I was in a meeting with Niall McCarthy and the team at Zova the other day. They’re building an awesome fitness app and we’re collaborating on The Slant, a Medium publication. In the meeting, someone commented that they admire my skills in building content and headlines people want to read.
Before I could stop myself, I had diminished that compliment and said something along the lines of, “Yeah but those aren’t real skills.”
I didn’t own my accomplishments. I didn’t own what I had spent years working to become good at. I didn’t stand up to say that I was happy with my work and proud of myself. I let that reflex kick in, the one that tries to reduce who I am and what I do. It’s a self-doubt reflex, and it’s incredibly poisonous.
I think we do this all the time.
“It’s nothing.”
“It was easy.”
“Anyone could have done it.”
“It’s nothing special.”
You know what happens when we repeat those same bullshit semi-humble self-deprecating lines? Number one, the people around us start to believe us. And they stop respecting our work or calling on us to do more. Number two, we start to believe ourselves and it turns into this vicious cycle where we keep chipping away at our own confidence.
Why do we do it? Because we’ve somehow learned that it’s a bad thing to admit that we’re happy with ourselves. It’s a bad thing to be proud of what we’ve done. We don’t want to appear arrogant. We don’t want to look like we’ve got tickets on ourselves.
All of that has been pushed on us so often that we’ve just taken it on board. So now we look at any sense of pride in our work as being a negative.
For me — that’s no longer acceptable.
I will no longer reduce what I do. I will be proud of it and I will accept that I do good work and enjoy it.
[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]
