What to Do When You’re Totally Overwhelmed? Smackdown!

Team, I’m privileged to be a guest poster over at the excellent 101 Smackdowns For Your Inner Critic.  I wrote about a great technique for calming the whirlwind – and your Inner Critic’s negative voice – when you’re totally overwhelmed.  Here’s an excerpt:

I am prone to a) inserting myself into totally-out-of-the-comfort-zone situations and b) getting totally overwhelmed as a result.  Since part a) is what helps me grow the most, and generally pays the biggest dividends, I have had to find a smackdown to combat part b). I’d like to share it with you by way of my favorite example:

I graduated from a very small liberal arts college with a writing degree and then for the next six years worked exclusively in and with non-profits and lived a freewheeling lifestyle of clubbing, tattoos and underground commix.  Suddenly one day I decided to pursue an MBA and a life in corporate America. This decision was borne not from cool-headed thinking, but from the emotional aftermath from a political takeover of my agency and the firing of my mentor.

Talk about out of comfort zone.  Not only did I have no undergraduate education whatsoever in business or economics, I had no corporate experience at all.  Nor did I even own a suit. Nor do I really have a head for math. Or skill at golf.

But I had decided to join a top-30 ranked business school, study finance (math math math!), sell out into a corporate job, hold my own with the “golf playing assholes,” as I mistakenly thought all corporate types were, and wear a suit.  And because I’m both a perfectionist and competitive, I took it upon myself to kick ass at it all.

Talk about overwhelmed. Totally, utterly, unbelievably overwhelmed.

What did I do to combat this? Head over to 101 Smackdowns to find out.

Failure: Keep the Benefits, Drop the Pain

Failure is kind of becoming a hobby of mine.

I want to learn to embrace failure and learn from failure, because popular business research seems to continually bear out that highly successful people generally have significant failures in their background and those experiences –  how they chose to respond and whether they noted and used key learnings – directly influenced subsequent successes.

Failure is a fact of life, because none of us are perfect.  Response to failure is what sets us apart.
I’ve got one failure in my past frpm which I’ve applied a ton of learnings:
•    Choose only roles that let me operate only from within my strengths
•    Ask for mentoring and promotion; don’t wait for it to be offered
•    Seek client, partner and peer feedback outside the “official” channels of annual review time
•    Manage my brand
•    Advertise my wins
•    Define my own success. Never, ever, let others define it for me.
•    Never give up. Do not hide. Do not quit.

Here’s what happened:
I was a financial analyst.  I’m a basically competent financial analyst, but I am not talented at it, I find it hard, and I find it annoying. But I was doing this work because I had a shiny new MBA and I thought I was “supposed” to.  One day, with no warning and contrary to recent prior feedback and review score indicators, I was the only member of my cohort to not be promoted during a time of very public social promotion.  I can’t underscore enough how public this was. Then, a few months later during a big reorganization, I was told that the Finance leadership didn’t see me at all as a leader – no potential, and that if I hadn’t already found a new role they would have helped me find one outside of the track I was on – I would have been kicked out.

I largely view my failure as a good thing, because it lead to a great, new role and helped me clarify my value proposition and stand up for myself in terms of what I wanted to do.

But here’s where I need your help:
Three years later, despite the positive outcomes the failure eventually led me to, I still stew on it and carry a ton of embarrassment about it.  I often assume I’m walking around the office with a big neon sign over my head, flashing the backstory just in case someone isn’t up on the details. I often still let myself get angry or mortified when someone who was a peer or lower pay grade in those days is promoted past me now on that track. Despite the fact I have removed myself entirely from that track. I’m also still mad. Nothing makes me madder than being told I do not have leadership potential.  Because I have plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Crowdsource me some solutions, team!
How do I give up the embarrassment, anger and negative head-bees from my failure?

Stew in Your Strengths, People!

Forget, just forget about trying to fix your weaknesses. It will get you nowhere but heartbreaksville. It is impossible to turn a weakness into a strength.

I’m great at writing, strategy and managing people. I do not do math in my head, I do not think intuitively about quantitative analysis, and I love strategic analysis not spreadsheet analysis.  But I got an MBA in finance in order to fix my hard-analytic weakness.  And I got a job doing financial analysis to prove I could.

Sure, I could do it, but it was not an easy experience, nor would I call it successful.

Good thing the best things are often born from failure. (Insert nerdy phoenix reference here.) Failure at a weakness ultimately led me to a path that let me work primarily in areas of strength.  So much more fun!

If your company isn’t strengths-based and instead focuses reviews on “fixing” you, be brave and start a revolution.  Talk strenghts-based.  Walk strenghts-based. Claim your weaknesses and own your weaknesses and celebrate your weaknesses. Talk openly about your weaknesses. Define success as mitigating or neutralizing your weaknesses. Let others see how you do it. Help others learn to do it too.