How to stay grounded when your world is at storm.

The key to regaining confidence and feeling capable with an everlastingly increasing workload

“And how many hours did you say your day had?”

Is the usual question when I tell people about my life. At home I have gazillion hobbies, 4 kids, a dog, 4 sheep, 20 chickens, 4 beehives, an insanely big garden and many friends I hold dear. At work, I am responsible for technological change management of the second biggest grocery retailer in the Netherlands, non-stop in meetings, context switching each meeting between all of the technical topics that are thrown at me whilst having and leading a vision while the workload increases.

I’ve had this question so often, combined with “how do you do it”, that I thought it might be time to share how I actually do that, without becoming insane.

Where to find the confidence

As you might know, or will know after you read this article about my struggle with anxiety, I’ve wrestled a lot with being confident in my personal skillset and knowledge.

A lack of confidence makes you smaller than you need to be or that the world has given you as a personal space. On the other hand, overconfident people are hard to work or live with. It’s important to find a balance in your self-worth without falling too much to any particular side of the spectrum. I have managed to gain a lot of confidence the past year or two, by practicing the following things.

Feeling inadequate is a sign of knowledge

Ever read about the impostor syndrome? If you haven’t, you might recognise some of the following signs:

• Do you ever feel that you are a fraud at risk of exposure?
• “they don’t know that I don’t have an idea about the things I’m talking about”.
• “They attribute these successes to me, but I was just lucky”
• I’ve never studied these things, so what do I know…

All of these (and many more) coincide with the impostor syndrome. And the majority of highly functioning people experience this. Fortunately this can be explained.

This is the Dunning-Kruger curve:

You see, the more you know about a subject, the more you know about the things you don’t know. It’s nearly impossible to attain a state in which there is nothing more to explore or know about a certain field of expertise. When you are considered as an expert by others, you won’t be as confident to state that you are actually an expert, since you know there’s always some aspect people can confront you with that you might not know.

When you know (fact) you have a decent amount of experience in a field and people consult you all the time, but you feel too afraid or timid to state you actually are an expert because you know you don’t know everything, you might just be an expert.

When others come to you for your opinion, feel confident in sharing it but remain open for the possibility that you are wrong. The fact that they come to you should tell you something about your ability. Not acknowledging how people around you perceive you, equates to you saying they are all fools and you don’t trust them in their judgement. Usually that says something about the person who says it. So don’t ;-).

“you are not here to be right, you are here to get it right” — Brené Brown

Feed the loop

Our brains are literally a neural network. And if you know how artificial neural networks work, this advice will already make a tonne of sense. Let me help you a bit on how it works.

Neural networks ‘grow’ by training. You have a reference which you can look at to understand if you are right or wrong about an assumption, and with each attempt you test if you’ve become more successful to attain the result of the reference and correct the network’s parameters if needed.

For instance, when a toddler tries to walk, they see other people walk and want to do that themselves as well. It just seems such a quick and convenient way to get to toys and cause mayhem ;-). So what they do is they try. There are many factors at play. The toddler has to establish a perfect coordination of a tonne of muscles and sensory systems that have never worked together in that way. Instead of thinking about what he should feel, which muscles should be strained and which loosened, the toddler just goes for it and falls.

Okay, so that didn’t work, however, he got higher than he got before. Iteration after iteration he perfects this art of standing and walking, and mom and dad cheer each time the toddler gets better at it. The ultimate satisfaction is the sense of freedom when he is able to run away from them though ;-). Freedom at last.

What you’ve seen here is that feeding a feedback-loop in which many factors combined attribute to reaching a goal. This is actually a process that can even be mathematically be described and is used by artificial intelligence.

How does that reflect on confidence, you ask?

There are a lot of things to be scared of in this world. When it is your natural tendency to avoid doing things you are scared of or might not know, you feed your loop with an acknowledgement of that action. Simply put, you train your brain that avoidance of those tasks makes you safe. Even worse, you increase the justification of avoiding it in the future. There was a problem, and now there is a bigger problem.

Instead, become comfortable with discomfort.

By stepping outside of your comfort zone each and every day, even if it is a little, you start conditioning that wonderful neural net of yours that doing things you might not know about or haven’t done before, might actually lead to something good. Being and becoming a better version of you. You reduce fear. Become more confident. You now hold the knowledge that even if you haven’t done something before and others might be better at it, you’ve managed to get this far and this is just another hurdle on the road you have to take (and can take).

You didn’t come this far, to just come this far

Keep growing and become the best. There is no need to become overconfident as well. Remember where you are on the Dunning-Kruger curve when you become overconfident at a subject. There’s enough to learn for everybody. Expect that you will be uncomfortable at times, recognise it and smile, because:

Times of stress are also times that are signal for growth. We can grow through adversity. — Rabbi Abraham Twerski

Prioritisation

The Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of consequences comes from 20% of causes. We all tend to say we are ‘ridiculously busy’, but bear in mind that you are busy goldplating the living sh*t out of things for 80% of your time. Are you really that busy, or are you busy with convincing your own relevance to your mind’s I? If that question makes you angry, dig deeper because it might be that truth is hurting you more than you’d like to acknowledge.

Accept that you are in the midst of a storm. You can’t catch all the rain droplets, so instead focus on installing a roof while the rain pours.

The fact is that there’s so much going on that you can’t possibly keep up. Therefore it becomes key to understand your top priorities and see what you can do structurally to reduce the load or mitigate the problem. You are less busy, or important for that matter, than you might think. So focus on the relevant stuff and cherrypick the things that do most good.

Constantly prioritising the needs of others over your own, inherently makes your own needs less relevant.

Balance

The universe continuously strives for a state of the least amount of resistance. A balance, if you will. See it like a seesaw. In order for one side to get up, there needs to be a roughly equal amount of force going down on the other end to reduce the amount of energy to be spent. If there was no counterweight on the other end, we’d call it jumping instead, and I can promise you that jumping costs way more energy than wobbling up and down on a seesaw.

Imagine your work being on one end, what do you do to have enough downforce on the other end of the scale?

My work primarily requires me to think about abstract things, and a lot of them at the same moment. That’s why I need to offset that with one track mind activities that bring me back into the real world. And it shouldn’t be optional as well. That’s one of the reasons that I have all these animals. They make me wonder in awe about nature and what life has to give. Without me tending to them, these animals would die, so I’m morally forced to do it as well. Creating and tending to non-critical and fun things with my hands feels like a good counterbalance to all these critical things that I create with my mind at work.

It might have been an easy route to think “But what do I know” and “why would people read what I have to say about this”. However, you might now (after reading the article) understand that those aren’t valid reasons to not-do it. Shying away from being vulnerable and putting yourself out there is detrimental to your own growth. And hey, maybe one of the readers found something inspiring in what I had to say. And that’s already more than enough for me.

Take care!