The Umbridge Effect: High-Functioning Anxiety & Self-Doubt at Work

When Success Gets Forgotten

0:22 SPEAKER_01: Have you ever noticed how some managers can forget your greatest success almost immediately, but then remember your smallest mistake in somewhat exquisite detail?

0:38 SPEAKER_00: You know this great story teaches us something about being human.

0:43 SPEAKER_00: I'm Cheryl Parris and this is Work Stress Anxiety.

0:47 SPEAKER_00: Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

0:59 SPEAKER_01: No, Roberta once helped save someone's life.

1:04 SPEAKER_01: She recognized something was serious, she acted wet and behaved professionally when it genuinely mattered, but somehow her manager didn't notice all of that.

1:22 SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?

1:24 SPEAKER_01: Now Roberta is 35, she loves going out with her friends, reading science fiction, and learning about different types of butterflies of all things, and I want you to remember those things because workplace stress has a rather nasty habit of shrinking a whole human being into one role, one problem, or even one email thread.

1:52 SPEAKER_01: And Roberta is not simply the member of staff with concerns.

1:58 SPEAKER_01: No, she's curious, sociable, and capable.

2:04 SPEAKER_01: She has a life that exists before this problem started, occurring far too much space in it.

2:16 SPEAKER_01: So what do we have?

2:19 SPEAKER_01: Driving a bus, like driving a car, which most of us adults probably can do, is not simply sitting behind a wheel and admiring the scenery.

2:32 SPEAKER_01: You are in a very responsible position.

2:37 SPEAKER_01: You're responsible for your passengers, you're responsible for traffic, time, conflict, safety, and unfortunately, the occasional member of the public who is apparently decided that basic social rules are merely for decoration.

2:56 SPEAKER_01: I feel it for Roberta.

2:59 SPEAKER_01: She's had to deal with several difficult incidents on her route, but she's done it calmly and professionally.

3:08 SPEAKER_01: And during one emergency, she performed emergency first aid and helped save a life.

3:15 SPEAKER_01: Just think about that for a moment.

3:17 SPEAKER_01: What does that tell us?

3:19 SPEAKER_01: When pressure became real, Roberta noticed, decided, and more importantly, took action.

3:32 SPEAKER_01: And here is where it becomes curious for me.

3:37 SPEAKER_01: Because you might imagine that an incident like that would become part of how Roberta's manager understood her better, you know.

3:47 SPEAKER_01: Roberta acted calmly under pressure, she was responsible, she was able to make sound decisions, but it didn't seem to settle anything.

4:01 SPEAKER_01: Herx's sex was rushed over, perhaps briefly acknowledged, perhaps not, then everybody moved on.

4:19 SPEAKER_01: Very efficient.

4:20 SPEAKER_01: No need to let evidence of competency clutter the narrative.

4:24 SPEAKER_01: Oh no, we can't have that.

4:27 SPEAKER_01: But if Roberta made a mistake, oh well, that's something completely different.

4:35 SPEAKER_01: The response was always different.

4:38 SPEAKER_01: It might be highlighted in a team meeting, it might be raised publicly, an email written, apparently, um, that Roberta might include her manager's manager, or other people who didn't need to be there to resolve it.

Public Mistakes And Email Theatre

4:58 SPEAKER_01: And perhaps you might have noticed this too.

5:01 SPEAKER_01: The more people get copied into a message, the less it can feel like a conversation, and more it starts feeling like some sort of exhibit, and perhaps you've noticed that too in your own life.

5:22 SPEAKER_01: I kind of call it it's almost like stage management, isn't it?

5:29 SPEAKER_01: A stage whisperer sounds as though it's intended for one person, but it delivers loudly enough for the entire audience to hear.

5:43 SPEAKER_01: So the email might be addressed to Roberta in this case.

5:47 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the real message is traveling somewhere else.

5:52 SPEAKER_01: It quietly says, I'm on top of this.

5:55 SPEAKER_01: Roberta needs watching.

5:57 SPEAKER_01: The reminder might contain perfectly ordinary words, yet its public setting begins to shape how other people start interpreting Roberta.

6:13 SPEAKER_01: The audience is not accidental, the audience is doing part of the work.

6:23 SPEAKER_01: Now, one of the things I find fascinating, not just with the podcast, but in life in general, is how language changes depending on who has made the mistake.

