59. Performance Reviews
The year is coming to a close, and for a lot of people, that means performance reviews are on the brain.
Having coached for a few years now and having spent time in the corporate world, one thing that’s clear is that performance reviews can be super stressful for many people. Even if you’re doing really good work, you may still fear potential criticism or you might just feel disappointed that you’re not further along.
Part of why performance reviews feel so hard is that many people take them very personally. Instead of seeing them as information about where you are in relation to where you want to go, you might feel like the performance review is a reflection on your value and your ability to create the career you crave.
And it’s often the same story when it comes to how you review your life overall. You may be doing well and making progress and yet you may still feel like you’re not doing well enough.
But thinking that way makes it very hard to evaluate where you are and how to get to wherever you want to go.
Performance reviews, whether at work or your own review of the last year, are just information.
They don’t mean anything about you.
They don’t determine your worthiness.
They can provide some really useful information, but it’s hard to benefit from that information if we make it too painful to look at.
Tune in this week to learn how to use the information in your performance reviews in a way that’s actually helpful.
Whether you’ve had a recent review at your work or not, this episode will still help you think through how you want to move forward in 2022.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why high-achieving perfectionists find performance reviews particularly stressful.
What I see people making their performance reviews mean about their worthiness.
Why we falsely believe that what we do is a direct reflection of who we are.
How to make your performance review a less emotionally loaded experience.
The information in your performance review that is actually really useful.
How to use the information in your performance reviews to see how you want to move forward in 2022.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about performance reviews.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. By the time y'all listen to this, it's going to be December. And at the end of the year, a lot of us are thinking about performance reviews. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Not just the performance reviews we do at work, although we're certainly going to speak about those. But also our own internal review of what we've done this last year, where we are in our trajectory, where we want to go, are we like going where we want to be going, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's interesting because I know at least a few of the people I've been talking to recently have already done their performance reviews for work. So my brain was totally trying to tell me it's too late to do this podcast and that I have to wait until next year and then do it earlier in the year before it gets so close to the end of the year. So that it can come out before people do their performance reviews.
But like I'm always talking about, we are going to make the good thing that's not perfect, which means I'm going to put this podcast out now. And if you've already done your performance review for work, maybe this can still help you think through how you're going to move forward with that information.
If you haven't done it yet, this podcast can help you with that. And even if you don't have performance reviews at work, you can review your own performance and think about where you want to be going in 2022.
Okay, so let's start with performance reviews at work. One thing I know having coached for a few years now, and having spent some time in the corporate world myself is that performance reviews can be super stressful for people.
And a lot of people who are like me, who listen to this podcast, who are high achieving perfectionists really struggle with performance reviews because even though they're doing really good work, they're always afraid of like, “Okay, what's the negative information I'm going to get?” They’re like, “What is the criticism or things I'm not doing well?”
And then sometimes my high achieving perfectionists also wind up in roles where they're struggling, or they have supervisors that they don't get along with. And in that case, sometimes they're not sure they're doing very well. And that can be really painful and difficult as well.
Not because it's painful and difficult not to do well, but because of what we make that mean about us, about our careers, about what's possible for us. And so that brings me to my first point, one of the things I want y'all to think about as you're thinking about your performance review is what am I making this mean?
For a lot of people they're making their performance review mean something about their worthiness as a person. And so what I would like to offer and suggest to you is that reviewing our performance in our jobs and in our lives is so much easier and more effective when we stop making it mean something about us as a person. And when we stop making it mean something about our worthiness.
A performance review is about your performance, which means your action lines. Your activities, the things you do, and the results you've created in a workplace. Or if you're doing this review about your life, in your life. A lot of people confuse what they've done with who they are. And the reason most of us do this is because that's what most of us were taught to do.
We were taught to see our actions, and inactions, and our feelings, and our thoughts as reflections of us and as something that can reveal something about who we are, what kind of people we are. So if that's how you've been thinking, you're in the majority, but it's not very useful because it makes hearing feedback very emotionally loaded.
And when we get good feedback, that feels really good. We almost get like a little high off of it. Like that validation, that praise, that approval. But then when we get negative feedback, it's like excruciating and deeply painful. And that makes it really hard to evaluate our performance, learn from our performance, and improve our performance.
A performance review is just information. What I want to pitch to you is it's like if you were driving from Seattle to Florida, a performance review lets you know where you are on the map between Seattle and Florida.
Where you are in the map doesn't mean anything about you. It doesn't mean you're good. It doesn't mean you're bad. It doesn't mean you're working not enough. It doesn't mean you're working too hard. It's just a reflection of where you have come to be on this journey in space, geographically like where are you?
