Growing Up at Work

How to Transform Personally, Evolve Professionally, and Lead Authentically

Yael C. Sivi, Yosh C. Beier

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781632993748
• eBook ISBN:
  9781632993755
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Do your best “inner work” while you work. 

The workplace—whether in-person or remote—is a unique laboratory where personal and interpersonal growth are tightly intertwined. What better place is there to explore who you are and who you want to be? 

For nearly two decades, therapists and executive coaches Yael Sivi and Yosh Beier have advised hundreds of employees, managers, and leaders on how to achieve authentic leadership, emotional intelligence, and conscious collaboration. They now know that work provides us with a unique opportunity to learn about ourselves, to better understand our core beliefs and assumptions, and to truly see the effect we can have on others. Work gives us the chance to grow up. 

Growing Up at Work explores how you can

• transform into an emotionally mature leader and create healthy employees, teams, and organizations—and by extension, enhance your influence;

• achieve authentic, positive, lasting leadership growth through self-awareness and openness to deep personal growth;

• realize extraordinary results if you choose to grow from the inside out.

​By presenting inspiring real-life case studies, Sivi and Beier examine how resolving professional dilemmas and leadership challenges can lead you on a dynamic journey of personal growth and evolution. 

Chapter 1

I Feel Like an Imposter

WITHIN TWO MINUTES OF SITTING down with me, Julia burst into tears.

“I don’t know if I’m right for this job. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’m succeeding at this,” she said, looking at me intently, her body hunched over. “I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job, and this isn’t going as well as I had hoped.”

She caught herself. “I’m so sorry I’m crying.”

This wasn’t the Julia I knew. I had first met her when she was a student in my leadership program. The kind of person who lights up a room, Julia was naturally full of energy, funny, and sweet. She managed to be simultaneously charming and authentic, a combination that led to her becoming a great favorite in class. She made friends easily.

After graduating from college, Julia, a white Jewish woman in her late twenties, got a job with a nonprofit educational advocacy organization and rose rapidly through the ranks. Academically gifted and driven, but not super-ambitious, she’d take an opportunity if it presented itself and felt right. A chance to move to New York? OK, I’ll do that. Move into a more senior position? OK, I’ll do that. She took things on mostly because they were there to be taken on and because she was a curious, bright person.

I offer all of my students a one-on-one coaching session as part of the leadership program I teach. Julia was one of the first to avail herself of this session, so here she was, this funny, bright, highly capable person—someone whom I knew was very smart based on my class—yet within two minutes of sitting down with me, she was in tears. She had been promoted consistently throughout her career and the only feedback she ever received was glowing, but her head was in her hands as she told me she was terrible at her job.

“I bet everyone at work is convinced I can’t do my job,” she said. “They’re probably sorry they hired me. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out that I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

What was going on here? Where was she getting this message?

Imposter syndrome

“Imposter syndrome,” where you frequently doubt your achievements and live with the fear of being exposed as a fraud, is a deeply familiar experience for many people I’ve worked with, including successful professionals and leaders, across all ages and industries.

With Julia, the impact of what she was going through wasn’t really visible on the surface. She was such a buoyant, effervescent personality that most of the people in her life were completely unaware of what was going on inside of her. But the pain and isolation were very real—affecting her mood, her relationships, her sleep.

My approach with Julia, as we’ll see throughout this book with other clients, was to “make the unconscious conscious,” which is to bring awareness to the beliefs, values, assumptions, and experiences that drive us. I sought to unpack the thinking that was leading to her suffering and hampering her development as a leader. I needed to hear exactly what Julia believed about herself. What was the story she was hearing in her head? Whose story was that? What was drowning out all of the positive feedback and leaving her instead with the terrible sense of being a failure?

A feeling can often be traced back to the thought that caused it. While some feelings seem to come from our gut, and those feelings may very well be based in trauma or pain from our past, our feelings often originate from a story we tell about ourselves—thoughts that we don’t even know we are thinking that give rise to negative feelings. For example: I’m telling myself that my coworkers think I’m lazy because I told them I couldn’t help out with a project. When I tell myself this story, I feel sad and ashamed. There’s the thought, then boom! there’s the feeling.

As Julia spoke, as we explored her thoughts, it quickly became obvious that there was more than one voice in the room—two in particular. There was the part of Julia that was suffering because she felt like she was an imposter, but this process all started because there was another part of Julia, an “inner critic” that was telling Julia over and over again that she wasn’t doing a good job. And that voice was informed by an imagined perception of how others viewed her. The voice of the receiver, the victim, was largely silent, taking in all of this abuse—it hadn’t been clear to Julia that she was actually berating herself.

The good news is that by simply identifying imposter syndrome as a common thought pattern, and by giving it a name, we can start to work with it.

“Do you recognize part of what’s going on here as a phenomenon called imposter syndrome?” I asked Julia. “Does that sound right to you?”

Asking this question is the first step toward breaking down the sense of isolation that often comes with imposter syndrome. The belief that everyone else sees you as a fraud, combined with the idea that everyone else around you must know what they are doing, is a very unpleasant way of suffering and feeling alone.

