Does your work performance feel like a loaded topic?

The other night at a networking event, I made a joke about being my own boss, and a friend asked me if I do my own annual reviews at the end of the year. 

I think she was kidding, but I actually really liked the idea.

The truth is, I review my business and my performance quite a lot, and not just at year-end. 

This keen attention to performance is nothing new. When I worked in an office, I was always evaluating my performance and asking my boss how I was doing and what I could be doing better.

That being said, the way I think about my own performance, and the way my evaluations feel, is really different now, and it is 100% coaching that has made the difference. 

Back when I worked in corporate, I was always trying to do more, do better, get ahead in any way I could. 

Part of what created that behavior was a drive to be excellent, but another part of what created that behavior was a deep fear of uncertainty and a desire to control my work life (and really my whole life) as much as possible. 

And also, of course, a deep fear of failure or even just mediocrity. 

I wanted to be amazing. At everything. All the time. 

But what I really wanted from being amazing was just to feel safe. 

I thought that the way I could get to safety was through excellence and certainty.

Turns out, I had things backwards. 

Because my anxious, perfectionist brain was never going to think I was excellent enough or that things were certain enough for me to feel safe. 

So I just kept striving and striving and striving, but no matter what I achieved, I never felt better. 

And y'all. I achieved a lot. 

But this is how the brain works. It will tell you, ok, you just need to do x or y or z, and then we'll feel safe. But then you do x, y, and z, and your brain is like, oh, x, y, and z don't matter anymore. Now we need to do a, b, and c. 

For me, a perfect example of this is my student loans. I felt completely haunted by them for years, and I thought that once I paid them off I would finally feel free. I did eventually pay them off, and for about four minutes, I felt amazing. Then my brain forgot about them completely. 

COMPLETELY. 

It was already thinking about the next thing I should go and accomplish.

And y'all, there is nothing wrong with accomplishment. I still love accomplishing things. I still love getting shit done and crushing it at my job. 

But when we're always thinking that the next thing will be the accomplishment that changes everything, we have it backwards. When we're thinking that we just need to be sure our manager thinks we're doing great, and then we'll feel safe, we have it backwards. 

In order for the next accomplishment to feel amazing or even just good, we need to learn how to enjoy the accomplishments we've already completed. In order to feel safe and trust that we're doing a good job, we need to learn to feel safe with uncertainty, because uncertainty is part of life. 

Otherwise, our brain is always looking to the future for its sense of success and safety.

And y'all. Life does not happen in the future. Life only happens in the now. When you get to the future where you have accomplished what you're currently working on, it will not be the future anymore. It will only be the new "now." And your brain will not care about that accomplishment if you haven't taught it how to care about accomplishments it's already completed. 

In order for me to feel safe back when I worked in the office, I didn't need to keep accomplishing and accomplishing and accomplishing. I needed to learn to feel safe first, and accomplish second. 

When we don't feel safe, no accomplishment or success or amazing performance review can create that safety for us. 

But many of us have the idea that they can, and that we just need to try a little harder and get to the next one, which will magically fix everything, even though none of our other accomplishments fixed anything. 

And this is exactly why we wind up in burnout. 

When we are trying to use our success to create safety, we never get to the point where we feel like things are good and we can relax. 

Our brains never say, ok, this is good. You're ok now.

Instead, we just keep striving and our brains keep worrying and the cycle repeats. 

This is why so many of us are sad and exhausted and anxious despite all of our accomplishments and accolades and our glowing performance reviews. 

This is also why we're so upset when we don't get those things. 

We live in a culture that idealizes striving and accomplishing and working your ass off. We live in a culture that says that if you just succeed enough, you'll be happy.

It doesn't work. But because we're all conditioned to believe it, we strive until we can't, even when none of our previous striving did the thing we wanted it to do. 

And while this all might sound like terrible news, it's actually good news. 

Because no matter where you are in your career, whether you have the glowing performance reviews or not, you can feel better. 

Right now. 

Because safety is an inside job. 

Joy is an inside job. 

Even purpose is an inside job. 

You don't need your job to create it for you. And your job can't create it for you. 

Even if you think your job does or did create it for you, it's been you all along. 

We all have this superpower even if we don't know about it, even if we don't realize we're the ones doing it. 

How is this true?

It's because safety and joy and purpose aren't created by external circumstances. They're created by our thoughts about those circumstances. 

That's why we can have awards and money and a boss who loves us and still feel anxious and terrified.

And it's also why some people can be in the middle of a job hunt after being laid off and feel safe and pretty certain they're going to land something great any minute. 

I was always in the first camp.

That's how I got here. Even though I was a super high performer, it didn't fix my anxiety for me, and if anything, I actually became more anxious even as things went increasingly well for me professionally and personally.

That's a big part of what brought me to coaching. I needed to learn a new way of doing things, a new way of thinking about the world. 

Honestly, I've met very few people who belong to the second camp, but I know they exist. On the whole, I think most of us are a combination. We might be super resilient in one kind of situation and then struggle in another. 

But the gift that coaching has given me is that I also know that I can change. 

I know that I can become (and that I am becoming) someone who can create her own sense of safety and joy and purpose, no matter what. 

That's what this work is all about, to me.

My clients kick ass and do amazing things.

They switch jobs.

They start businesses.

Sometimes, they keep their current jobs and instead change how they show up to them, which makes their same job feel like a whole new job. 

No matter what work they choose to do, they know how to show up to it in a way that will not burn them out. 

But what I love about coaching is that this work teaches them to be able to do so much more than that.

This work teaches them that they can change, and it teaches them how to do it.

Whether they want to create a sense of safety or whether they want to create a thriving side hustle, coaching teaches them that they can do it and it also shows them how to do it. 

And here's another added bonus: this work makes it so much easier to look honestly at your own performance.

To see what you're doing well.

To see what you'd like to do better.

And to handle that information easily, because your work performance is no longer on the hook for creating your safety or your sense of self or your right to be a person and take up space in the world. 

And being able to look honestly at what you've done is essential to creating whatever it is you want to create.

It's another way that we have things sort of backwards. 

We think we'll be happy if we get the feedback that we've done well. But if we're not where we want to be, we need the other feedback, the feedback about what we could do better, so that we can level up. 

We're able to become the people we want to be when we're willing to see both what we've done well and what we would like to do better, and when we waste no time criticizing ourselves about that and instead just enjoy what went well and then get back to work on anything else we'd like to create. 

This is what resilience is. 

This is what safety is.

And this is how to be truly productive in a world where shit does not always go according to plan. 

It's not having things always go perfectly and always getting that glowing performance review.

It's being able to show up, do your thing, and enjoy yourself, whether life is perfect or not and keep going. Not because you need another accomplishment. But just because you want to create something new and interesting. 

Take a look at your last year. What went well? What would you like to do better? And what are you going to do to make it happen?