6:39 SPEAKER_01: When the wider team falls short, it can become we need to improve this, or there's been a mistake with the process.

6:50 SPEAKER_01: Nice, broad, misty language, no one's fingerprints are visible.

6:58 SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to Roberta, the miss beautifully clears, suddenly there's a name, a date, and a very specific account of what Roberta's alleged failing is.

7:17 SPEAKER_01: The we becomes Roberta, and this is where I'd like to mention Dolores Umbridge because she really comes to mind.

Sweet Control And Proper Cruelty

7:32 SPEAKER_01: Not because every difficult manager is secretly wandering around in pink, waiting to bang Quidditch.

7:40 SPEAKER_01: Sadly, reality usually has a smaller costume budget than that, but Dolores Umbridge was unsettling in Harry Potter because control arrived smiling.

7:54 SPEAKER_01: It came through rules that she made, the process and procedures, the sweetness, and that annoying, apparent concern.

8:06 SPEAKER_01: She undermined capable people while presenting herself as the sensible person in the room, restoring order.

8:16 SPEAKER_01: And perhaps that is why this type of management is so difficult to explain.

8:22 SPEAKER_01: It does not always sound cruel.

8:24 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it sounds terribly proper.

8:29 SPEAKER_01: At first, Roberta may be angry, then she becomes careful, then more careful.

8:40 SPEAKER_01: She checks things, she already knows she's checked.

8:44 SPEAKER_01: She hesitates over decisions she once made without any difficulty.

8:51 SPEAKER_01: She prepares explanations before anyone has even asked the question.

8:59 SPEAKER_01: You know, the strange thing is confidence doesn't always disappear, or that sense of confidence rather, doesn't disappear because we lack ability.

9:12 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it disappears because we've been repeatedly invited to distrust our own ability.

9:21 SPEAKER_01: The abilities we already have.

9:24 SPEAKER_01: Little by little, someone else doubts, begins taking up residence in our own voice.

9:33 SPEAKER_01: And remember what my mate Andy said: don't let anybody live rent-free in your house because we all know where it is like.

9:48 SPEAKER_01: We all know what it's like to replace something after work when this becomes a pattern.

9:56 SPEAKER_01: The job can start following us home without having the decency to pay for the rent.

10:03 SPEAKER_01: You may even find yourself reading an email again while you're making dinner, or wondering whether you sounded defensive, wondering who believed what, wondering if perhaps you really are the problem.

10:21 SPEAKER_01: And all the while the fuller evidence, what you've handled, what you've prepared, how many times you quietly got it right begins to kind of slip out of view.

How Confidence Gets Quietly Edited

10:38 SPEAKER_01: And there's often comes a point, sometimes when a capable person reaches what can seem like an obvious conclusion.

10:50 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps I'm not suited to this role really.

10:54 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps I can't cope.

10:57 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps I should leave before they're all proved right about me.

11:05 SPEAKER_01: But let me just ask you something.

11:07 SPEAKER_01: What if you've been asking yourself the wrong question?

11:14 SPEAKER_01: What if Roberta is not losing confidence because it's evidence of her incapability?

11:22 SPEAKER_01: What if she is losing confidence because somebody else has been controlling what evidence she is allowed to see?

11:33 SPEAKER_01: Because before we decide that Roberta needs more confidence, we need to understand something.

11:41 SPEAKER_01: We need to understand how her existing confidence was quietly edited in the first place.

11:54 SPEAKER_01: So let's come back to that uncomfortable question.

12:00 SPEAKER_01: If Roberta has already shown that she can think clearly under pressure, if she can respond during an emergency and help save someone's life, why?

12:13 SPEAKER_01: Why does one copied email leave her doubting whether she can do a proper job or not?

12:25 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the issue is not that her competency has vanished, perhaps what has changed is her access to that feeling, that beautiful feeling of being competent, and those are not quite the same thing.

12:51 SPEAKER_01: We sometimes tell people don't let your manager's opinion affect you, which sounds marvellous, and is about as useful as telling what someone not to notice smoke in the kitchen, I think.

13:09 SPEAKER_01: Because a manager's opinion, you know it from your own experiences, can affect workload, opportunities, references, how colleagues see you, especially in other teams, and whether work feels like a safe place, a secure place.

