I’ll never forget my PhD admission interview years ago. My (then future) supervisor, a gentle, kind and very compassionate human, told me: “Many international students quit within the first 6 months. The stress of moving countries and the endless improvement feedback gets to them. What will sustain you through it all? What’s your plan for keeping your joy and motivation when all you’ll get is requests to change things?”
I remember confidently replying how insanely passionate I was about my research topic (which to this day I can swear is one of the best ways to survive a PhD!), and that our move to Australia was something our small family had considered deeply and an adventure we were more than ready for. The latter turned out to be very far from the truth, as I would later find out.
I also remember telling him I’ve always valued feedback and every opportunity to stretch and grow, and in fact, one of the reasons I was choosing to leave my whole life behind to move countries and become a student again was because I had reached a plateau in my career. Things had gotten a bit too comfortable. Borderline boring. I needed a challenge. I wanted the improvement feedback. I welcomed it. And then I started receiving pages and pages of red-marked notes on every one of my research submissions. Be careful what you wish for!
Those years of stepping so far outside my comfort zone were both humbling and growth-inducing. I was lucky to get all that improvement feedback from someone I knew cared deeply about me and my learning, and his kind steadfast support helped build my skill without undermining my confidence - or better said, he knew when to push and when to step back and how to pull me out of the pit of despair when I unavoidably fell into it. The ongoing nudge to improve, delivered with care, can be a powerful motivating force when you’re starting something new, but it can become a heavier burden to carry when you are already experienced at something and have become your own biggest critic, never quite satisfied with your own performance.
Where is the healthy boundary between the drive to keep developing yourself and the compulsion of always perfecting because you’re ‘never quite enough’?
In some roles, people get formally evaluated once a year. Feedback might be more informal the rest of the time. In professional facilitation, you get evaluated, formally, every time you stand up to deliver any piece of learning. In many ways this is a tricky profession for those who (like me) are either suffering or recovering from what I’ve come to call the “‘straight A’ student syndrome”.
These are people with a history of putting lots of pressure on themselves to excel at whatever they do, all of the time; people who are never happy with their own performance (or others’ for that matter) and always feel this niggling need to polish, perfect, improve something. I say it’s a tricky profession for us because this constant scrutiny from clients and workshop participants can become the perfect trigger for self-criticism and discontent with yourself, and might even push a facilitator to focus more on how they are being perceived by participants than on what learning impact they are actually creating.
I was lucky, very early on in my career, to have a trusted mentor in the L&D space who told me something that forever shaped my relationship to this profession and my own purpose and measure of self-worth. She said
“The best facilitators are those who are in it for the people in the room, not for themselves; those who intentionally step back from the spotlight and move the light on the learners, and who are willing to sacrifice being liked for the gift of being truly of service to someone else’s growth.”
Twenty years on, those wise words remain my North Star. I still feel the trepidation when I start working with a new group - that prickly feeling of being observed and assessed, that sense of having to work for people’s attention, respect or curiosity. But every time I remind myself I’m not there to be liked, admired or popular. I’m not there to be the centre of attention either. I’m there to create a meaningful, useful learning experience, and if that happens, it means I’ve done a good job. I step into every workshop with an intention to be fully myself and fully attuned to the humans in front of me. To be myself FOR them. I care about their needs while also owning who I am and not trying to be anyone different.
This has allowed me to build a connection with the leaders I work with because I come to them as willing to learn from what they know, as I am to share some of what I know. I come fully aware that the collective experience and wisdom of any group I facilitate will always be greater than my own. I genuinely believe we walk side by side in the learning space, and I give them my truthful feedback just as I ask them to give me theirs and welcome it when it comes, even when it’s hard to hear. It really works! We all learn and, amazingly, we also end up liking and trusting each other because, I found, it’s hard not to like people who come to you with their guard down and invite, but don’t push, you to lower your own.
Also, it’s hard not to build trust when your feedback is invited and welcomed and when you receive honest feedback in turn. But that genuine, developmental back and forth requires us, I noticed, to build a core of self-esteem where we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are already worthy as human beings, no matter what anyone says about our work performance.
It is part of my profession to be ready to be found wanting in some areas, every single time I do my job. Keeping the balance between welcoming, listening to and actioning feedback, and staying mindful of what is mine to own and purposefully NOT change has been one of the most significant developmental efforts of my adult life.
Over the past year, I’ve been involved in designing and facilitating a few learning programs that have pushed me further outside my comfort zone than most before them. Projects where the expectations were even higher than usual, the margin for error smaller and the feedback ongoing, detailed and always focused on improvement. They made me reflect on this fine line between welcoming improvement suggestions as a gift of growth and letting some wash over you, trusting you are already doing enough. Between inviting contrary opinions that challenge and stretch your thinking and make your ideas better, and standing your ground, trusting your instincts and intuition, even when others believe you might be wrong. Between welcoming well-meaning feedback without defensiveness and genuinely seeking to improve, and knowing when people’s feedback to you says more about their own needs, worries and concerns than about your performance.