And sometimes, due to whatever circumstances we're going through or facing or dealing with, we're not as far along as we want to be. I mean, honestly, like most of us are not as far along as we want to be because we want to be at the end already. But that's not how road trips work and it's not how career trajectories work either.
And I know I've talked on the podcast before about how the destination is going to feel like the journey. So learning to enjoy the journey and have fun on the journey and relate positively to the journey is super useful. And I think the metaphor of the road trip is really helpful here because it's like, okay, wherever you are in your career, you're probably not in Seattle, but you're probably not to Florida yet.
And even when you get to Florida, then you're probably going to want to go somewhere else. Because that tends to be how we are. We have a big goal, and then we get there and then we're like yay, for a minute. And then we have another goal.
But if it's really hard for you to hear that like, “Hey, I know you want to be halfway to Florida already, but you're actually in Oregon.” Then you're missing out on information that could be useful. Useful in helping you get all the way to your goal, which in this metaphor is Florida. And useful for helping you enjoy the road trip along the way.
In an actual road trip we have an understanding thanks to things like Google Maps of about how long it will take. And then, of course, it doesn't ever just take how long Google Maps says it's going to take because most of us tend to stop to eat and sleep and use the bathroom.
So if we understand that, and we know, okay, I left Seattle, now I'm in Oregon. I sure do wish I was in Mississippi already, but I'm not. How do I want to handle the trip so I can get to where I want to go? And what factors are actually really important for me to get there?
What factors are important for me to get to Florida? Is it most important that gets to Florida as soon as humanly possible? Or is it most important that I have a really fun time along the way, I want to like take the scenic route or do I really need to go look at the world's biggest ball of twine?
This metaphor has gotten strange, but you see my point. And let me back up a little because I think I got ahead of myself. Performance reviews tell us how we're doing, but usually we have goals in careers about where we want to be going. And that's why I'm using this metaphor of the road trip.
So usually it's like we want to be told we're doing really well and that we're not doing badly at anything, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm offering this metaphor of the road trip because most of us are trying to go somewhere.
And so we can be doing really well and not doing anything wrong and still not be to our goal yet. But sometimes we're doing really well, but someone has a few pieces of critical feedback for us that are actually going to help us get to our goal faster, or maybe at all.
Like if we're looking at my GPS example, let's say you're trying to go from Seattle to Florida, and you're driving on 90. So 90 goes across the top of the US and it goes west to east or east to west. And if you're driving that to get from Seattle to Florida, it's going to take you one direction across the country.
But then when you get to the East Coast, you're not going to be in Florida. I don't actually know where you're going to be because I'm not super familiar with roads. That's an error in my metaphor usage here, but go with me. You're going to wind up somewhere in the northeast, right? So somewhere along the way you need to start also going south if you want to wind up in Florida.
So sometimes when we're in a performance review, and we're struggling to allow people to give us critical feedback, what we're doing is keeping ourselves from hearing the information that would actually help us get to where we want to go.
I know that this happened to me at Expedia. I always wanted to just be told like that I was doing amazingly. But I also had goals while I was there. You know, I wanted to get promoted, and I wanted to move up and have more experiences.
Which is interesting, because looking back, I'm like, “Did I want to get promoted? Or did I just want to be doing so well that they continued to promote me because of what I thought promotions meant about me?”
But in any case, let's just pretend you've examined that, and you really do want to be promoted. If all they do is tell you you're doing great, but they never give you the information that you need to adjust your behavior to be considered for promotion, that's not going to be helping you actually get to where you want to go, even if it feels really validating in the moment.
So what I'm pitching here is using performance reviews to understand where you are and where you want to go. And then how do you want to get to where you want to go from where you are? And what information do you need that's going to help you be able to do that?
And we could actually get really deep into this metaphor too of like which route do you want to take? And what things do you need to make sure to have along the way? Like in an actual road trip you need to have fuel for your car. Whether your car needs gas, and so you need to know that there are going to be gas stations to stop it.
Or I know someone who did a road trip in a Tesla. And they did make it to where they were going, but towards the end of that trip it was a little like, “Are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it?” And they did, but that probably wasn't a super enjoyable experience on that last little leg of the trip of wondering if they were going to get there.
So if we're using this metaphor for you, it's like what rest do I need? What learning do I need? What nourishment do I need that's actually going to make this trip doable? Versus a lot of us, I think, in our careers are trying to do the equivalent of just driving straight through from Seattle to Florida, which isn't really possible.
Okay, let's also talk about, I think a lot of people feel emotionally loaded about performance reviews, like I said, because of what we make it mean about us. And we're very attached to the positive information, we're very attached to the negative information, it can really impact our mood. And I think a lot of us are looking to the performance review to tell us how we should feel about ourselves in our career. And I don't think that's useful.
