as well as constantly underestimating our own strengths, we continually overplay the talents of others. We usually pick the one skill or personality trait that a colleague has that we do not, meaning we are unfairly judging ourselves against someone else’s ‘super power’. So, it is crucially important that we stop comparing ourselves to others. We are unable to be objective when we are in the Impostor Syndrome mindset and comparison invariably goes badly for us. Until we are able to acknowledge our own strengths and abilities more accurately, we need to just stop.
We have to allow ourselves to make mistakes and to learn from them. We need to afford ourselves the right to not know and the option of coming back to someone later. What often feeds into Impostor Syndrome is an inability, or unwillingness, to see everything as a learning process. There are very few jobs any more where you master one skill or one approach and that’s it for the next forty years! If we are to have a full and varied career, we will always be living on the edge of our comfort zone. We will never be definitive experts at everything – as soon as we approach the mark, we will be challenged in some other way by being given a new role or being moved to a new job. This has to happen if we are to progress and grow.
We need to become more comfortable in this space where we do not know everything, and challenging Impostor Syndrome is a huge part of this process. If we are constantly telling ourselves we are not good enough for the job, any mistake or gap in our knowledge will be seen by us as the proof of this. Working to diminish these feelings will enable us to be more comfortable with the level we are at. We may also need to take stock of the role perfectionism plays in this sense of never feeling good enough (we’ll be looking at this in the next section).
As with some of the other anxious thought patterns we’ve looked at, when we have thoroughly addressed Impostor Syndrome and the feelings around it, through challenge, balance and fair analysis, we need to leave it be. We cannot start challenging it over and over each time it crops up, as this will only confirm to our brain the sense of danger, thereby keeping the thoughts strong. We should try to simply be aware when it is at play and then, using the thought defusion tools from Chapter 6 (Anxiety Toolbox II), acknowledge it and go about our business. We can call it out, ‘Ah, here’s the old Impostor Syndrome. I’ve to go to a meeting, Brain, so come on, bring on the thoughts if you want to – but then, let’s go.’ In this way, we are telling our brain that we know it’s worried, but that we do not see the same level of threat here as it does.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism and anxiety are not a good mix.
If we consistently hold ourselves to account and continually push ourselves to reach our goals and improve our situation, then fantastic. If, however, we insist on unattainably high standards in every little thing we do, where simply meeting the bar we have set is the minimum we expect of ourselves and falling in any way short throws us into an anxiety tailspin, then this can become problematic.
This way of operating plagued much of my corporate working life. There was one stage, early in my IT career, where I’d be asked to carry out simple estimates on prospective small jobs coming to the team I was working in. What was needed was not much more than a finger-in-the-air guesstimate, backed by a bit of knowledge of the general work involved. These estimates should have been easy enough to do, but I agonised over each one for far longer than the task warranted. I would generate spreadsheets with detailed breakdowns, constantly terrified that if I underestimated, the job would be bigger than we had planned, but that if I overestimated, I would look stupid and possibly even lose us the job unnecessarily. I never told anyone just how much time I’d have to spend on all this, and my manager loved the format of the estimates I prepared – so I quickly became the go-to person on the team for this task! Each time another estimate was needed from me, my other work suffered greatly and my anxiety levels went through the roof because my perfectionism did not care about mitigating circumstances. All my work had to meet a certain, very high standard, regardless of its actual importance.
How perfectionism affects our work
Perfectionism and our own unrelenting standards can be a curse in our professional lives. They can of course ensure that we generally put out quality work, however, such perfectionism can often also mean that every job we have to do becomes ten times more intimidating, ten times longer and ten times more anxiety-inducing, as we grapple with the fear of not meeting our own standards. These standards are applied to big and small tasks alike, regardless of their actual importance.
An email of little consequence can take fifteen minutes to complete, as we write and rewrite it, checking for any kind of inadequacy that could be read into our words. Might anyone on the CC-list possibly be offended by what I’ve said here? Should I say it another way instead? And so we can find ourselves caught up in small, meaningless tasks for so long that there’s now less time for the bigger, more important stuff that has yet to be done – but which must still be done perfectly.
The tasks we work on have to be checked and double-checked before we can show them to anyone – and even then, self-doubt can continue to gnaw at us. As you can imagine, if we operate like this for any length of time, the unfinished tasks rapidly mount up, and next thing we know, our work-life balance is heavily skewed towards work.
Perfectionism can also stop us from reaching out for help – firstly, because we cannot be seen to be lacking, but also because maybe we only trust our own way of doing things and don’t trust others not to make a mistake. We believe they may not have our standards, that they will not check as thoroughly or cover every angle the way we would. If our name is to be on a piece of work, it has to be completely error-free, and so even when we allow ourselves to get help, it can add time to the task, since now we have to check the other person’s work as well as our own.
We may believe that we have to work all the time, so as not to appear lazy, or that we must be faultless, so others cannot see the person that we fear we are. This fear can play out as Impostor Syndrome, which we have discussed on pages 131-6, where we believe that we will be found out as frauds and so we have to keep up the charade with perfect work.
The need to be perfect at all times and in all things in work can play out in other ways too. When I deal with perfectionism-related anxiety with my clients, I find it tends to go one of two ways. On the one hand, it can keep us feeling as though we’ve convinced everyone around us that we’re a really solid person (but this can take an enormous toll, as we have said). Conversely, perfectionism can be such a tyrannical monster that it can make us feel that it is easier to just not try at all. Why attempt to satisfy that which cannot be satisfied? And so the need to be perfect can keep us stuck and unable to start a new project because it is so difficult to reach our own impossibly high bar. Not trying becomes infinitely better than trying and failing, especially because most perfectionists cannot tolerate the possibility of making mistakes.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
Well, one reason is that we presume the world is judging us as harshly as we are judging ourselves. Everyone else is as critical, impatient and unforgiving as we are with ourselves. If we can see a mistake we have made or something we could have done better, well, we can be sure that everyone else has spotted it too. And guess what? They feel as disgusted, as appalled, as let down as we do.
