Have you ever let your manager’s or your company’s assessment of your worth become how you see yourself?
A previous coaching client came to me because she was feeling like she wasn’t good enough. Her project lead had shown little grace for a difficult personal situation and had determined that she wasn’t worthy of promotion. She felt that this person was actively blocking her career progress.
She thought she was failing at her job. I saw someone who was extremely talented and simply wasn’t in the right environment to thrive.
Here was someone who had worked incredibly hard to get where she was, and yet her experience at one company had left her questioning her capabilities.
How does this happen?
When we join a company, that company has a certain amount of power to show how much it values us: what kinds of work we get assigned, how much they pay us, whether they invest in us, whether they promote us, and how they treat us.
When a manager or company determines that our value is lower than what we see for ourselves, it’s very easy to take it personally and internalize that outside assessment as more important than our own.
The longer and more consistently we’re told through a company’s actions that we’re not valuable, the easier it becomes to believe it.
But the value they see in us IS NOT the final judgment of our value as employees, let alone as people.
That doesn’t mean every negative performance review is unfair, or that we shouldn’t take feedback seriously. We all have things we can improve. But there’s a difference between recognizing that we have room to grow and believing that we’re fundamentally not good enough.
Your skills don’t diminish in value because they aren’t being used properly by someone else.
A computer shouldn’t be judged by its ability to clean floors or thresh wheat. I’ve sometimes felt like a sports car being asked to tow a trailer and then being evaluated on my gas mileage.
Even if there are real misalignments between the value we bring and the things an organization needs, that doesn’t make our skills any less valuable. It may just mean that our skills would be better appreciated somewhere else.
And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the inherent value we each have as human beings.
We live in a capitalist society that puts an enormous emphasis on productivity and economic value. It’s easy to start measuring ourselves by how much we produce, how much we earn, or how successful we appear to others.
But our productivity is not our worth.
When you’re in a work environment that consistently makes you question your abilities, I think it’s important to ask yourself: Am I actually lacking something I need to develop, or am I allowing someone else’s inability to recognize my strengths to change how I see myself?
Both can be true. But neither should determine how much you value yourself as a person.
Don’t let someone else determine your worth to yourself.
Struggling to recognize your own value because of how you’re being treated at work? I’d be happy to talk through what you’re experiencing and help you explore what might be next.
