A Guide to Building Resilience
Objectively speaking, anyone looking at you from the outside would have to say you’re good at your job. You have years of professional experience and a broad network of people who trust your judgment and value your work. You’ve solved difficult problems, executed high-visibility projects, led strategic teams and initiatives, and built a career you could not have built without being capable.
But none of that stops your stomach from bottoming out when a board member pulls you aside after a meeting and says, “You weren’t as prepared for that meeting as I expected you to be.”
GULP
You tell yourself it’s no big deal and try not to worry about it, but three nights later, you find yourself lying awake wondering if maybe you’ve been fooling yourself and don’t really belong in your role.
Sound familiar?
This is one of the most common patterns I see in people who struggle with imposter syndrome. Your brain will take one mistake or less-than-stellar performance and turn it into evidence of a much bigger problem.
For example, let’s assume you did underestimate the meeting. You didn’t anticipate some of the questions, and you were also juggling five other fires that all urgently needed your attention, so you weren’t as laser focused on your preparations as you usually are.
Okay, the truth is you could have prepared differently, but you didn’t. But now, instead of thinking about how you prepared for one meeting, you find yourself questioning how good you are at your entire job.
Most of my clients who find themselves stuck in this loop want me to teach them how to stop caring so much about what other people think, but I don’t think caring too much is the real problem. The real problem is that they don’t know how to figure out which parts of criticism are valuable and which parts they can safely disregard.
Human brains don’t weigh all evidence equally
In theory, years of career success should easily outweigh one critical comment, but that’s not usually how it works in real life, especially for those who struggle with imposter syndrome because:
We tend to minimize our successes:
- I just work harder than most people.
- I’ve had strong teams supporting me.
- I’ve been fortunate.
Then, we change the rules when something goes wrong. Instead of minimizing it, we amplify our mistakes and draw much bigger conclusions:
- I guess I just don’t have what it takes.
- Maybe I don’t belong here.
- What if I can’t actually do this job?
When you fall into this pattern, criticism can be incredibly difficult to process and make sense of because you’re not just trying to answer a relatively narrow question like:
Was I prepared enough for that meeting?
You’re trying to answer a much larger one that probably sounds more like:
Am I actually as capable as everyone thinks I am?
The first question may have an uncomfortable answer, but it’s a useful one. The second question can’t possibly be answered by one comment after one meeting, so asking it can send your brain spiraling into self-doubt.
Being good at analyzing complex problems can make this even harder
To make matters worse, if you’re someone who is good at seeing patterns, considering multiple perspectives, and anticipating downstream consequences, your mind can generate an enormous amount of context around a single critical comment.
You can appreciate the part of the criticism that’s fair and the context the other person may be missing. And, you can also consider who delivered the feedback and what they might have meant but didn’t say. You can remember three previous interactions that might support their interpretation and five pieces of evidence that contradict it. So you might find yourself thinking:
She was right. But also the expectations weren’t clear. Maybe I should have anticipated them anyway. Does this connect to a similar concern my boss raised last quarter? But that situation was different. Unless other people are seeing a pattern I’m not seeing…
And all of a sudden, your mental flexibility has become a liability instead of an asset.
Start by separating the criticism from the facts
If you want to stop this spiral, the first step is to separate the facts about what happened from the interpretation of what happened.
For example, when the board member says, “You weren’t as prepared for that meeting as I expected you to be.” The comment may be completely accurate. Several questions came up that you should have anticipated. You hadn’t done the necessary analysis, and you couldn’t give answers you reasonably should have had.
Or, maybe the questions that caught you off guard involved information you had no exposure to and no way of knowing. Maybe the board expected a level of detail your boss never told you to prepare.
So, instead of choosing between She’s right, and I’m failing or She’s wrong, and I can ignore her, you can ask yourself some more useful questions to help you figure out which parts of the criticism may be useful:
- What does this tell me about my performance?
Did you miss something? Make a poor decision? Communicate unclearly? Fail to anticipate something you should have anticipated? - What does this tell me about the environment?
Were expectations unclear? Were you managing competing priorities? Was the necessary information unavailable? Were different stakeholders expecting incompatible things? - What does this tell me about their perception?
Sometimes someone’s interpretation isn’t entirely accurate, but their reaction is still useful information.
For example, if your CEO says your presentation was too detailed, you may disagree. The analysis may have required that level of complexity.
But if senior stakeholders repeatedly struggle to identify the recommendation underneath all your analysis, you may have a communication problem worth solving even if your analysis is excellent.
Remember that even accurate criticism has limits
Now let’s suppose for a minute that the board member was right. You should have anticipated those questions, and you didn’t prepare as thoroughly as the meeting required.That’s valuable information about your performance in that meeting. It doesn’t tell you whether this was an isolated mistake or part of a larger problem.
If you usually prepare well and this meeting was an exception, the evidence supports the conclusion that you weren’t prepared enough for that meeting.
If you have been unprepared several times, the evidence may support the broader conclusion that you have a recurring problem with how you prepare for important meetings.
Being consistently underprepared for certain meetings may reveal a real weakness in how you plan, anticipate questions, or allocate your time, but it still isn’t enough to establish that you lack the judgment, knowledge, leadership, or other abilities your role requires.
For people who struggle with imposter syndrome, that final leap can happen almost automatically:
I wasn’t prepared enough for this meeting.
becomes . . .
I have a problem with preparation.
which becomes . . .
Maybe I’m not capable enough for this role.
Those are three different claims that each require different levels of evidence. The first requires evidence about one meeting. The second requires evidence of a pattern. The third is a much larger conclusion about your overall competence and would require a significant amount of corroborating evidence.
Building resilience to criticism takes practice, but over time, it gets easier and easier to stop the mental spiral that keeps you up at night.
This practice is part of the work we do in career therapy. Building resilience and self-trust includes learning how to respond to the pressures of work without letting every difficult meeting, critical comment, or mistake consume more of your energy than it needs to.
Sometimes it can take a little while to get in for an appointment with me. If you’d like to start practicing on your own while you wait, I’ve designed a workbook to help. You can find it below.
