Latest / Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic / 80: Self-Doubt or Skill Gap? | Why Knowing More Isn’t Always Enough

Transcript

80: Self-Doubt or Skill Gap? | Why Knowing More Isn’t Always Enough · Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic

• 0:03
  Tania: Welcome to Banish the Lies, the podcast where we outsmart that sneaky inner critic and get closer to the truth that sets us free.
• 0:10
  Tania: I'm Tania Cervoni your host and fellow work in Progress here to share real stories and small shifts that help you reclaim what fear and doubt once stole.
• 0:21
  Tania: Let's jump in.
• 0:28
  Speaker: Hello, dear friend, and welcome back to another episode of Banish the Lies.
• 0:31
  Speaker: This morning, I was on a walk with my favorite little furry friend.
• 0:36
  Speaker: His name is Duke.
• 0:37
  Speaker: He's our mini double doodle.
• 0:39
  Speaker: And as we were walking along, I decided to listen to a podcast.
• 0:43
  Speaker: The guest on this particular podcast made a statement that really struck me.
• 0:49
  Speaker: He said, "Skills will always bow to belief systems.
• 0:54
  Speaker: Skills will always bow to belief systems." And I was thinking about how true that is and how much I'm seeing it play out right now as I raise a teenage daughter.
• 1:06
  Speaker: My daughter is really ambitious.
• 1:08
  Speaker: She's taken on a very aggressive course load.
• 1:11
  Speaker: She wants perfect grades.
• 1:13
  Speaker: She wants to work hard, and study, and take the right courses, and do all the things that she believes will set her up for success in the future.
• 1:20
  Speaker: And of course, I love that.
• 1:24
  Speaker: I think it's great.
• 1:25
  Speaker: I want her to work hard.
• 1:26
  Speaker: I want her to learn and develop skills and challenge herself.
• 1:30
  Speaker: But I also find myself trying to balance that message with something I'm not sure school necessarily teaches us.
• 1:38
  Speaker: Because you can take the right courses, you can get the grades, you can develop the skills, and build an impressive list of accomplishments, but if underneath all of that you don't believe you're capable, if you're afraid of getting something wrong, if your confidence depends on always performing well, then all of those skills can only take you so far.
• 2:04
  Speaker: And I think that's the tension I'm trying to help her understand while admittedly still learning it myself.
• 2:11
  Speaker: We definitely want to invest in skills, absolutely, but we also have to pay attention to the beliefs developing alongside of them.
• 2:19
  Speaker: And to be clear, I've had a lifetime love affair with pursuing skills and learning.
• 2:25
  Speaker: I started my career as a high school teacher.
• 2:28
  Speaker: I burned out after three years, and then segued into corporate learning, and I cannot tell you the number of workshops, certifications, books, all of that stuff that I've completed.
• 2:40
  Speaker: And I remember at one point looking fondly at my bookcase because back in the day, you'd get these binders when you went to a workshop, so that's just giving you some insight into how old I am, and I used to call them my vinyl trophies.
• 2:54
  Speaker: These trophies signified completion, but not necessarily application or transformation.
• 3:02
  Speaker: And as much as I'm still a learning and development professional by day, and I deeply love learning, I've also recognized that there have been times when I expected learning to do something it simply couldn't do And that is On its own translate into the outcomes you desire.
• 3:22
  Speaker: Now, again, skills are critical, and if I'm gonna go to a doctor, I want that doctor to have gone to medical school, just to be clear.
• 3:31
  Speaker: But I've also seen this phenomena in myself and in so many people who can have extraordinary technical ability and still not use it fully because underneath something in them says, "I'm not ready," or, "Who am I to do this?" Or, "I need more experience," or, "I can't risk looking foolish," or, "Other people are better at this than I am." And I've seen in myself how I've tried to solve these kind of belief problems with skill solutions.
• 4:07
  Speaker: You know, the thinking that I just need that one more course, and then I'll feel confident, or I just need this certification, and then I can put my work out into the world with credibility.
• 4:19
  Speaker: There's this assumption that gets reinforced, I think, in our society that if we learn more, we'll become more capable, then we'll feel more confident, and then we'll take action.
• 4:30
  Speaker: But I'm not sure it always works in that order.
• 4:34
  Speaker: Sometimes we need just enough belief to take the first action, and with that action, we get some practice, and through that practice, we then develop the skill.
• 4:47
  Speaker: And then we start gathering evidence that says, "Hey, maybe I can do this." And then based on that evidence, we start to expand our belief system, which allows us to take on even bigger action.
• 5:02
  Speaker: And it's an iterative process.
• 5:04
  Speaker: You don't have to arrive at some glorious state of unshakable self-belief before doing anything.
• 5:11
  Speaker: You can start small.
• 5:13
  Speaker: And I think this raises an interesting question for those of us who, like me, can find ourselves in this constant pursuit of the next qualification in order to feel credible.
• 5:25
  Speaker: And that question is, am I actually missing a skill or am I trying to solve a belief problem with yet another skill?
• 5:35
  Speaker: And I think about my podcast journey as a little mini case study here.
• 5:40
  Speaker: Yes, I absolutely invested in taking a podcasting course 'cause I really knew nothing about podcasting nor where to start, and it was truly helpful.
• 5:50