Again, I think the performance review is more about where are you on the map between where you started and where you want to go? And if you want to feel good about the journey you're making in your career, let's not outsource that to a performance review. Let's not outsource that to someone else's opinion about where you are and how you're doing.
I do think when we're getting a performance review in a professional context it can be really useful to be open to the information that the other person is giving us because it may be the blueprint to how we get to where we want to go. But also humans are imperfect, so we want to be discerning about whether we're going to take the information that other person is offering us and upload it to how we're thinking about the situation.
So it's kind of like if our GPS isn't working, let's just say we don't have service in an area, we can stop at a gas station and ask somebody directions. And then we have to be discerning about whether we're going to follow their directions or not.
And sometimes we might ask a few different people before we find someone whose directions we're willing to follow, excited to follow. Someone that we think based on our discernment is actually giving us useful information. And then sometimes, there's no one there and it's just about going in a direction until you can find information that's going to help you get back on track and move forward.
So I think all of these examples, these metaphorical examples are actually really relevant to navigating the trajectory of your career. And using performance reviews as ways to help you get from where you are to where you want to go.
Versus using them as like these kind of, it's almost like an emotional, Russian roulette, where you're like, “Is this going to be amazing and feel good? Or is this going to be terrible and feel bad?” And it's going to have a huge impact on your emotions. I just don't think that is the most fun way to interact with performance reviews, nor do I think it's the most useful.
But in order to not have that experience, like I said, you have to create your emotional experience of your career for yourself, versus letting it be informed by what other people think and whether other people think you're doing really well or not.
And if you're not sure how to do that, I have a lot of podcast episodes that can help. I have one about how to feel more confident at work. I talk a lot on the podcast about writing lists of what is working, I think those can be really useful.
If you want to feel positive about your career, you can write a list of what is working, and that will kind of generate positive emotion for you. And that may even help you look at what's not working. And then problem solve through what's not working from a more beneficial head space.
Versus a lot of people try to do it from what's not working, but then they get kind of like, “Oh, it's not working, this isn't working, that's not working, nothing's working.” And they can kind of get trapped in that fuck-it effect or pit of despair that we've talked about in some of the more recent podcast episodes. And if you missed those, be sure to go check those out. They're super useful.
Okay, so that's all information about how to kind of navigate your thoughts and feelings around a performance review that someone else is giving you maybe in a professional context. But I think it's also super fun to think about how do I want to review my own performance?
Where am I actually trying to go? Where did I start at the beginning of this year? Or where did I start at the beginning of the journey, which may have been several years ago, it may have been halfway through this year. Where am I now? And how am I going to evaluate this performance in a way that's going to be useful to me?
When we're evaluating our performance, I think it's really helpful to look at it through the lens of how will it be useful to me to evaluate this? If evaluating it really harshly is just going to make us feel like shit and then not want to do anything, then I would argue that that's not useful.
And that doesn't mean we're not honest with ourselves about our own shortcomings, or the places where we're not making as much progress as we'd like to be. I think it just means starting from the lens of what's going to be a useful way to look at this information and dig into it from there.
And how do I need to think about my shortcomings so that I can get useful information here and be honest with myself about the places where I'm not living up to what I would like to be doing? But not get so bogged down in that that then I feel like I want to give up on everything and not even try.
And this is a different way to relate, I think, than a lot of people are doing. But I think it's so much more helpful, especially for keeping us in a place where we can continue to show up for a goal that's taking a while to come into being.
And some goals in life don't take that long, and we can kind of power through, or push through, or willpower through. But increasingly, the older I get, the more my goals are things that I'm working on for much longer. And things where I start strong, and then I wobble a little, and then I figure it out. And then I wobble a little bit more.
And when I was younger and much more self-critical, it was really hard for me to sustain attention and focus with something when that's what I was doing. Because I would just go to that place I was talking about earlier, that fuck-it effect, that pit of despair of like, why am I even bothering? It's never worked before it's not working.
Versus now I'm like, “Okay, well, there are plenty of things I've worked on since I learned about coaching that weren't working for a really long time. And I didn't give up and I kept going with them and kept going with them. And eventually, I made progress and things got easier and things clicked.
And yeah, I can be honest about the ways that I wasn't doing as well as I wanted to in the first few months or few, whatever, units of time that I was dealing with a thing. And I can also see how continuing to do it and continuing to bumble through and see where I was doing well and basically mentally sustain myself, allowed me to do the thing for long enough for a shift to take place for me to get better at things, for my capacity to expand. And then I did, you know hit the goals I had and beyond.