13:31 SPEAKER_01: So Roberta's brain doesn't file that opinion under irrelevant remarks from random people.

13:40 SPEAKER_01: It's given weight because authority can influence belonging and that feeling of safety.

13:49 SPEAKER_01: Here is what most people miss.

Your Nervous System Starts Scanning

13:52 SPEAKER_01: I think I think this is what most people miss.

13:55 SPEAKER_01: Roberta may not be reacting only to the mistake.

14:00 SPEAKER_01: She may be reacting to what the mistake now appears to mean in front of other people.

14:08 SPEAKER_01: What might be going through her head?

14:09 SPEAKER_01: Who's seen it?

14:11 SPEAKER_01: What have they been told?

14:12 SPEAKER_01: Is this how I'm being discussed when I'm not around?

14:16 SPEAKER_01: Will this affect how people trust me?

14:20 SPEAKER_01: You see, the words in that email may be quite ordinary words, but the social meaning around them might feel enormous to Roberta.

14:30 SPEAKER_01: The nervous system doesn't count how many paragraphs there are, it notices something else, it notices possible danger.

14:41 SPEAKER_01: You know, human beings are truly, I think, extraordinary prediction machines.

14:50 SPEAKER_01: If something unpleasant happens to us repeatedly, the brain begins to try to spot it earlier.

14:58 SPEAKER_01: Not because it enjoys ruining our weekends or even Tuesday morning for that matter, but because prediction feels safer than surprise.

15:10 SPEAKER_01: So Roberta starts scanning, she checks the email recipients before she reads the email, she studies the punctuation as though a full stop means more than a full stop.

15:23 SPEAKER_01: She enters meetings, half listening to the agenda and half wondering whether she's about to become part of the agenda.

15:33 SPEAKER_01: After a while, the manager doesn't even need to be in the room, and Roberta begins doing the monitoring herself.

15:42 SPEAKER_01: She starts the possible criticism before she makes a decision.

15:47 SPEAKER_01: She rewrites an ordinary message three times just to make sure.

15:51 SPEAKER_01: She asks herself how it could be misread and who might be forwarded on to, and that external voice has started becoming an internal narrator, and frankly, it's not a narrator anyone would choose, would they?

16:11 SPEAKER_01: Hell no.

16:29 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we have absorbed a rather dangerous belief that if someone has authority over me, their interpretation of me must be more accurate of me than my own.

16:40 SPEAKER_01: And of course, managers can see things we can't.

16:44 SPEAKER_01: Useful feedback matters, but a job title doesn't produce perfect objectivity.

16:51 SPEAKER_01: And repetition doesn't turn a selective account into the whole picture.

16:57 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the person speaking with the greatest certainty is simply the person who has been given the largest microphone.

17:07 SPEAKER_01: So I want you to imagine something.

17:11 SPEAKER_01: Imagine somebody making a film of Roberta's working life, the difficult incidences she happened to handle well, land on the cutting room floor, the first day, the calm judgment, the everyday reliability receives perhaps three seconds over the closing credits.

Labels That Pin People In Place

17:34 SPEAKER_01: But each thought coming is enlarged, replayed, carefully labelled, and eventually the film, the finished film, looks convincing, not because it contains no truth, but because it contains a selective portion of it, a distorted picture, a distorted story can include facts, but the distorted lie is what has been repeatedly left out.

18:05 SPEAKER_01: Roberta loves learning about butterflies, and perhaps this is something useful in that image because a butterfly pinned beneath glass can be beautifully and neatly labelled, studied, and perhaps exactly where someone wants it to be, but it no longer is being allowed to move, and this is where workplace labels can really do it, can really do it for people when you're labelled careless or difficult or need monitoring.

18:48 SPEAKER_01: A living responsive person becomes a fixed description, and once the label is accepted, every everything she does can be interpreted through it, even evidence that should be challenged.

19:08 SPEAKER_01: Once that label begins feeling dangerous, Roberta might try to prove it wrong by working harder, um becoming almost painfully conscientious, or maybe she begins imagining the relief of leaving.

19:27 SPEAKER_01: Different responses, but that same emotional driver.

19:32 SPEAKER_01: How do I get safely through this again?

19:37 SPEAKER_01: One person's overperformance, another withdrawal, another update, the behaviour changes, but the search for safety still sits underneath all that.

