INsight/ The Wrong Question
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Photo by Eunice Lituañas on Unsplash.
Manila, 15 November 2023 — How to better manage your inner critic.
Story
It happened this year. And every year since I started my leadership coaching practice 15 years ago. The leaders I work with would often mention that it wasn’t so difficult for them to change their goals or even their mindset while they were attending a leadership training. The real challenge came after the training, when they had to apply what they had learned in real life. That’s when they ran into problems. Does that sound familiar? Learning and development researchers have identified that the main problem with most training programs is the lack of sustained results achieved by the trainees afterward.
Unpacking this problem, researchers found that while it is easy for participants to feel inspired to change their mindset during training, it is difficult for them to internalize and sustain that change after the training in their work and life. They have come up with several reasons why this happens to us. The resistance to change often originates from self-limiting beliefs we acquired earlier in life. These beliefs will keep playing in our subconscious mind, and we might hear them as a critical voice—often referred to as our inner critic or saboteur's voice—that questions us whenever we want to embrace a new mindset and when we are about to level up to take on a bigger challenge in our career.
These inner voices will question us critically if we really have what it takes to perform well in a new role, or if we deserve the success and rewards that come from performing well in that new role. Aiming to keep us safe in our comfort zone, these self-critical voices can easily trigger us into believing that we are, in fact, not good enough, and that we don’t deserve the success that comes with performing well in the new role. It’s natural for us to start worrying about this and it stops us from applying what we learned in training. Of all the people I have coached, from executives to emerging leaders, I can’t think of anyone who didn’t encounter this problem, myself included.
Challenge
Psychologists, coaches, and counselors know that the problem of overcoming self-doubts, raising self-esteem, and building self-confidence is part and parcel of self-leadership. At every step we take in our career, including when we take on bigger and executive roles, we need to give ourselves permission to change and grow to our potential. That is especially true after we attend a training program. It’s not surprising, therefore, that management and leadership researchers have pointed out that the hardest person to lead is ourselves. The greatest challenge in leadership often lies within, and mastering oneself is the truest test of a leader's mettle.
Self-leadership includes dealing with the inner voices that seek to limit us from growing into the leaders we can become. From countless coaching conversations with leaders, I have seen that we all have an inner critic. I certainly do. The question is what we do about it. One of the ways to help us deal with our inner critic was framed by Gay Hendricks, a psychologist and writer. He called it the Upper Limit Problem in his well-known book The Big Leap. Unconsciously, we are all upper-limiting ourselves in our daily work and life. In his book, Hendricks shows that we can learn to make a big leap into what he calls our Genius Zone, where we live with a big vision and leverage our strengths in the work we do, thereby overcoming our upper limit problem.
I agree with Hendricks that we can master our self-leadership by being less concerned with ourselves, and more with the people we want to serve around us. By allowing ourselves to inhabit our Genius Zone more frequently every day and week, we discover that the questions raised by our inner critic are examples of the wrong question to ponder. When we deliberately shift our focus to helping the people around us—our teammates, reports, bosses, clients, and partners—the inner critic’s voice will gradually recede to the background where it is no longer plaguing us every day. While self-leadership will continue to be a task that requires attention throughout our lives, we can decide to stop asking the wrong question and shift our focus to helping those we want to serve, in our zone of genius.
Question
My question for you this week is about your focus in self-leadership. Are you more focused on overcoming your self-critical inner voices, or on the needs of the people you want to serve?
Decades of research into psychology and coaching have taught us that shining a light on our limiting beliefs will help us to dissolve them. This is part of self-leadership, and it is important to invest time and effort into that. At some point, however, it can dawn on us that our inner critic’s perennial question “Are you good enough?” becomes the wrong question to focus on.
What I have noticed in my coaching work with leaders is that their progress tends to accelerate when they set ‘the wrong question’ aside and start focusing more of their time and attention on the people they want to serve rather than on themselves. That shift of focus will also help them to put into practice what they have learned in their leadership training.
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