Please stop saying "I don't know what I'm doing..."

"I don't know what I'm doing!" Jean confided in me, relieved to admit it, yet ashamed by her own unfulfilled expectation that she should know how to do all the parts of her new role.

While I'm protecting my client's real name, I'm not hiding the fact that many of the highly accomplished leaders I coach come to me when they reach a point in their careers that feels really unsettling. Instead of being the expert, the go-getter, the solution-finder, they're baffled to find themselves without answers, without direction.

If you've ever experienced this uncomfortable pivot point, it usually happens soon after you've been promoted. You're especially caught off-guard because you've been expecting to be elated. You thought you'd be celebrating your achievement of winning a coveted more senior title. You had imagined being the expert, feeling on top of the world.

Instead, you're feeling massively overwhelmed.

You're scrambling to figure out the content you believe you need to know for your role. You strive to cram in as much learning as you can, as quickly as you can, in an exhausting attempt to master new information -- of course on top of executing your job all day long.

Maybe you're like Jean, who felt compelled to learn -- in the first week -- every nuance of the new product line she was now managing. Or you're like Brad, who went from advising clients to selling to them -- and wondered why he hadn't mastered sales in under a month, just as he'd mastered everything else in his career that quickly. Or you're like Danielle, who was responsible for four employees, and now oversees twenty, and she's not sure how to give each of them an hour's worth of one-on-one attention a week (hint: she needs to change that up).

If you're an anxious achiever, it's likely you've been super successful for years, and the last time you had to struggle this much is when you first began working. For the vast majority of your career, you've been accustomed to getting up to speed quickly, and generally being smarter and quicker and more productive than most -- if not all - of the people around you.

But in this new role, you feel way outside your comfort zone. You feel shaky and unsure. You start to wonder if this taking on this new role or new project was a big mistake. You might even wonder if you're good enough or smart enough. Perhaps you even panic, unsure of whether something is wrong with you for not catching on quickly enough.

So, you want to scream "I don't know what I'm doing!"

I understand. Truly. I've been there.

I wanted to scream that all the time when I was in management consulting. I would walk in to speak to a CEO who had at least 20 years of experience in healthcare, and I'd had 20 minute briefing on the industry and the company. All too often, I'd get intimidated and shrink at the thought of how much more experience he had than I did. Only recently, thankfully, I realized I was pitting 10, 512,00 minutes of exposure to the industry to my imagined 20 minutes of value. I was fixated on the amount of time we'd each spent in the industry, when really, that's not what mattered.

My value wasn't based on the minutes I'd spent thinking about or working on healthcare projects. My value came in other forms. I'm sharing with you what I did to prove my value, and to navigate from "I don't know what I'm doing" to "Let me show you (and myself!) how I can help you."

How to quickly become an expert and prove your value

I suggest five ways to boost your expertise, and lower the need to figure everything out on the job:

• Think strategically, more than tactically. Your job, especially as a leader, isn't to be in "the weeds" and the details. You need to be a big-picture thinker. Whatever you're working on, always ask yourself, "How does this initiative/project/direction relate to the overall organizational strategy?" If you don't know, ask, even if that means seeking out the CEO to get the largest perspective possible on why your project matters and what's essential in your work to moving the organization forward. Seeing those connections will help you to weed out what's essential from what's not, what's big picture versus was what's the granular level.
• Ask great questions. Earlier in your career, your focus was on getting the "right" answers. As you move up in an organization, it's harder and harder to whip out an answer, because you're grappling with much bigger, more complex problems. Your role is to ask genuinely incisive questions that will move your strategy ahead. As a management consultant, I rarely dazzled C-level executives with great facts and figures. I got their attention by asking thoughtful questions. This week, listen to leaders you admire. What can you learn from the kinds of questions they ask, and how they're thinking?
• Find a framework. So, as a management consultant and an MBA, I have a truly nerdy confession: I dream in frameworks. Yep. Diagrams, schematics, matrixes, and other visual ways of organizing the relationships on a given topic. They help you to get a "lay of the land," and understand what's essential in a situation. SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a framework that you might use to figure out your organization's strategic direction. The BCG matrix might help you think about what to do with different products in your company. A framework (find some great ones here) allows you to organize information, and it's great to use a tool that other people have used to think about similar issues. What framework(s) can you use to grapple with the issues you're facing as a leader?
• Recognize that your fresh perspective can be valuable. If you're new to a role or a problem, congratulations! You get to see with fresh eyes. You may not "know" in the sense of having grappled with a problem that's super familiar. But if you bring a curious mind to all your interactions, you run a high likelihood of crafting new insights that solve problems and create positive momentum.
• Realize that no one else really knows what they're doing. Even (or especially) the most senior leaders. They're improvising. Making stuff up. Some people sound convincing, and it's usually because they're confident. Not necessarily about all the facts, figures, and ideas they're sharing. Rather, they're confident in their ability to take in new information and pivot. Sure, a portion of these people will be overly confident, so much so that they gain status for it, but that doesn't need to be you.

• Ask for help. One of the unfortunate learned behaviors of anxious achievers is to "do it yourself." Independence only gets you so far. Ask senior leaders for direction. Ask junior staff to brief you and help you make strategic sense of the details. Just don't try to go it alone, even if that's been your approach for years. It's simply not sustainable or wise.

So, please: Trust you do know what you're doing, at least part of it. Give yourself time to learn your new role or about your new project. Learn to listen for what's essential. Allow yourself to feel awkward, shaky, and unsure, and allow that feeling to move through you as you step into what you do know.

Now, YOU: What's something you'd love to learn? I hope you give yourself the time and space to learn it!

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Are you an anxious achiever coping with a new role or project?

If you wonder how you're ever going to succeed in your new role or project, , I’d love to help you break through, so you can celebrate your success.

I invite you to sign up for a complimentary coaching exploration call, to explore how working with me can help you to stop feeling frustrated and start feeling excited, eager, and ready to move forward.

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