Welcome to the new manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
I wanted to let you know that I am taking new clients.
So if you want to work with me, go into the show notes, you'll
find a link to schedule a consult directly on my calendar.
We work together for six months and the reason why Is because
the coaching that we do together is about Shifting.
The way, you're thinking, beginning to see things in a new
light and then implementing the Insight on a regular basis.
You've had years of building up habits and patterns for how you
are at work and how you think of yourself and those habits and
patterns are really familiar. Or so you're going to use them
all the time in the work that we do as you're growing in becoming
a more effective leader and feeling more authentic.
And confident in the way that you work with people, it helps
to have a regular touch point every week in order to help
establish some new patterns deal with some of the fears that come
up and just partner with you through the course of, you know,
six months. Life the highs and the lows of
work and life as a human. So that's why I work with my
clients that way, I love it, it's really fun to see how you
can grow and change and really start to thrive in a new way
through the coaching we do. So if that sounds like something
that you want, then book a consult.
Let's talk about it. All right.
Now let's get on to our episode today.
I want to talk With you about three things that I've seen my
clients deal with and I'm guessing that you're going to
deal with this to in the course of your life.
In the course of your career. They are anxiety, perfectionism
and problem-solving. And these are each things that
we tend to use. I think, especially early in our
life and early in our career and they can help us become
successful and reach a level of achievement.
Which means we're very reluctant to let them go.
I had a client years ago and we were working on mindfulness for
her life and for her work and she had this moment where she
asked me, but we if I let go of my anxiety, will I stop
achieving things? Well, I stopped being productive
and it was this really interesting light bulb moment
where she Aged even though she had a lot of anxiety, she was
relying on it, she was using it to drive her achievement and to
drive her success. And she had this belief to,
like, if I'm anxious, that means I'm doing it, right?
Because everyone around me is also anxious.
Everyone around me, who seems successful, who is working at a
higher level. They all seem to be anxious all
the time. So, Felt weird to question.
Do I even need that anxiety in order to achieve and to
accomplish thing as she hadn't really seen someone who could
work at this high level and take on this.
This more successful level in her organization and did it
without anxiety. And so that was one of the
things, the things we had to unwind and perfectionism to.
So I see this a lot where people will come and they'll say I have
this Perfectionism and it stresses me out and I'm always
worried and I'm always feeling not good enough because nothing
is ever quite perfect enough. But I feel like I need that in
order to be successful, if I'm not perfect, if I'm not striving
for Perfection then, doesn't that mean?
I'll start slacking off if I'm aiming for Perfection.
Won't that make me detail-oriented?
Won't that make me? And so I can make sure that
everything is to the correct and and perfect standard.
And what's so interesting? These things often go together
and they can be useful, they can fuel success and our Drive in
our motivation. But what tends to happen is
that, when you rely on those exclusively that turns into
burnout, that turns into rumination where your mind won't
stop thinking about how Not good enough and all the things that
could go wrong and it actually then starts to undermine our
ability to think deeply to take a higher level perspective.
It makes us extremely risk of verse.
So then we're afraid of, you know, what will people think if
I do something and it's not perfect, we really start to hold
ourselves back and when you then become a manager, you end up
then holding others. To this exacting standard and
that can have a really kind of crushing effect on how people
feel about, you know, not feeling supported feeling
criticized all the time. If you've ever had a manager who
was highly anxious and highly perfectionistic, it might have
been really challenging my clients that have had this
experience. Say, I feel like I can't ever do
anything right. And so why even try nothing I
ever do is good enough. So you know my manager, no, only
sees the things I don't do. Well, they never tell me what I
do. That they appreciate, they never
tell me what I do do. Well, they just take that for
granted. And so we want to be really
mindful. We want to be aware of, you know
what your own relationship is to anxiety.
And perfectionism, and understand why we might actually
choose to continue them even when we don't enjoy them.
But if If we perceive them as necessary to success
achievement, if we identify with being a hard worker means that
I'm anxious and have this exacting perfectionism, that
makes it really difficult to let go of them because then it kind
of threatens, our identity of being a hard worker.
And we think, well, I don't want to be lazy, and I don't want to
be, you know, uncaring, you know, we can Of wrap up all
these stories into this big jumble and so part of what we
want to do is start to see. Well what is the actual effect?
And is it still something that you want?
Just because it was useful at one stage of your career and of
your life doesn't necessarily mean that it's serving you now
and I sometimes think of this like you could fuel your engine
with coal and it will work. It actually works very
effectively. Li like anxiety and
perfectionism, it's kind of like coal in the engine definitely
can work. But over time there is a cost
that becomes more difficult to extract more costly to run it
ends up, you know, polluting your environment.
