How To Overcome Your Internal Barriers

Feeling stuck is very common these days. A friend, a product manager in a high-growth tech company in San Francisco, confessed she feels stuck in a dead-end job.

"What?! How could that be?" I asked. "Your company is growing 50% year-over-year, with all that exciting press and fanfare every quarter. Shouldn't you be excited about this job? Many people would kill to be in your shoes."

But she had been in the role for a couple years now, and hadn't been able to have the kind of impact she'd envisioned when first joining the team. Her last annual review had been great, singing her praises as a smart and capable employee. But she'd been passed over for promotion a couple of times, with the firm but compassionate feedback that she "wasn't ready for a leadership position."

Convinced she had all the qualifications for a more senior role, she came to me for advice. The key to getting ahead in your career path, I told her, is to become more confident and self-aware. And the key to that is to uncover the hidden internal barriers that stand in the way of your own growth and development.

The spectre of fear and self-doubt is standing in the path blocking your way. We all have it in some form or another: depression and anxiety, imposter syndrome, repeating patterns of self-destructive behavior. Even just a mild self-doubt can keep us from speaking up in the meeting, from voicing our perspective, from having hard conversations with peers or our boss. The fear of ridicule, scolding, or failure can be a powerful deterrent to action.

Most, if not all, of the leadership coaching clients I have worked with have had breakthroughs only after being brave enough to look deeply within and discover things about themselves that, frankly, aren't always pretty. Some of the narratives about ourselves and the world that we carry around can be pretty depressing, demoralizing, and sometimes downright scary. It's the negativity of those beliefs, and the fact that we refuse to see them, that gives them the power to hold us back in the first place.

I have had this experience myself, of uncovering things about my own psyche that I couldn't or wouldn't see for years. And then, when they finally came into focus, they almost instantly lost their power over me. In fact without this experience, I would never have had the perspective to be able to help others at all.

The work I have been doing on internal barriers to growth focuses primarily on a few key areas from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, leadership, and organization development. They can be summarized in three main pieces:

First, there is the inner narrative, the stories we all tell ourselves about who we are and what we're capable of. These stories are deeply engrained in our psyche, starting in early childhood, usually passed down from our parents, but also reinforced by cultural norms from friends, school, and the media. These narratives reinforce our inner worldview, deepening beliefs already held about what we are truly capable of.

Second, there is the connection between those stories and the emotions they engender. From philosophers of ancient Greece to modern psychologists, the fact that emotions affect our performance is well known. Different types of opportunities and challenges will trigger specific emotional reactions in each of us. Those emotions, tied to the stories we carry around in our heads, can dramatically affect how we perceive our own role in the stories. The difference, for example, between feeling like the hero or the victim in a particular story can mean the difference between having the courage to face a challenge, or shrink from the opportunity and remain stuck where we are, waiting to be rescued by some external actor.

Thirdly, there are the physical sensations that emerge from those emotional states. In many cases, these physical sensations can be easier to uncover than the emotions themselves. Often our inner barriers are hard to detect because they are so subtle, interwoven as habits into our behaviors. Physical sensations, such as tightness in the chest, butterflies in the stomach, or headaches, can emerge alongside certain emotions we have about other people or our surroundings (see "How Emotions Are Made", Barrett 2017), and they can be easier to detect at first. These sensations then can form a sort of code, or short-hand, that can help alert us to the fact that we are approaching or hitting an internal barrier.

If you don't take the time to know yourself, it becomes nearly impossible to break through the internal barriers that are keeping you from getting ahead. You'll keep getting stuck re-experiencing the same hard lessons over and over, and not be sure why they keep happening. The fancy psychoanalytic term for this is repetition compulsion.

The state of being self-aware is not some mystical out of reach sitting-on-a-mountain-top-contemplating-enlightenment sort of thing. It's a straightforward, readily achievable practice that you can start today. It's a deceptively simple shift in perspective that will change the way you look at the world forever.

I've combined all of this into the "Grounded Self Canvas", a simple one-page tool I designed to help you uncover the bits and pieces of yourself that are not always readily top of mind. I am hopeful that this canvas is useful in starting to unpack your internal barriers so that you can tear them down in the light of day.

The canvas is a set of twelve questions that help you outline the components of your narrative, and where the structure of that narrative may be setting you up for failures in certain situations. Clients have found these questions helpful in learning to articulate their values and beliefs explicitly so that they can better align themselves with opportunities matching those values and beliefs.

Some saw that situations they thought of as essentially random were, upon reflection, really the result of their own patterns of internal barriers silently dictating to which opportunities they availed themselves and which they avoided. For example, beliefs about the appropriate use of power that should be wielded by authority figures led to repeatedly joining organizations and bosses with a particular style of management that reflected that use of power. Or a belief that one's own contributions are not truly valuable led to constantly bottling up during important meetings. These behaviors were overcome by first detecting the sensations in the body that were present during these situations, discovering what emotions the sensations were associated with, and gradually uncovering the internal barriers that lay behind those emotions.

This line of self-questioning is not for everyone. Many of us would prefer to just continue about our lives without looking too close at our own internal limiting beliefs. And that's fine. But if you want to take the journey, if you would like to give the Grounded Self Canvas a try, here is a link to get access to it .

I believe we are witnessing a wholesale reimagining of what it means to be leader, leaving the 20th century industrial command-and-control model behind, and moving toward one that embraces mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and a clear sense of purpose. I hope that the Grounded Self Canvas can contribute in a small way to this new understanding of modern leadership.

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Be a better technology leader

Learn to apply these skills in the context of your organization. Check out the Mindful Leadership Accelerator . We cover topics like how to discover and pursue your purpose, effective communication, how to manage up to executives, and how to lead change in an organization using influence rather than authority.