Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
When you step into a new role, nobody tells you how someone in that position is meant to come across. So you guess, and you guess fast. A little more distance. Shorter, more formal emails. Fewer jokes.
Each of those guesses made sense at the time. The trouble is that nobody ever goes back to check them, and years later you can find yourself doing well by every visible measure while still being someone you chose in a hurry.
In this episode, we look at the difference between adapting to a role and being rewritten by it, why those early decisions are so hard to see from the inside, and what happened to Adam when he stopped going to lunch with his team. We also look at how to give those decisions the review they never had…
Key Themes
- The guesses you made on day one
- Adapting to a role or being rewritten
- Why nobody reviews who you became
- The lunch that changed a reputation
- Old habits answering questions nobody asks
Timestamps
- 0:00 The quick decisions you made on day one
- 2:15 Guessing who you’re meant to be
- 4:55 Adam and the lunch that stopped
- 8:20 What did you decide without deciding
- 8:50 Adapting or being rewritten
- 11:20 Why early guesses never get reviewed
- 14:10 Giving old habits the review they never had
- 16:45 A question to take with you
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. When you stepped into your role, you made some quick decisions about who you needed to be. Most of them, well, they made perfect sense at the time. But the question is, how many of them are you still living years after the reasons for them went away? Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble, because success shouldn’t cost everything. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, And welcome to episode 37, The Role and the Person. In the previous episode, we looked at the inner critic and we looked at what changes when you stop arguing with that voice and start noticing it instead. When you start registering what it says and when, without having to decide whether it’s right.
Now, that kind of noticing, that turns out to be really useful well beyond just the inner critic. And today, I’d like us to notice something that most of us do every working day without a second thought, and that is noticing the moment you step into your role and the person that you become when you do. Why? Well, there’s often a little distance between the role and the person playing it. Most people never quite look at how that distance ever got there. Before we get into it, if you haven’t already, please do follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. That way, the next episode turns out— turns up without you ever having to go looking for it. Cool, huh? So think back to the start of the role or the position that you are in now. Might have been a promotion.
It might have been a new job. Could be a new business. Or it could be the point where your own business grew big enough that people started looking to you for direction. Whatever it was, there was a stretch at the beginning where you didn’t quite know who you were supposed to be yet. You knew the job, or at least you knew what the job involved, that you knew the decisions to make, you knew the people that you needed to look after, and you knew the results that you had to deliver. What you didn’t know was how someone in that position is supposed to come across, how they’re supposed to speak in meetings, how close they get to people, how much they joke, how formal the emails need to be. You see, nobody tells us any of that. So you guess, and you guess quickly because the role doesn’t wait for you to work it out.
There are meetings from day one. People are watching to see what you are like from the outset. There’s a gap where the answer should be, and you fill that gap with your best guess. You notice the person before you maybe kept a certain distance, so you keep a certain distance. Perhaps you notice senior people send short, formal emails, so your emails get shorter and more formal. You maybe notice a joke lands a little bit flat. Excuse me. So you make fewer jokes.
None of these are big decisions. Most of the time they don’t even feel like decisions. They’re more like the small adjustments you make when you walk into an unfamiliar room. You read the room, you adapt, and you just get on with things, which is entirely sensible. The interesting part, the interesting part is what happens next, or more accurately, what never happens next. You made those guesses as someone who didn’t yet know the people, or didn’t yet know the culture, or didn’t yet know the role and what it actually needed from you. You made those guesses for the opening stretch of that role. And then you never went back to check them.
Let me tell you about Adam. Adam got promoted from within his own team. One day he was part of the team, the next day he was running the team. Before the promotion, Adam was one of those guys that people tended to gravitate towards. He was quick, he was funny, he was the person who could take the edge off a tense afternoon with one well-timed comment. Lunch with the team, that was a fixed entry in the diary. It was where the best conversations happened, and quite a few of the best ideas used to come from those team lunches. And then he got the job managing the team, and within the first fortnight, Adam stops going to lunch with them.
There’s no announcement, he didn’t decide it in any formal sense, simply started to feel wrong. He was the boss now and he’d be sharing the table with people he might have to give hard feedback to at some point. It seemed like the kind of thing that a manager shouldn’t do, so he stopped going to the lunches. He ate at his desk and then he got busy and then it became normal. If you’d asked Adam at the time, he would have told you it was the right call. A bit of distance, some professional separation, perfectly reasonable. 2 years later, Adam bumped into someone who had been on the team back at that point and had since moved on, and she said quite casually, you know, Adam, you used to be the funniest person in that office. Used to be.
She went on to tell him that people saw him as distant now, unapproachable. One or two had even used the word boring. And what hit the hardest was the realisation that followed this: nobody he worked with now would describe him as fun. Most of them had never even met that version of him at all. They’d only ever known the manager who ate lunch at his desk. And there was a knock-on effect that he hadn’t seen coming. With so little time together outside of the work itself, his team felt less comfortable bringing him problems, and things were, as a result, reaching him much later than they should have done. Now here’s the part that I find most telling.
The only thing Adam chose in his first fortnight was to stop having lunch with the team. One small guess about what a manager should look like. The distance, the lost humour, the reputation for being boring, all of that grew From that one tiny decision. Small decision at the time, but it grew over the 2 years. So let me ask you, think back to the start of the role that you hold now. What did you decide without really deciding about who you needed to be? Maybe it was something you stopped doing. Maybe it was something you started doing. A tone of voice, a certain distance, a door that stays closed Just a little more often than it used to.