  Speaker: I learned about software and, you know, buying a good microphone, how to edit, and just different production stuff.
• 5:57
  Speaker: It was great, it was all important.
• 5:59
  Speaker: But none of those skills in isolation were actually what made me eventually hit record.
• 6:06
  Speaker: I mean, yes, to some degree, they helped me feel a little more ready, but even with the skills, I sat on my dream for a little while.
• 6:15
  Speaker: What eventually changed was that I made a decision.
• 6:19
  Speaker: I decided it was time.
• 6:21
  Speaker: I decided this mattered, and I connected my heart with a bigger vision of how I wanted to serve and show up.
• 6:29
  Speaker: And I think the really important part here for me personally was that I was able to create the permission space for myself to be a beginner, and that was huge.
• 6:42
  Speaker: I've been a learning and development professional my whole life, and yet somehow I've always secretly wished that I could be the exception to how learning works.
• 6:52
  Speaker: Essentially, I never wanted to make mistakes.
• 6:55
  Speaker: I never wanted to be a beginner.
• 6:57
  Speaker: I wanted to learn something and go straight to mastery And apparently that's just not how it works.
• 7:03
  Speaker: So when it came to the podcast, I had to accept that my early episodes were likely to make the future Tania cringe.
• 7:16
  Speaker: And it's true, when I listen to some of my earlier ones, I can hear the difference.
• 7:23
  Speaker: Not to say that I'm this masterful podcaster now, but even in the relatively short amount of time I've been doing this, I can hear the growth.
• 7:33
  Speaker: But that growth required doing it messy at the beginning, doing it imperfectly, being willing to put something out publicly that I knew wasn't necessarily going to be amazing.
• 7:44
  Speaker: I guess what I'm saying is, I stopped requiring competence before I allowed myself to develop experience.
• 7:52
  Speaker: And somewhere in that process, I recognized something you may have heard me say in a previous episode, that being ready isn't an emotion, it's a decision.
• 8:04
  Speaker: That's actually something I learned from fellow podcaster, Erin McQuaid, and it's a tough one for me because I've spent a lot of my life waiting to feel ready before doing things.
• 8:15
  Speaker: But I didn't become a podcaster because I'd mastered the technology.
• 8:21
  Speaker: I became a podcaster because I decided to make the podcast.
• 8:25
  Speaker: And this is where we bump up against identity.
• 8:28
  Speaker: How do we see ourselves?
• 8:31
  Speaker: How do we define ourselves?
• 8:33
  Speaker: Because sometimes the question isn't simply, "Can I do this?" You know, from a skills perspective.
• 8:40
  Speaker: It's, "Am I someone who does this?" For example, you know, someone can learn the skill of setting boundaries while still seeing herself as the person who never wants to let anyone down.
• 8:53
  Speaker: Or a leader can learn the technical steps and the skills of delegation while still believing that if she were truly competent, she should be able to handle everything herself.
• 9:05
  Speaker: Or someone can learn presentation skills while still quietly identifying as someone who's just not comfortable or good at public speaking.
• 9:14
  Speaker: We can sometimes acquire a new behavior, a new skill faster than we can update an old identity.
• 9:22
  Speaker: And when those two things come into conflict, guess which one wins?
• 9:28
  Speaker: It's identity every time, and that's why skills will bow to belief systems.
• 9:36
  Speaker: So if there's something you want to do, something you want to become better at, by all means, ask yourself, "What am I trying to create?
• 9:46
  Speaker: What am I trying to get better at?
• 9:48
  Speaker: And what skill would genuinely help me?" And I say genuinely, because we want to discern whether we actually have a skill gap or whether we're hoping another skill is going to fill a confidence gap.
• 10:00
  Speaker: And then I'd offer one other question: What would I have to believe about myself to actually use that skill?
• 10:10
  Speaker: And maybe an even more interesting question, what am I currently treating as a skill gap that might actually be a belief gap?
• 10:21
  Speaker: And please don't hear me saying that you need to go from zero to a hundred in terms of your belief systems.
• 10:29
  Speaker: If, if the belief isn't there yet, you don't have to convince yourself that, "Hey, I'm gonna be brilliant at this." You may only need enough belief to say, "I can learn this.
• 10:41
  Speaker: I can survive being new at this.
• 10:44
  Speaker: I can survive failing at this.
• 10:47
  Speaker: I can do something imperfectly at the beginning, and I don't have to be impressive while I'm learning.
• 10:53
  Speaker: I can take the next step before I feel ready because I've decided this matters." So yes, by all means, develop the skills, take the course, read the book, listen to the podcasts, practice, get coaching.
• 11:07
  Speaker: But don't ask yet another skill to do the job of a belief, because you can have all the tools sitting there waiting for you and still never pick them up.
• 11:19
  Speaker: Skills will always bow to belief systems.
• 11:23
  Speaker: So again, maybe the question isn't only what do I need to learn next?
• 11:30
  Speaker: Maybe it's what would I need to believe to use what I already know
• 11:41
  Tania: Thanks for listening to Banish The Lies.
• 11:43
  Tania: If today's episode resonated with you, take a moment to let it settle in.
• 11:47
  Tania: And maybe share it with a friend who could use it too.
• 11:49
  Tania: Lies, lose their power when we're brave enough to challenge them.
• 11:53
  Tania: I'm Tania Cervoni and until next time, be kind to yourself.
• 11:58
  Tania: And remember, you're not broken, you're not alone, and you don't have to stay stuck.