“It could be. That’s really interesting,” she said, her blue eyes widening. We smiled at each other. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Exploring the voices inside

To understand why we are suffering, it’s necessary to explore exactly what’s going on inside of us. With Julia, I wanted to hear the voice of her inner critic to know what it was saying and to understand the effect it was having on her. So I invited Julia to speak from that voice. What exactly was she telling herself ?

“You’re such a fake,” she spat, “you’re such a phony. Everyone knows you don’t know how to do this job, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re really found out by everyone.”

What was happening here, according to “Gestalt therapy,” is called an “interruption in contact,” which involves how early experiences mute or alter our natural needs and impulses. It essentially describes the different ways we unwittingly block our flow, our energy, our excitement, our love of life.

This interruption in contact was actually two interruptions in one. First off, Julia was “projecting,” whereby she was imagining the thoughts of her colleagues and that they had a negative set of perceptions of her. The second interruption here is called “retroflection.” This is where we attack ourselves, either in the way that others have attacked us or in the way we wish we could attack others, or to try to force ourselves to be a particular way in the world.

After hearing from the part of Julia that was creating the attack, I asked if she was aware that there was another part of her that was actually receiving this message. In essence, the receiver of the messages is our inner victim—the part that receives the inner attack.

“How does this part feel?” I asked. “And what, if anything, do you want to say in response?”

While she felt sad to hear these critical words about herself, she agreed with what the critic had to say.

“The critic is right. I really am not good my job, and everyone knows it.”

Take back your eyes and stand up to your inner critic

As we began our work together, I started by discussing the psychological process of “projection” with Julia. Many of us spend a lot of our mental energy projecting onto others as if they are a blank movie screen. We often tend to project our fears onto others—and sometimes we project our wishes, too. We don’t even realize we are projecting, and we also feel quite convinced that whatever we are projecting is accurate.

In Julia’s case, I wanted to start by helping her see this first distortion that was getting in her way: She was seeing herself through her imagination of what others thought of her and she didn’t even realize that this was what she was doing. Step one for Julia was to take back her eyes and realize that she was the one who was creating the voice in her head—no one else.

Once Julia realized that it was part of herself that was imagining the worst, we looked next at what she was doing with that information. She was attacking herself with it. So, just as you would coach a child being bullied on the playground, I began to fortify that victimized, quiescent part of Julia’s psyche. Standing up to your inner critic—something we also refer to as making peace with the bully—is about exchanging the voice of the victim with the voice of strength. I encourage my clients to get in touch with how they would respond if these mean things were being said to someone they cared about.

I began coaching Julia to defend herself by proxy, to think of it as defending someone else.

I asked Julia, “What would you say if this bully was talking to a friend of yours? How would you react?” The truth is that it’s much easier for us to stand up to a bully if they’re bullying somebody that we love.

“I would tell them to stop,” she said, without hesitation. “I would tell them that this was unacceptable, that this was not OK. That what they were saying wasn’t even true.”

Velcro and Teflon

It’s said that negative thoughts are like Velcro. They tend to stick. As human beings, we have a knack for believing, and ruminating on, negative thoughts about ourselves, and we feel bad as a result.

This was certainly true for Julia. She was in the habit of telling herself that she wasn’t good enough at her job, that she was an imposter, and as a result, she told herself that she was a failure. This thought pattern was on a loop in her head and had a “sticky” quality in her consciousness.

Meanwhile, positive thoughts tend to be like Teflon. They often don’t stick. Someone tells us we do something really well and we just think, yeah, well, I’m not so sure … We write them off.

The reality was that Julia was in receipt of plenty of positive feedback—there was no shortage of people telling her she was doing a great job, but she had trouble believing it.

Sometimes we have to borrow the confidence others have in us and see ourselves through their eyes. People often see in us what we can’t see in ourselves, and it can take deliberate effort to appreciate something positive about ourselves and to decide to be affected by it.

Julia began working on trying to be affected by the positivity around her and by the praise that her colleagues were expressing toward her. This took a lot of practice. It’s not easy to take a mental concept and turn it into something that’s lived in the body, to see that you have talents and gifts and to recognize that you can live them.

During one of our next sessions, Julia told me about a curriculum she was working on, and I used this opportunity to put my observations into play.

“Julia, that’s such an innovative way of putting theory into practice,” I said. “I find you so imaginative.”

“Thanks, but anyone could have done that,” she responded.

“Let’s pause,” I said. “What just happened? Did you notice you just brushed me off ? You just deflected that positive thing I shared about you being creative.”

She looked surprised. “Deflection” is a way in which we avoid a difficult experience or emotion and find a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Lifelong Practices for Personal Transformation and Professional Evolution
• Glossary of Terms
• Chapter 1: I Feel Like an Imposter
• Chapter 2: I’m Their Manager, but I Want to Be Their Friend
• Chapter 3: I Take Care of Everyone Except Myself
• Chapter 4: I’m Just Not Good Enough
• Chapter 5: I Know I Should Address This Conflict, but I Don’t
• Chapter 6: I Don’t Want to Play Politics
• Chapter 7: People Think I’m a Jerk
• Chapter 8: People Don’t Trust Me
• Chapter 9: I’m Successful, but I Have No Life
• Chapter 10: I Have to Be Perfect
• Chapter 11: I’m Scared of My Boss
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors