Giving yourself some credit
“Ugh, my hair just looks terrible today. What a mess! Please don’t take my picture.”
It is hard for many high-achieving people to acknowledge growth, progress, and mastery.
"Oh, I'm just stumbling around in the dark," they'll scoff in response to a compliment. Or they'll say, "I've got to work harder," when the evidence suggests they're already working harder than anyone else.
It's laudable to want to better yourself — to want to raise the bar and not settle for less than you're capable of. But if you are constantly telling yourself and others that you haven't even scratched the surface of what you need to learn, how will you pinpoint the moment when you have skills that are valuable enough to be of service to someone else?
In a way, it's kind of stingy to hold back your acknowledgement of your capabilities. You're doing yourself a disservice for sure, and probably other people as well.
With practice, you can recalibrate your self-assessment to give yourself some credit where it is due. The key is to compare yourself not with others, but with your own past performance. When you do, you can't help but recognize your progress.
There are lots of ways to measure our growth and development. Though we might feel the same as we did when we were starting out, we can look at the evidence to know that we have moved forward. We were on chapter one, and now we're on chapter ten. We used to take breaks every 500 meters, and now we can run a 5K without stopping. We had zero podcast episodes produced, and now we have a dozen.
"Yeah," I can hear you saying, "But it's still not enough." True, if that's what you believe and that's what you've decided. But it is a distortion of the facts that isn't helping you. You may feel most comfortable being in last place, but it's unbecoming to act like you are there when you really aren't.
The consequences of failing to give yourself credit can be serious. People become bullies when they feel slighted and powerless. The bully believes himself to be the underdog, overlooked and made fun of, without realizing that he is now the one who harms others.
Some eighth graders show up on the first day of school wondering where the eighth graders are. They are looking for someone to look up to. It hasn't clicked yet that they are the ones who are to be the leaders of the school now. If they don't step into that role, everyone else is going to be confused; meanwhile, they will be a bit stunted, failing to live up to their potential.
When it comes to learning, our first step is to be able to tell whether we've got something right or wrong. For instance, can we tell that the note we are singing doesn't match the note someone else is singing? If we can get past this first step, we can then identify the problem, and then, finally, figure out how to fix it.
If we don't give ourselves credit for what we know and can do, we haven't made it past the first step. We're thinking that we are wrong by default. That may seem cute and humble and hardworking, but it's actually kind of lazy and dismissive. You deserve more than that.
Correcting this pattern and properly identifying our strengths and weaknesses is progress in itself. It is a habit that must be learned like any other, but with practice, it begins to feel better than the desire to put ourselves back at the starting line over and over. Enjoying our accomplishments doesn't mean we're resting on our laurels; it motivates us to strive for more.
You can develop a realistic picture of your problem areas, sure, but let's also get clear on where you're exceptional. We can all benefit from your good work, and you shouldn't be the last to know about it.