I find it a tricky balance to hold, and I notice I’m not alone in it. My clients, too are struggling with the pressure to always be and do better. With this sense that spotting what’s working and going well is much less valuable than looking for mistakes and improvement areas. With this underlying belief that we need to keep perfecting ourselves, that what and how we do things is never quite good enough. We make it a badge of honour to pursue perfection and stay critical towards ourselves and others in the service of excellence. But at what cost?
As noble and well-meaning as it might be, does this whole drive for improvement have a darker side? Do we end up fuelling a perpetual sense of discontent? A low-grade unhappiness that’s temporarily soothed by our successes and achieved milestones, only to come back with a vengeance as soon as we set our sights on our next goal?
I notice this outside of work, too. People never quite being content with their bodies, their looks, their wellness routines, their relationships. Wanting to see our partners do and be better, our kids aim higher, and our lives always improve in some shape or form. I wonder if, at times, we confuse the existential drive to grow and thrive with the necessity of cultivating chronic discontent as fuel for that growth.
Can you keep dreaming and growing while at the same time feeling at peace with who you are, what you have and where you have gotten to in life?
As a parent, it’s a tension I’m deeply aware of. I encourage my child to stoke her passions, to work hard for what she cares about, to be honest about her mistakes and aim to learn from them, to be resilient and perseverant in getting better at things that matter to her, to stay open to feedback, knowing she can always improve what or how she does things. And at the same time, I believe, and I deeply want her to know she is enough. I want her to trust she is just as worthy when she succeeds at something as she is when she makes mistakes, falls or stumbles. That improving her work doesn’t mean something in her as a person is lacking. That she is enough as she is, while also having the potential to grow into a bigger version of herself.
The wise and prescient educator Maria Montessori called this life force - that pushes us forward, into growth - ‘horme’ (from the Greek goddess Horme - the spirit of energy and forward-movement). She believed every child comes into this world animated by this life force that drives them to try things, repeat actions over and over until they master a skill, then move on to the next one. As the acorn has inside of it the life impulse to turn into an oak tree, so do healthy, thriving humans have the impulse to grow, do more, be more, strive to reach their fullest potential just because they can. She believed that, nurtured in the right way, without excessive pressure and unnecessary external feedback, ‘horme’ can survive inside of us as an intrinsic, healthy driving motivational force that spurs us on to become good, productive, happy humans.
But then come societal pressures, comparisons, projected dreams and aspirations adults lay on the shoulders of children or the reverse, a lack of challenge or sense of direction out of a misguided desire to protect and eliminate all pressure. Then come warped definitions of ‘success’ via social media feeds. Cultural fads telling us we have to be/look a certain way to be worthy of love and appreciation. Professional pressures that make us forget how to celebrate success and instead become stuck on always fixing, tweaking or improving something that doesn’t seem to be working quite right. And there is always something to improve! Out of it all grows the introjected sense of ‘not enoughness’ that turns the innate, intrinsic drive of ‘horme’ into the extrinsic pressure of ‘self-improvement’. It turns ‘you are enough, and you have the potential to grow’ into ‘you are lacking something and have to fix yourself’.
For ‘horme’ to stay strong into adulthood, for self-esteem to stay healthy and motivations intrinsic, people need a fine balance of healthy challenge and steady support towards goals that are meaningful to them. It is as true for children as it is for adults. But sadly, this balance is often broken in homes and in organisations because too many of us have this warped sense of ourselves as somehow broken and in need of being fixed, of somehow lacking and needing to make up for what is missing.
I wonder what might happen if we started to look at our own mistakes as opportunities to learn rather than signs that we are not being good or doing well enough? What might happen if we held the next piece of critical feedback that comes our way with curiosity and did not immediately assume it means we have somehow failed for not doing things perfectly?
Striving to always better ourselves from a constant sense of scarcity can be incredibly exhausting. I see so many exhausted people all around. People who are tired of hearing one more person ask them to do something different. I often feel exhausted myself.
I wonder what might happen if we give ourselves a little break. A little grace. A little more forgiveness for our many imperfections. A little more patience to allow ourselves to try again and again those things that feel hard. A little more time to grow without rushing ourselves. A little more benefit of the doubt when we’ve not quite lived up to our own standards. Perhaps fewer standards. A little more love and gentleness for this acorn inside of us that’s doing its mighty best to become an oak tree.
The world feels like such a rushed, harsh and unforgiving place right now. Perhaps we could use a little more kindness towards ourselves, and maybe challenging that belief that to continue improving, we always have to look for our failings.
What have you done well lately? What can you be proud of? What have you learned from some of your worst moments that has grown you into a slightly wiser human? Where does Horme still shine inside of you? What are you curious to do and try just for the sake of it, not out of some goal to make anything better? What might you find if you take a moment to stop fixing and polishing and just notice the wonder of what already is?
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