19:50 SPEAKER_01: And this is the part I want us to hold carefully.

19:54 SPEAKER_01: The fact that Roberta is now anxious doesn't prove that the original story about her was true.

20:01 SPEAKER_01: In fact, the fact that she's hesitated doesn't arrage all the time she acted decisively.

20:12 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes distress is not a confession of incompetence, sometimes it is the information about what um certainty means, scrutiny means, and that selective recognition that has been costing you.

20:33 SPEAKER_01: So perhaps maybe the real question is not how does Roberta become a more confident person again?

20:44 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps she was already a capable person before someone else had an edited version that became louder than her own evidence.

20:55 SPEAKER_01: What if confidence doesn't have to be manufactured from nothing?

21:00 SPEAKER_01: What if it begins by separating what happened from what was implied?

21:07 SPEAKER_01: And the full evidence is used rather than the version that's been most repeated.

Rebuilding Informed Confidence With Evidence

21:19 SPEAKER_01: So I want you to remember that there are so many people out there who are doing ordinary work and they may be invisible to you.

21:32 SPEAKER_01: The healthy alternative for me is not for Roberta to declare that she's always right and everyone else is dreadful, because that's kind of tempting on certain mornings, nor is it to accept every criticism as the final truth.

21:48 SPEAKER_01: To me, the alternative is balance to place what went wrong beside what went well, because we kind of forget to do that.

22:01 SPEAKER_01: No inflated confidence, just informed confidence, and this to me is where awareness the first point of the ABGW method becomes really, really useful.

22:16 SPEAKER_01: Not awareness as in starting at the problem until it is developed.

22:20 SPEAKER_01: Develops its own postcode.

22:23 SPEAKER_01: No.

22:23 SPEAKER_01: Awareness simply asks what happened, what meaning did I attach to it?

22:31 SPEAKER_01: The meaning might mean everybody thinks I'm incompetent, or it might mean my manager copied a senior colleague into an email by mistake.

22:43 SPEAKER_01: Those two things can feel welded together, but as you begin to separate them, that little space, that memorable space begins to appear and get larger.

22:56 SPEAKER_01: You know, once you notice that your body is bracing, you don't have to solve the entire situation in that moment.

23:04 SPEAKER_01: You might put both feet on the floor, make the outbreath slightly longer, look around the room and name what is actually here.

23:15 SPEAKER_01: Nothing mysterious.

23:17 SPEAKER_01: You are simply reminding your nervous system that an email has arrived, and that's all.

23:28 SPEAKER_01: Then Roberta might begin what I call a full evidence record, where she notes what happened, what responsibility did she carry, what actions did she take, what was the outcome, was the what feedback did she receive?

23:49 SPEAKER_01: Was the achievement acknowledged, overlooked, or later contradicted?

23:56 SPEAKER_01: The full evidence record works because stress has this annoying habit of finding every criticism in some sort of I don't know ultra HD.

24:09 SPEAKER_01: Small evidence matters because confidence is really built by shouting.

24:16 SPEAKER_01: Balance also means asking better questions, not only of herself but of her manager.

24:25 SPEAKER_01: The purpose of experimenting is not to guarantee that the manager suddenly sees the light and apologizes.

24:33 SPEAKER_01: No, it's to gather information.

24:39 SPEAKER_01: That's what it's about.

24:42 SPEAKER_01: And if the pattern continues and it starts affecting Roberta's health, she doesn't have to manage it alone to prove that she's resilience.

Support Options And A Tiny Challenge

24:54 SPEAKER_01: That's why we have unions, that's why we have occupational health, that's why we have human resources.

25:02 SPEAKER_01: The old belief says if someone in authority repeatedly presents me as incapable, perhaps that is who I am.

25:12 SPEAKER_01: No, where the healthier belief is more balanced.

25:17 SPEAKER_01: Feedback may contain information I need, but no single person's selective account of me is the whole of me.

25:27 SPEAKER_01: So here is your tiny challenge today.

25:30 SPEAKER_01: Before you finish work or before you go to bed, I want you to write down one thing you've handled really well.

25:38 SPEAKER_01: Not perfectly.

26:04 SPEAKER_01: Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace.

26:12 SPEAKER_01: Until next time, bye for now.