The Radical Gift of Being Seen

My life has been transformed, at critical junctures, by people who believed I was capable of things I didn't yet know I could do. Here's to the art to believing in others in ways that lift them up.

I work with many brilliant, talented people in many professional contexts, and I often notice crippling levels of self-doubt that hold them back, keep them small, frozen, discontent, holding off on their dreams and aspirations, putting up with toxic environments at work just because they don’t trust they deserve more. Most of these people seem to be women, though I must say I’ve also met exceptional men who see themselves as less than they really are. I won’t go into the reasons for the apparent gender gap in self-confidence, but what I’d love to focus on here is the subtle and powerful art of meaningfully lifting people up when they need it. Because so many fabulous people need to be seen and uplifted right now!

I find that building up faith in yourself is tricky business. It’s not enough to have people tell you “you should back yourself up more!” or “trust your voice!”. In fact, encouragements alone can often backfire because when the gap between what you feel inside (small, insecure, ‘not enough’) and what others tell you (“you are strong!”, “you can do this!”) can feel daunting. You might feel even more like a fraud because they seem to hold this beautiful image of you that you don’t hold yourself. You might feel like you are tricking them and will surely let them down. So encouragement alone is not enough. In fact, encouragement not backed by genuine proof of faith in that person’s abilities can be unintentionally disempowering.

I was lucky to have early proof of what truly seeing the potential of someone can look like. I was raised by an incredibly dedicated father who has always proudly declared himself a feminist. He always told my sister and me that there is nothing we cannot achieve if we work hard enough. Growing up, I never heard a phrase starting with “girls should…”. In fact, gender was never a criterion for me in choosing what to do or not to do.

Only much later did I realise that my upbringing was not the norm. As I have started working with professional women and hearing stories of early life conditioning, messages around ‘staying quiet’, ‘being nice’, ‘acting like a proper lady’ - I realised my foundation was a rare solid ground of self-confidence which has served me unwaveringly through every single peak and trough of my life so far.

As with every good thing, there was a dark side to my dad’s parenting philosophy. It came with high expectations and pressure to perform. I had to be a straight-A student. I had to work hard, always. And work some more, while taking a break from another kind of work. Idleness or ‘wasting time’ was anathema. So was mediocrity. You had to push yourself, transcend your limits over and over again. I still wrestle with feelings of guilt when I have nothing to do. But, somehow, having to learn how to hold back from doing too much seems like an easier life lesson than having to learn to trust I could do something in the first place - a lesson so many of my coaching clients seem to wrestle with.

Thankfully, I also had a grandmother to balance out my father’s rougher edges. She never judged. She always listened with such presence as to make me feel the most important person in the world. What I had to say, in her eyes, always mattered (and that was as true when I was 5 as it was when I was an adult, still spilling my secrets to her). She was my master teacher in unconditional love.

Between them, they taught me the power of fully seeing and accepting people as they are, not asking them to be something else, telling them, and showing them that they hold value simply because they exist.

When I was 19, and a sophomore in college, I applied for my first job as an assistant manager to the CEO of a foreign company who was just opening up shop in Bucharest. I went through a couple of interviews, which went well, and on the final round, my potential future boss asked me what I considered a reasonable salary for that job. I gave him a figure that was, by all reasonable accounts, ridiculous for that job and my nonexistent professional experience. He almost laughed and could have dismissed me on the spot, but instead chose to look me in the eye and say, “I think you’re a very smart girl, but you could use some wisdom.” I didn’t get the job, and the feedback stung for a long time, but it did show me the other side of self-confidence: ego, hubris, arrogance. I was much more reasonable in my financial requests on the next job application.

When I was 21, I found an ad on a jobs site for a role as British Ambassador’s Residence Manager - a leadership role coordinating the official residence of the UK Ambassador in Bucharest, organising official functions, and managing 5 staff. I read through the requirements and, despite still missing the professional experience and likely being a decade younger than their target audience for the role, I felt I could do that job. I trusted I could. So I applied.

It took 3 months and some 6 rounds of interviews. The last one was an integrity test with lots of questions checking your moral compass. Would you accept bribes from a supplier, even if offered as a ‘gift to the team’? Would you take the easy way out to secure entertainment for a function, offering a small perk to the artist’s agent so they could prioritise your request for their time? Those were questions that, in the Romania of the early 2000s, when cutting corners was the norm, would have been easy traps to fall into. But I was a girl who was raised to always take the hard, long winding path, and cutting corners was not something we did in our family. So, amazingly, I got the job.

The ambassador and his wife later told me they chose me for my ‘maturity and moral compass’ above all else. I found myself managing 5 people, the youngest of whom was 10 years older than me at the time, and the oldest was older than my own parents. It took me over 6 months to gain their trust and convince them I had been hired through a real and honest recruitment process. They kept trying to find out who I might have been related to, who might have ‘pushed me’ into the job, because they simply could not believe the ambassador would trust a 21-year-old with that kind of role, and also because, in that culture, nepotism was still rife and too often people didn’t get into good jobs (particularly in government/public sector) of their own merit.

Those months brought about my first real crisis of faith in myself. I felt overwhelmed. Had no idea what it meant to lead a team. I ran by instinct and common sense alone. The elation of getting the job dissipated quickly and gave way to deep anxiety. And that was when I first experienced what being ‘lifted up’ can look and feel like.

Luckily, both the Ambassador and his wife were mostly operating from what I would now call a ‘late stage’ mindset. They both were emotionally mature, thoughtful, principled, and highly self-regulated individuals. And they both were really good coaches. So instead of giving me advice or simple encouragement, such as ‘you can do it!’, they coached me through my dilemmas. “What is hardest about this?”, “What are you worried about here?”, “What is at risk?”, “How else could you look at it?”, “What might you try?”.

