Disappointment does not equal failure – what consulting has taught me about life

These past few weeks have been a real struggle. I’ve never had so many health problems in a row before – colds, headaches, back pain, mild alcoholism, un-clinical depression, anxiety, insomnia, stomach flu, fever. The list goes on and on. The last strike was working through a fever this week to complete a deck that the client (of course) had a reaction to. I went to bed at 12am last night and woke up 3 times during the middle of the night to check my emails in preparation for a big meeting this morning, and that was when I’ve realized I’ve had enough.

Enough of how I treat myself, not of consulting.

I woke up this morning and could not go back to sleep, and I decided to share the following with you.

1. Don’t be afraid of things going wrong. They do not equal failure. 

I used to be so afraid to fail. To not deliver. To not have approval from others. To not please. Hilariously enough, it took me THIS LONG to finally realize external approval of my thoughts and actions in fact do NOT equal internal approval of my thoughts and actions. This is basically a no-brainer, but such a mental trap for consultants that we beat ourselves up sometimes for not “delivering to clients”. We’re taught that we’ve “won” when the client is happy. Where is your self-worth? Find it, protect it, because that’s all you got sometimes, love. You cannot let the world beat you down so easily. You’re too precious for this bullshit.

2. Others’ trust in you does not mean you necessarily must own the outcome. 

You need to figure out where this trust comes from. Is it about YOU or is it about THEM? In other words, do they put all this responsibility in your hands because while they can do it themselves, they recognize your capability and would like you see you handle this stretch experience and grow, OR, do they put all this responsibility in your hands because they don’t care enough to do it themselves or can’t? There is a huge difference, one that should keep you up at night more than owning this “trust” and running with it, because you might just run into a wall (that has always been there). If it’s about them to start with, deal with it carefully, and do not internalize the chaos and make it about you.

3. Feelings are nice to have at work, but work isn’t going to love you back 

I deeply believe that regardless of how many people you know in life, there are only a handful (at best) that you can count on during those really hard times. Can you name those people in your life? Can you name those people who will instinctively recognize your call for help and come stand by you in times of need? Because seriously, when we invest in these kinds of relationships, this is basically the reason- what else are they good for?

So let’s talk about feelings about work here for a second – guilt, responsibility, ownership, trust. You hear people talking about this all the time: “I love the people I work with”, “my team is like my family”. Yes honey, in a COLLEGIAL sense. Do I love my team? Of course I do. They’re possibly the best people I’ve ever worked with. But people connections are different from connections to the actual work – and sometimes people confuse them. When you’re sick with a fever on your bed working and you realize this is the only night this week you’ll get to spend time with your loved ones, that’s when you really put things into perspective.

4. Sometimes it’s good to just say “no”

Just do it, you pussy. Set some boundaries. May you don’t get promoted this year. Maybe you don’t be one of those women who Lean In (at least not yet ’cause maybe leaning in takes time). Maybe you actually learn to make sacrifices in your life for once based on what is most important. Is saying “yes” all the time really that important to you? Are you driven to always say “yes” because you’re an overachiever with no regards to consequences of your actions, or are you driven to always say “yes” because you’re afraid of the repercussions of saying “no”? Because there are self-help books to deal with both scenarios. Read them.

5. Communicate constantly 

Don’t hold it all in until the last minute and have shit explode like a volcano. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for the team, it’s bad for business. Keep everyone around you tapped in on how you’re feeling, what you’re struggling with, be self-aware enough to articulate those in concrete ways. You’re not a prima donna and people shouldn’t have to “watch out” for your needs. On the flip side of the coin, if you also consistently communicate your anxieties around the project and how it’s going, noting risks and red flags, that’s a much better and more efficient way to  make it successful (than, for example, taking on too much for yourself).

 

xoxo

V.

How we bind ourselves against potential

I recently started doing yoga again, and honest to God, I’m not the best at standing poses that require a lot of balance. I tip, I sway in every direction, and sometimes I sway so much I have to drop the pose.

And the instructor says to us, “Why are you so scared of falling? There is no fault to falling. How are you going to process that internally? How are you going to get back up?”

Surprisingly this voice has begun to stay with me, a person terrified of falling. If life is like a game, the further we go into the game, the higher the level we advance to, the higher the challenge and the bigger the stake at hand. “Square One” becomes so mentally distant that if we look down at it, we experience vertigo. No, we say to ourselves, we’re so far removed from Square One that it will literally kill us to be back at that point again.

Or will it?

“Square One” is the flip side of the coin to something equally detrimental in the long run – an illusion of safety. The notion that some external factors are allowed to govern our sense of who we are, how “good” we’re doing, how much competence we have compared to our peers, how confident we are in ourselves. This notion is something we built up in our heads, and it happens when we are so married to what we think success means that we hold ourselves back from exploring tangential things of perceptibly lesser value–parameters not entirely aligned with our current views of what success represents.

The benefit of thinking this way is that we mentally create a Zone of Comfort in which we live comfortably. We put qualifiers around our expectations for ourselves, define ourselves in certain ways, to not only feel comfortable with our station in life, but also to leave room for self-excuse when we become afraid of failing.

Not too long ago I had a very interesting conversation with an acquaintance about this. Just out of medical school with limited experience working in the traditional healthcare management space, he said to me, “I am pitching to some private equity-backed hospitals to see if they’ll let me run a hospital. I want to be the Chief Technology Officer. That is the future of healthcare.”

And I just sat there, dumbfounded. I mean, seriously?

“Are you…sure? Do you know…how…to run a hospital? Like, how do you know it won’t crash and burn?” I asked him.

“Look, V,” he said. “Nobody knows how to do anything right, and here is the difference between men and women. Men don’t know what they don’t know and they do it anyway. They never say no to themselves before they start something despite that they have no idea how to do it. Women on the other hand, jump straight to what they don’t know, how it can’t work. Whenever I interview someone for a Department Head position in a hospital [as a board member of a non-profit], the men ONLY talk about how they’re a good fit, how excited they are for the opportunity, what cool plans they have to make improvements. And the women always start off the conversation with a preamble about how they don’t have this experience or that experience,  how they’re not qualified BUT they’re up to the challenge because of other experiences they DO have.”

All stereotypes aside, it’s true that sometimes we don’t give our best work or best thinking. We hold ourselves back primarily because we’re afraid that veering too far away from our predefined understanding of WHAT our capabilities are and HOW MUCH we have, if we fall, the fall will take us back to Square One.

Veering away from the center of Zone of Comfort does not necessarily take you back to Square One. Sometimes it takes you to a different dimension altogether. 

The key is to realistically understand your capabilities- your strengths but also your weak spots – in order to have that intrinsic level of credibility in yourself regardless of external reinforcements of who you are and who you are not. Until very recently, I often thought that I would feel better about myself if I’d just gotten to a higher tier consulting firm like McKinsey, whose brand would much more strongly endorse my personal brand and credibility as a professional and as a person. But the truth is that genius knows genius, and if you’re good at what you do, that level of competence is intrinsic to who you are as a person. Even without external validation, others will come to recognize that in you, and even if you eventually lose that external validation, you’ll still thrive.

Happy hump day!

V.