Take a look at the list on the next page, and see if any of these apply to you.
1. I must do all things perfectly.
2. Mistakes are not allowed, as they will highlight my inadequacy.
3. If I try, I will most likely fail.
4. If I make a mistake, I will be rejected.
5. If I put my work out there, it is inevitable that others will think badly of me.
6. Doing well isn’t good enough – I have to do better than that.
7. If I don’t strive to achieve higher standards, I am a lazy and useless person.
8. My work is never as good as I want it to be.
9. I can’t let anyone else do a task on my behalf in case it goes wrong.
10. I have to check over any work I do several times before I can show it to anyone.
11. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things – no in-between.
12. I prefer to either do something perfectly and to 100 per cent of my ability or not do it at all.
13. People will always judge me as harshly as I judge myself.
Becoming less vigilant
In tackling the downsides of perfectionism in our working lives, we need to try to allow ourselves to think in less black-and-white terms. Unless we are in the first week of a job, what people at work think of us does not change on a daily basis – and even in this scenario, we are generally given time to grow into a role before opinions are formed. When our colleagues and managers have got a general take on us, and if our work tends to be of a good standard, making a single mistake will not change that or cause them to do a complete turnaround on us. This can be difficult for perfectionists to believe and it is especially difficult if we have a boss who tends to sound off a lot and snap when things aren’t going their way.
It is important to understand, however, that our reputation is not on the line every time we go into work. We do not need to be constantly vigilant or spend an unproductive amount of time second-guessing other people and continually trying to figure out if they think less of us for some small thing we said or did. This kind of thinking will make for a very stressful environment and a heightened level of emotional alert, which is unproductive when it comes to keeping anxiety under control.
It is worth asking ourselves if our perfectionism is a way of keeping our opinions of ourselves at bay, as much as those of other people. If we believe that we are useless, incompetent, talentless or generally a fraud in the professional environment, we may think that turning out quality work at all times will at least enable us to feel a little more neutral about ourselves and keep the real negativity at bay. Do give this some serious thought. If this is how you are operating, it would be good to bring it out of the fog so that you can begin to challenge some of the thoughts and beliefs that lie behind it.
When thinking about these issues, can we try to bring in the compassion that we would no doubt have for other people who shared with us such thoughts about themselves? What would we say to a friend who was telling us this story? Would we agree and tell them they were useless and a fraud in spite of all their achievements or would we have some counterarguments to make? Often, behind the accolades and achievements we have been so driven to notch up, we can have a very poor opinion of ourselves and very low self-worth. If this is a really entrenched problem, it would be a good exercise to get a piece of paper and pen, and write about what it means if we do not do everything perfectly. This could bring up some very interesting points for further exploration.
Behind perfectionism, there can also be the unfounded belief that the only thing that is keeping us from crumbling completely and descending into a state of chaos, in which we could not get the simplest task over the line, is the constant drive of our unrelenting standards. That if we lower our standards even just occasionally, we will all at once do everything really poorly and everyone else will suddenly see us for what we actually are. This is similar thinking to the belief that worrying about everything is the only thing keeping us focused and enables us to get things done. In reality, if we did not constantly strive to be perfect, we would still put out a level of work that would be totally adequate. It’s this intolerance for less than perfect every time that is the issue here, and, as we have said above, this can end up making perfect work either impossible or so time-consuming that it affects our overall standard of work anyway.
Good enough, more often than not, is good enough
Have a think about how perfectionism is playing out for you presently in the professional realm. Does it really mean that you are productive and that your work is always of a high standard? At what cost does that high standard come? Does it leave you stuck and fearful of starting anything? Does it stop you asking others for help or mean that you only do so when things have gone too far or when it’ll be really hard to turn things around?
Next, ask yourself how this might play out in your career going forward. If you cannot trust anyone to help you because you feel they don’t have your standards, how will this work out if you get to a stage where you’re required to manage a team? No doubt it will lead to micromanagement, with you constantly looking over people’s shoulders and being very critical of their work, and yet obliged to stand over it. How will those on your team react to such a style of management? We need to address this kind of thinking before we progress any further.
When you allow yourself to be less than perfect sometimes, you can lower your anxiety levels and become more productive. Being cautious of making mistakes can help you be vigilant and improve performance, but as always, it’s about balance. If mistakes are utterly unacceptable, then this can keep you from making any move at all. Your beliefs about mistakes need to be challenged here. There almost certainly is an element of worst-case scenario thinking, where mistakes are shameful, will have terrible consequences, or will do damage to your reputation. Generally, this is not the case. Mistakes are to be expected as part of the human experience. We are regularly our own worst critics and others will not judge our mistakes as harshly as we judge ourselves. The truth is that often the extra work we put into insuring our work is mistake-free is unnecessary and will go unnoticed.
Other people are not always looking for an opportunity to criticise us. In fact, the reality is that most of the work we do, and the emails we send, will not come under the degree of scrutiny we fear. Can you save your perfectionism for the priority, high-exposure work? Not every small task needs to be gold-plated. Not every email you send has to be read and reread ten times. It may sound counterintuitive, especially in a professional environment, but when it comes to the everyday tasks, you may need to lower your standards. I bet all that you do will still be absolutely good enough!