Once you’ve found it, here’s the question. Is the reason that you did that, is that reason still valid today? So here’s where the key distinction comes in. It’s the difference between adapting to a role and being rewritten by that role. Adapting, adapting is healthy. Every role asks something of you, and everyone who steps into one with their eyes open, naturally they’re going to adjust. You speak a little differently in a board meeting than you do in the pub, for example. You take more care with what you say. when people are relying on you, and that’s part of doing the job well.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that. When you adapt, you stay the author of your life. You make a change because the situation calls for it, and you know why you made it. And if the situation changes again, then you can change accordingly. Being rewritten, however, And that’s what happens when an adjustment is made for one moment and it gradually becomes permanent. The guess from your first fortnight stops being a response to a situation, turns into a description of who you are. You don’t remember making it, you certainly don’t remember why you made that decision, it’s simply how you are at work now. This is how I am now.
Yeah. Tricky thing is that from inside, the two of those, being the author and being rewritten, they feel identical. Adam would have told you that he adapted. He’d taken on a new role and he had adjusted to it, as any sensible person would have done. What Adam couldn’t see was that the adjustment had carried on long after the reason for it had gone. And it had taken something with it that he was never meant to give up. So here is a useful test. When you look at the way you are in your role, can you still see the reasons? Can you still see why you are that way? Can you point to the situation, situation each habit was responding to, and can you say whether that situation still exists? Where you can, that’s a sign that you adapted, and where the reason has vanished but the habit remains, well, that’s an area where you’ve been rewritten.
Why does this happen? Good question. Why do quick guesses made at the start of the role outlast the uncertainty that produced them? There’s a few reasons and they all tend to work together. The first one is that the guesses work. Adam kept a bit of distance, nothing obvious went wrong, nobody complained, the team carried on delivering. As far as Adam could tell, it was the right call. And when something works, you don’t revisit it, you build on it. The second thing is timing. When you make those early decisions at the point when you know the least and feel pressure the most, well, you’re new, people are watching, and you badly want to get it right.
That, that, my friend, is the moment you are most likely to reach for a safe, slightly stiff version of yourself. And it’s also the moment you’re least able to judge whether you need to make that change. And the third reason, nobody gives these decisions a review date. Think about almost anything else in a new role. You review targets, you review processes, performance gets reviewed, possibly more often than you’d like. But the decisions you made about who to be, They never come up for review. Nobody wrote them down, so they never come up for discussion. They just carry on.
Oh, and there’s a 4th, perhaps most powerful reason, and that is that everyone around you gradually forgets that there was ever a different version of you. New people join and they only ever meet the person in the role. The people who knew you before, over time they move on. And after a while, the only person who remembers that you used to be the funny one is you. And even you start to forget that. Which is exactly why so many capable people end up years into a role, doing well by every visible measure, and becoming someone They chose in a hurry rather than the person they ought to be or they would like to be. Now, there’s a good deal more underneath this than we’ve room to explore properly in this episode. It’s what we explore in Leading Without Losing Yourself course in the Overachievers Club.
Works through all of that in rather more depth than this episode allows. But hopefully it gives you a bit of an overview, gives you a starting point. With that starting point, what are you going to do with all of this? Marching in tomorrow as the person you were before the role? Nah, it’s not really going to work. It probably isn’t possible either when you think about it. Some of what you adjusted was in fact the right thing to do. Some of it still serves you and the people around you. Giving up all of that That’s a mess. What helps though? What does help is giving those early decisions a review, the review that they never had.
Pick one of them, just pick one of those decisions, something you started doing or something you stopped doing in the opening stretch of your role. And then ask yourself plainly and openly, what problem was it solving at the time? Sometimes you’ll find the problem’s still there, so the habit is doing a useful job. That’s good, keep it, but keep it knowingly, knowing that you are keeping it and knowing why you are keeping it. Sometimes though, you’ll find that the problem disappeared a long time ago. You were new, now you’re not. You didn’t know the people, and now you do. You hadn’t built the relationships and now you have. In that case, the habit, if you’re still maintaining it, is answering a question that isn’t being posed anymore.
There is also something else worth noticing here. The person you were before the role was mostly just out of, out of practice. The person’s still there. You just lost touch with them. You just stopped practicing it anymore. Adam still had his sense of humour. It simply spent 2 years being out of work, his sense of humour. Anything out of use, anything you don’t use for a while, well, it’s something you can pick up again because it was always there.
In the next episode, we are going to look at leadership and control. And we’re going to look at the pressure you put on yourself to keep hold of everything. It’s called Leading Without Pressure. And it picks up rather neatly from this episode. Until then, here’s a question I would invite you to consider over the ensuing week. If someone who knew you before you took on your current role spent a day watching you, what would be— what would they be most surprised that you’d stopped doing? If someone who knew you before you took on your current role spent a day observing you, what would they be most surprised that you had stopped doing? Something to think about. Hey, if this episode struck a chord, I hope it did, then I’d appreciate if you leave a review or a rating wherever you’re listening to this. It helps other people find the show and it helps me know what hits for people.
And if someone comes to mind who’s recently stepped into a new role or who’s been in one long enough to forget what they were like before, share this episode with them. Of course, if you haven’t already, follow and subscribe so that you’re here for the next episode. And finally, head over to KeithBN.link/top, T-O-P, where you’ll find all of the episodes of the Overachievers Podcast. Find this episode and you’ll find the show notes along with a few related additional resources. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble. The Overachiever’s Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
