Latest / Women Who Ship / 9. Thoughts are Optional: How Self-Coaching Changes Everything in Your Career
Transcript
- Sarah Williams: Welcome to Women Who Ship, the podcast for women in tech who are tired of proving themselves in rooms they've already earned a place in and are ready to lead like they know it. I'm your host, Sarah Williams. Let's dive in. Sarah: Hey friends, welcome back to Women Who Ship. Last time we talked about your recognition and promotion squad, and we focused mainly on the roles of the mentor and the sponsor. But this week I really want to dig into why you need a coach, and I'll share some actual tools that I use with clients every day to help them improve their mindset, both for achieving recognition and promotion, and just getting their mindset right to deal with the everyday challenges of working in the tech industry. So it's interesting. I was working with a client recently, and she actually told me that she had never considered the idea that she could change her thinking. Her approach had always been to just work harder and power through. And she hadn't considered that every thought that came into her brain didn't need to be considered a cold, hard truth, that you could challenge your thoughts and you could use that to drive the right types of actions. that help you to succeed and to get the promotion and the recognition that you're looking for. So if there's one takeaway that I want you to take from today's episode, it's this Thoughts are optional. The story that you are layering onto your career right now is something that you get to choose. And let me tell you a very deeply personal story about how this kind of came about for me, how I discovered coaching, how I learned this self-coaching toolkit to help me succeed and to achieve some things that I really at one time didn't think was possible in my career. So I'll take you back to about five years ago. I had a dream that I wanted to land a role at a major tech company. I wanted to be maybe in product management or program management. And I had spent years searching for the right fit. I had applied for a number of roles. I had gone through the interview processes, sometimes even making it to a final round, interviewing with VPs. And I would ultimately end up getting a no. So anybody right now who's navigating the job market is familiar with this story. You have to be prepared to get a lot of rejections. And this can come from every layer. You know, you're gonna get rejected by the applicant tracking systems. You may go through a couple of rounds of interviews and end up being rejected. sometimes you can get pretty far and it can still happen. Now, for me personally, this was compounded by some really difficult situations in my work and personal life as well. So there was kind of a theme for the whole year. I called it my year of rejection. And unfortunately, it was a theme that was like intensely emotional for me. So in addition to trying to look for a job and go into a situation where you're kind of setting yourself up to be rejected. I was also experiencing a really difficult situation at work. I had another team member that was kind of, he had set out to alienate me and make it kind of hard for me to be accepted by the rest of the group at work. And I had even had like some friendships that kind of fell away and I felt rejected in those situations as well. So it's really interesting how sometimes with your mindset, when you need to get past a certain theme, it will show up. In a bunch of different areas until you can figure out a way around it. Now, how this was showing up for me, I was taking the constant rejections and starting to build this internal story that maybe I really just wasn't good enough. And that is a common, you know, thought that my brain will offer me during difficult times. you're just not good enough. So, in my mind, I was taking all of these no's as very realistic evidence. That things weren't just going to work out for me, that I was never going to land my dream job. Look, it's I've got all this proof. And maybe people really don't like me all that much. You know, I'm having this difficult situation at work. It's probably just that I'm not good enough and people don't like me. a little dramatic here. In the moment, like, you know, your your mind, like you're buying into this high drama situation. But in the moment, it really did feel a hundred percent real to me. And the problem, like the root of the issue there, it wasn't the rejections for the jobs. It wasn't the difficult peer. It was the fact that I was taking that and making it mean something about me, about my worth as a person. So those of you who've been around, you've gone through the Beyond Certainty series with me. Maybe you've downloaded my Get Recognized at Work playbook. So, you know where I'm going with the first couple of steps. The first thing is to separate the circumstance that you have from the thought that is coming up in your mind. So just looking at our self-coaching model that I use, that I teach all of my clients, the circumstance needs to be very neutral. So the neutral situation for me during that time was. I had applied for jobs and received rejections. That's it. But the story that I layered on top of that was the thought, I'm not good enough. And how, like, just think for yourself, when you think that thought, what kind of a feeling does it bring up in your body? For me, it feels hopeless. I feel deeply discouraged when I think that. And so that feeling is the third thing that we need to identify. What's this feeling that the thought creates? And when you have that feeling and you're operating from that in your body, what kind of actions do you take from it? So if I'm feeling deeply hopeless and discouraged, That's not a great mindset to be in walking into a high-stakes interview with a VP, or even to walk into team meetings because I'm going to reflect that in my actions. I might hold back, I might overexplain, I might be too nervous, I might act guarded because I'm expecting a no. I might preemptively reject others by pulling back. Because I'm concerned about how I'm going to feel about the rejection. What will happen is because you're letting that feeling drive your actions, you're not projecting the calm confidence that the VP is looking for, which then leads to another rejection, kind of proving the whole thought right. So then you go into this negative loop of where you've had the experience, you didn't show up right for it, but then you just continue to recreate the experience. with the way that you're thinking about it. And one thing I want to point out is that with a job rejection, there is going to be kind of a natural clean disappointment. So you don't get a job, you are interested in it, maybe you've even devoted a lot of time to like going through the assignments that they create for you, doing the tests, going to all the interviews. And so it's natural to feel a level of disappointment when that doesn't work out. But the disappointment should be temporary. So you should feel that disappointment, let it flow through your body in like a minute or a minute and a half. It should pass and you should be able to move on. But what was happening for me is since I was layering on the story, I'm not good enough, then I create that kind of dirty suffering that kept me trapped in this negative cycle and negative loop. Going back to the beginning of the episode, the number one thing I want you to remember is that thoughts are