And what we can do is we can shift that energy source to
something that is going to be more sustainable and less
costly. So we can switch you to solar.
You can switch you to win, we can switch you to some kind of
combination of things. So you're still able to
accomplish and Achieve but now it's being driven from a
different place. This also connects to
problem-solving, so often early in career we think oh I have to
be a great Problem Solver and you know, even separate from
career in your own life and especially if you grew up where
maybe your household wasn't super stable.
Able or the adults in your life, or not that reliable or not that
trustworthy or, you know, they were just humans and not fully
present and, you know, they didn't receive the handbook of
had a perfectly, be an adult for the particular human that you
are, you might have decided early in your life that it's up
to you to solve the problems of other people.
Or it's up to you to solve the problems that you encounter and
you went into this kind of hyper.
Problem-solving mode and you might have been rewarded for
being a problem. Solver, whether that meant you
were being the Diplomat in your family that D escalated the
stress and the tension or in your career being rewarded for
solving problems and doing that quickly now this can sound
really weird but what I want to tell you is that there can be a
time when focusing on problem solving Is not actually what is
needed. Now, let me give you a couple of
examples. When you become a manager,
sometimes part of your job is to help other people solve.
The problem, you might be able to solve it exactly quickly
easily on your own. But as the manager, your job is
actually to coach and manage and train other people so that they
can learn how to do that themselves.
When you don't, then you become the bottleneck and you actually
start spending more time in the role of individual contributor
rather than in the role of strategic thinker and decision
maker and coach and the one who helps expand the capacity of
other people. Also, when we jump into
problem-solving, were often doing that based on our past
experience. And sometimes what is more
valuable is to slow down. On get really curious, do higher
level thinking, so strategic thinking rather than reactive in
the moment. Let me jump in to solve the
problem and part of the challenge as you go in your
career is learning how to discern between when is a
problem-solving mindset needed and actually, when is your
Isince and your curiosity and slowing down.
When is that needed? When is a different skill
needed. So, anxiety, perfectionism,
problem solving. All of these can be very useful
but we want to be mindful of when are they not?
When are they getting in the way?
And when you start to notice that you're going to want to
know how to think differently and you're going to After shift
your pattern into something new and this can be uncomfortable.
And this is often where a lot of the coaching happens, which is
let's start to think about what else is possible.
So, here's what I want to offer, three specific qualities or
three specific things you can reach for.
Instead, if you notice that your tendency towards anxiety,
perfectionism, and problem-solving tend to be the
first or most present things for you.
So number one, curiosity curiosity will help you with all
three of these. Actually anxiety comes up when
we're thinking about the future and we have a fear about what
will happen and we have uncertainty and there's you know
all the energy and things ayat e starts to go really fast and
curiosity will help to slow the Mind down which is helpful
because it Brings you back into the present moment.
Like what is it? That we know what is it that we
have tended to? What is the thing?
We actually need to be worried about right now.
Sometimes, our anxiety gets us to solving problems way too
soon. Like you don't need to be
worried about that until you reach, you know, so much revenue
or until you hire. So many people like, don't don't
be worried about that. Yet.
It's kind of like if you have a kid and you're worried about
their college essay or their SAT scores and it's like you don't
need to worry about that. On the day, you bring them home
from the hospital like it's too soon to worry about that.
There's a lot of other stuff that we need to focus on First
and actually if we tend to the things in the present, then they
can roll into at to reducing Social Challenges about had, but
the way we do that is by staying Us by being present because that
lets us actually draw in information rather than the
speculation that your creative mind will do when we're curious.
It opens us up to receive more information more perspective, it
lets us kind of slow down so we can get better thinking, more
perspective, more information and I found two that when we've
been driving our success with anxiety, and we think my gosh,
but if I don't have the anxiety, Then, won't I start slacking
off. The answer is no, because you
are a curious, humid, and you are just interested.
You are really interested. And I wonder what would happen
if I got to make those kinds of decisions?
I wonder what would happen if we did it this way?
I wonder if there's an easier and more effective and efficient
way to accomplish this, the Curiosity.
Is a powerful engine. It's a powerful driver but it
requires us to step out of the anxiety so that we can kind of
sink into and Savor that Curiosity that doesn't feel
tightly wound but instead just feels interested and open and
creative. So with perfectionism, what will
help there Is also the Curiosity of this time, asking, I wonder
what's really required here? If you've ever heard some, you
know that phrase done is better than perfect.
When perfectionism gets to kind of controlling and the way that
we're thinking about it, we it can end up causing delay, delay,
delay delay because nothing is ever perfect.
