Stop discounting your past successes

If I asked you to tell me about 10 accomplishments that you’re proud of in your career, would you be able to?

If you struggle to feel confident at work, I suspect the answer is no. Perhaps you can only think of one or two things off the top of your head; perhaps you have to search deep inside your memory to access anything at all; or perhaps you just find the whole exercise really uncomfortable.

Probably, when you think of something that might be worth adding to the list, your brain starts to immediately discount or diminish it. You think it doesn't really count because:

• “everyone at work has done the same thing"
• “I should have done a better job"
• “anyone could have done it with a bit of work"

Your brain is basically determined for you to feel bad, or at the very least ambivalent, about your past successes!  

Now don't worry. There’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s trying to preserve your life by keeping all potential dangers at the top of your mind and anything that might make you feel complacent, buried deep inside. It’s our natural negativity bias. And it served our species well in the past. Not so much these days.

Your brain doesn’t understand modern society. It doesn’t know that you’re not at risk of being eaten by a lion at any moment. It doesn’t realise that diminishing your past accomplishments is doing you more harm than good.

The real danger these days is that, when think you’re not good enough or feel overwhelmed by a new project, you don’t have easy access to evidence that you're the type of person who can figure it out. 

So, what's the solution?

Well, if we want to feel more confident, we need to supervise our brains a little more deliberately. We need to remind ourselves, on purpose, about our past accomplishments and gently steer our brain away from thoughts that discount or diminish them. 

Start by grabbing a piece of paper and writing down your list of 10 things.

Remember, on purpose, what you’re capable of achieving.

If you’d like to feel more confident at work and learn the next step in my process, just click THIS LINK to sign up for a free call today.