From them, I learnt that if you want to help someone grow, you don’t spare them the discomfort, but you step into it together with them, let them do the work, and keep exposing them to opportunities to discover how far they can go. They kept throwing things at me. Receptions for prime ministers. Massive events celebrating some world-renowned writer visiting Romania (I still have a signed copy of one of my favourite fantasy series of all time by the author herself, a ‘pinch me’ moment to this day). I felt seen by them, not because they complimented me (though they were generous with thanking and recognizing staff for their efforts), but because they always behaved as if I could do hard things and trusted me with big responsibilities without hesitation.

They were also wise in responding to mistakes. “What can we all learn from this?” was one of the most transformative questions for me, a kid raised to regard mistakes as anathema and count anything but ‘perfect’ as being ‘mediocre’. They taught me that mistakes are opportunities, not reflections on my self-worth. They saw me as someone capable of growing and perfecting and someone who was worthy of trust and acceptance, both when I got it right and especially when I got it wrong.

While in that role, I attended my first-ever leadership training and fell in love with what would become my profession. As fate would have it, the wonderful facilitator who ran that session would later become my mentor as I stepped into L&D. She became another person who saw me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My core lesson from those early experiences was: If you want to help people feel seen and foster their self-confidence, let them do hard things and support them when they don’t get it perfect.

As life would have it, I’ve been afforded many counterexamples to help strengthen my sense of what it takes to lift people (and how easy it can be to put them down).

Three years later, as I stepped from my Embassy job into my first corporate role, my boss told me I was too young and needed to wait years before I could be entrusted with a team, and my earlier management experience could not be taken into account. No chances afforded, no opportunities to prove I could do/be more.

Some more years later still, when (while working for a large training consultancy) I pitched an idea to build a distinct suite of courses focused not on soft skills (which were the main line of business), but self-awareness (neurosicence of emotions, strenghts-based work and similar interventions for leaders), company leaders told me that I was naive and didn’t quite understand how the training business worked, that this idea was too strange and no corporate client would ever pay for their leaders to learn about themselves (sic!).

Many more years later, when I was getting ready to leave behind a decade-old leadership development company I had built in Romania and move to Australia, do a PhD, and start life over, someone very close to me told me (from a deep fear for my future and a hope I’d decide to stay) that I would never be able to build in a new place what I had worked so hard to build in my native country. For a couple of years after the move, I feared they might have been right, but then again, they were not.

Or later still, when someone I had looked up to and admired deeply told me the idea of building the Vertical Development Institute and working solely with inter-(in)dependent teams, without fixed contracts or full-time employees, was not much more than a pipe dream because “the only way to get loyalty and commitment from people is if they work for you full time”. So was my dream of building a developmental coaching school, because there “isn’t much value in just asking questions without offering any solutions - clients want solutions”.

For every one of these votes of no-confidence, there were other people along the way who lifted me back up with their unconditional trust.

My PhD supervisor, who told me it was ok to feel like a total imposter in the world of research, that I would be able to learn everything I needed, and that my experience as a practitioner still mattered a lot. His willingness to guide me, while also openly admitting what he didn’t know and being open to learn from me in turn, was priceless.

It showed me you can lift people by being a mentor who is also willing to become a student. Support their ‘crazy’ ideas! Teach them while letting them teach you, and that will boost their confidence!

Then there was Mike Vierow, then Dean of one of Australia’s largest executive leadership programs, whom I met in London, where we were both learning about a developmental psychometric. I was getting ready to move to Australia, and he was the sole Aussie who had flown across the world for that course (and only the second Aussie I had ever met up to that point). I was looking for a leadership program to do my research on, and after 20 minutes of chatting about my dreams of studying leaders’ vertical development in real time (such lofty dreams!), he said, “I think we’ve got the program you’re looking for.” No ‘proof of concept’ needed. Just trust.

Like Mike, there was Bill Torbert, a giant in the field of adult development, who simply gifted me his time, attention, curiosity, and unconditional support without ever expecting anything in return.

There was also my first boss in Australia, who hired a new immigrant facilitator after one interview, brought me in to work on some of the company’s largest client projects from day 1, and didn’t bat an eye when I told her, after she had made was deemed a ‘final’ financial offer, that I needed a different salary and working days arrangement to be able to balance my PhD, my work, and my family responsibilities.

I would have done anything to avoid letting these people down. Their trust felt like such a precious gift, because it had come with no prior test of loyalty, hoops to jump through. It had simply been given, freely. And I wanted to honour it the best I could.

They taught me the immense power of unconditional trust. They saw in me a bigger version of myself and made me want to strive to grow into that person.

They also made me want to be that person for others in turn. Recently, someone very dear to me, whom I work very closely with (another ‘never-employee’, always ‘colleague’) told me: “I don’t know what you see in me, but it gives me courage to look for it in myself too”.

I’m not suggesting here that we just gift our trust to everyone, always, indiscriminately. I have at times been let down by people I trusted. Yet much more often, I’ve been blown away by what people can do when you truly believe they can (even before they do).

And this post is about more than all of that. It’s about our capacity to lift each other up, to heal this wound of self-doubt, to open doors for each-others potential through accepting people as they are and offering your trust first; through letting (and nudgning) people to do hard things; through coaching them so they can learn and grow from their mistakes; through being open to not just teach them, but learn from them in turn (and intentionally step off that pedestal they might have placed you on if you’re their mentor).

So, who have been the people who lifted you through your life? How did they do it? How are you in turn lifting others? How do we collectively step away from patting each other’s backs as a way to boost confidence and do it through action, through showing (rather than just telling) people they can and they will and they matter?

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