optional. So when you're thinking about as a hiring manager yourself or as a person who's gone through job interviews, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of reasons why a job interview doesn't work out at a specific time for a specific person. I can tell you for one, as a hiring manager, I've never been in a hiring committee situation where we were making a judgment on a person's self-worth. We were not sitting there saying, well, that person just wasn't good enough. There are literally thousands of reasons why a job may not work out in the time. It's simply market data about that specific role fit. It's not evaluation of your capability or your worth as a person. once I found coaching and learned these self-coaching tools, I stopped believing that every rejection was a verdict on my value. And this was so important for me. It actually worked very quickly as well. So within a few months of me learning these tools and applying them regularly, I did land my dream job at a tech company. And then I kept using the tools to get recognized and to be promoted. And I still use these tools today to help other women achieve their goals at work, as well as to help myself achieve my goals in my coaching business and as the host for Women Who Ship. So, my first tool is to continue practicing what you learned from the Beyond Certainty series, separating the facts of your situation from the story that you're making up about it. So the next time that you face a difficult situation at work, I want you to write down the circumstance as neutrally as possible. So you want to make sure you're not layering on any meaning about it whatsoever. In my case, it needs to be just clean. I received an email that I didn't get a job I had applied for. That's as basic as you can get it. Then what you would do is write down the story or the thought that your mind has layered on top of this. So in my example, it was, I'm not good enough. And once you can start seeing the difference between the circumstance and the way you've chosen to think about it, you can see that your thoughts are driving an emotion. Which is then going to drive some of the actions that are following it. So is this thought creating a negative loop of hopelessness? And is it driving actions that then kind of sabotage what I'm hoping to achieve? The second tool I have for you is to spot your blind spots. So this is one of the things that I personally do for my clients as a coach, and that my own coach does for me as well. So when I'm talking about, you know, my negative stories with my coach, she can point out to me when I'm believing that a thought. Is actually a circumstance. So when we get into our own drama, our brain kind of acts like a lawyer that is building a really airtight case for why the negative story is completely true. You heard earlier how during that time I had really bought in that all of these rejections were just proof that I wasn't good enough. And I was really buying into that negativity and that story that I wasn't going to be able to land my dream job, that my goals weren't possible for me, that my dreams weren't possible for me. So a coach can act as kind of a mirror to point out when you're buying into that negative. thought pattern that is optional and treating it like it's an unchangeable fact. Now, another thing a coach can do for you, and a tool I'd like for you to try as well, is to hold space for what's possible. You can't leap from that feeling of hopelessness, that thought I'm not good enough, to a super positive. Affirmation like, I'm going to crush this VP interview. Your brain isn't going to accept that. It's going to think it's false. And so what I want you to find is just a thought that is slightly better, but believable in your body. So you want the thought to be just 10% better. So if you've identified a negative thought that is driving some of your actions, then you'll want to look out. For something that's just a little bit more positive that you can actually believe. So, as an example, I went back to my notes from that time frame of when I was really struggling with the job rejections. And I found that a thought that I intentionally chose to believe was, well, that didn't work out. But there are other opportunities out there for me. So what works about this thought is that it does acknowledge that there was some clean disappointment there, but there's no drama. It's just, well, that one didn't work out. And then it cuts off the dirty suffering because I didn't say it didn't work out because I'm not good enough and I'm a failure and I'll never achieve my goals. I just said, Wait, it just didn't work out. But there are other opportunities out there for me. And so that's where it's opening up a space. I did believe that because, you know, even now, if you look, there's tons of job opportunities. There's tons of things out there. So there are opportunities that are out there. And I just have to find the right one for me in the right timing. So that thought was my 10% better thought. That really helped me get out of that negative cycle of believing that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't going to achieve my dreams and that I couldn't do it. All of that turned it around for me and helped me coach myself into actually landing that dream job. So, your assignment for this week is I want you to block 15 minutes and run your own mini self-coaching audit. So, write down that recent disappointment or stressful situation at work as a very neutral circumstance. Write down the story that your brain offered you about that. And then I want you to brainstorm that 10% better thought that allows you to feel some relief from the negative cycle. It gives you a little bit of a foothold to move forward. Thank you so much for listening today. Go out there, notice your thoughts, build that self-trust, and let's go ship some good stuff together. If you've been listening to this episode and nodding along, you might be asking yourself, how do I actually take the amazing work I'm already shipping and make it visible to the sponsors and leaders who influence my career? Because here is the hard truth for senior women in tech. Quiet high performance is not a career plan. Too often we hold entire projects together with invisible glue work, doing the heavy operational lifting, stabilizing the team after re-orgs, and writing the documentation. But we do it in silence, waiting for a gold star that is never going to be handed to us. If you are ready to break that cycle, I want you to download my free Get Recognized at Work playbook. It is a practical five-step system designed to help you stop waiting for external praise, build an unshakable private evidence file of your own wins, and start talking about your impact with calm, unapologetic confidence. Inside you'll find my exact template to turn your day-to-day tasks into high impact metrics using my formula, How to build a weekly recognition retro ritual that retrains your brain to notice your own value. And a step-by-step roadmap to map your own visibility circle so you can share your work with skip levels and key partners without feeling like you're bragging. You don't need to be louder, flashier, or someone you're not. You just need a system to make your results impossible to overlook. Visit Go. dot coachsarahwilliams.com forward slash recognition right now to download your copy. Let's stop doing the invisible work and start getting recognized for the results you actually create.