And what also happens is, you prevent yourself from learning
So if we say OK, Perfection might not be the goal.
What if learning was the goal? What if the way we improve?
Is actually, by discovering where the gaps are?
And the only way we're going to do that is by letting things
move forward imperfectly. So, bringing the Curiosity into
the room, asking yourself, what is truly required here?
What is really the level we need to solve for here?
What are the specific requirements?
It's that are needed here and tending to those letting go of
the perfectionism because you can let detail-oriented be
driven by that Clarity. The Curiosity of what actually
needs to be addressed here. And when you realize, Well when
things don't go quite right, that's actually the most
valuable information, you can get because it it gives you real
feedback, gives you real A not simply speculative data, right?
So getting out of the hyper-vigilance because
hyper-vigilance is often from this place of, I need to make
sure that nothing goes wrong when we have Clarity with some
curiosity, we think well there's probably going to be something
that goes wrong that I'm not actually thinking about or
something that goes wrong in a way that I, you know, I was
expecting but not in this exact way or Just understanding.
Okay, this part might not go exactly to plan or kind of
expecting that there's a likelihood, that could happen.
So, here's how we'll address that if that comes up that
Clarity and that Curiosity can be a lot more effective than
kind of the straitjacket perfectionism.
Where nothing feels good enough and everything feels like, you
know, just feels heavy rather than understanding.
Okay. We're going Do it in this way.
I'm not going to be perfect about it and that's actually
great because that's the only way I'll get the learning and
the information. And this also, when you're in a
leadership role, the way that you model this for others
becomes really valuable. Because what can happen is that
when your team thinks, oh my gosh, my boss needs everything
to be perfect, one of the downsides to that is that people
start to hide. They stop asking for support.
Port, they start to hide problems, which means they don't
surface, until they've really escalated and become bigger.
So when you have the mentality, not so much.
We're going for a perfect but let's get clear about what the
standard is, what we need to do to reach it.
And then what happens, if something goes a bit sideways or
something, isn't quite there, what do we do about that?
Then it can actually create more open lines of communication and
it can Create a mindset of learning and a culture of
learning. And when you have people that
are really self-driven, and that know that it's safe to learn.
That's amazing, like, that's great.
That also gets you better information because you have all
of these mines that are working towards learning and Improvement
and that aren't feeling like it's a penalty.
Like absence of perfection becomes a penalty.
So Clarity, curiosity can help as kind of an antidote or kind
of help you to to, you know, adjust the perfectionism dial
and then with problem solving remembering that sometimes
presence and that Curiosity, and that Clarity that actually
becomes more valuable, that helps you to slow down.
It helps you to think better. It helps you to get out of the
rushing reactive. Like need to be right?
It's all on me mentality, and it gets you more into.
Let me bring a higher quality of attention into the situation.
Let me understand on a deeper level, what's going on?
Let me bring my presence here rather than my problem solving
and I'll just add that in your personal life as well presents
over problem-solving can be an Terribly effective way to
deepen, trust help people, and create a better relationship
with others. So, that's a, should be like, a
whole different conversation. But all I just want to leave you
with is just the note that in your relationships with others,
even outside of work. Remember sometimes presence over
problem. Solving is what helps it's like
when you go into Problem solving mode with someone part of your
attention, leaves, the room. And sometimes the most helpful
thing you can do with someone is simply remain with them, stay
present with them. You might be surprised that they
can solve their own problem or it might simply be something
that is like an unsolvable conundrum, the situation that
they simply need to be with and deal with that doesn't have like
a solution. It's just and here it is, but
I'm going to be with you through this challenge so that is what I
wanted to share with you today. Watch out for anxiety.
Perfectionism and problem solving, they are things that we
sometimes learn and that we over rely on.
We think our success is dependent upon them, which then
makes us reluctant to give them up.
So I want to offer to you that you can experience success.
And achievement without being driven by those qualities.
Instead, you want to cultivate your presence.
You want to cultivate your curiosity, you want to ask for
clarity. And when you do all of these,
what happens is, you start to feel more calm in your life
because you feel more equipped. And when you feel more calm, and
when you feel more equipped, then you have this kind of
authentic. Since that simply emerges, it's
not performative, it's just like who you are, it's who you're
being. When you're present, curious,
clear, and calm. So fascinating.
So that's what I wanted to share with you today.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing week
and I'll talk to you next time if you know, it's time to level
up, but you feel Really your perfectionism Self Doubt and
uncertainty getting in the way then come work with me.
We'll have six months of one-on-one coaching and it all
starts by going to my website, chemicalguys.com coaching and
joining my waitlist talk to you soon.