And the easiest example of this is money, just because it's measurable and very cut and dried, easy to look at. So in the very beginning of my business, I had this goal to make six figures in the first 12 months. And I made like less than $15,000.
So I was not arriving in Florida on schedule. And that was painful because of what I thought about it and because of what I made it mean about me. But I navigated through that, and I looked at what wasn't working through the lens of what was useful as much as I could.
I didn't even do it perfectly, y’all. It was a hot ass mess, and it was great. But enough of my energy was looking at it in useful ways that I was able to continue and keep going. And I did get in fuck-it effect sometimes and I did get in self-sabotage sometimes, but I was also able to get back out of that.
And you have the benefit of not having to go on the exact journey I went on, because I can be here telling you about what I learned and helping you avoid the pitfalls that I got stuck in. And I think that's a beautiful thing.
And I'm glad I had my experience the way I did, even though I didn't enjoy a lot of it at the time. Because it taught me so much and it's allowed me to coach other people and help them avoid some of the places that I spent several months before I was able to make it back out the other side.
Okay, so let's review. Performance reviews often feel painful because of what we're making it mean. What we're making it mean about us, what we're making it mean about our career, what we're making it mean about our worthiness.
One thing I didn't even mention before, but I'll just quickly mention here is maybe you're like me, when I was in corporate I was always really afraid of being fired or laid off. Not because I was getting any negative feedback, but because I'd already been laid off once. And my brain was just really heightened and attuned and aware that that was a possibility that could happen.
And that made everything feel really loaded, too. So it's super useful to just pause and be like, “What am I making this mean? What if I make it mean something else? What if I make it mean this is just information about where I am on the map to my goal? And information is helpful and then I get to decide what to think and feel and how I want to navigate from wherever I am to wherever the goal is.”
And then another thing we talked about is, if you want to feel good about your career, let's not outsource that to other people and their opinions about us. Let's create that for ourselves so we have a strong basis of confidence and joy about our work. And we're going to do that using things like the what is working list.
Which doesn't mean we ignore what's not working, it just means we build a solid foundation of noticing things that are going well. And we do that because the brain has a negativity bias. So focusing on what's working isn't actually being delusional or anything, it's actually giving us a clearer and more realistic view of what's actually happening.
And then, the other thing I want to re-mention is thinking about creating your own performance review for yourself. Evaluating your performance in your work, and in your life, and in your relationships, in any area you want to.
Not as a way to create an artificial high or an artificial low or tell yourself you're only doing amazingly or telling yourself you're failing at everything, but as a way to see where you are as compared to where you started. And as compared to where you want to go. And to help yourself have a more delightful, fun experience of getting to where you're trying to go. Because that's super fun.
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you this week. If you want to dig more deeply into designing your life, and designing your career, and mapping your performance, and really blowing your own mind with what you can be. and do, and accomplish I would love for you to come work with me one on one. I've got some client openings starting in the next few weeks, and I would love for you to be one of them. So come hit me up on the website if that sounds like you.
All right, y'all have a great week. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. By the time y'all listen to this, it's going to be December. And at the end of the year, a lot of us are thinking about performance reviews. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Not just the performance reviews we do at work, although we're certainly going to speak about those. But also our own internal review of what we've done this last year, where we are in our trajectory, where we want to go, are we like going where we want to be going, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's interesting because I know at least a few of the people I've been talking to recently have already done their performance reviews for work. So my brain was totally trying to tell me it's too late to do this podcast and that I have to wait until next year and then do it earlier in the year before it gets so close to the end of the year. So that it can come out before people do their performance reviews.
But like I'm always talking about, we are going to make the good thing that's not perfect, which means I'm going to put this podcast out now. And if you've already done your performance review for work, maybe this can still help you think through how you're going to move forward with that information.
If you haven't done it yet, this podcast can help you with that. And even if you don't have performance reviews at work, you can review your own performance and think about where you want to be going in 2022.
Okay, so let's start with performance reviews at work. One thing I know having coached for a few years now, and having spent some time in the corporate world myself is that performance reviews can be super stressful for people.
And a lot of people who are like me, who listen to this podcast, who are high achieving perfectionists really struggle with performance reviews because even though they're doing really good work, they're always afraid of like, “Okay, what's the negative information I'm going to get?” They’re like, “What is the criticism or things I'm not doing well?”
And then sometimes my high achieving perfectionists also wind up in roles where they're struggling, or they have supervisors that they don't get along with. And in that case, sometimes they're not sure they're doing very well. And that can be really painful and difficult as well.
Not because it's painful and difficult not to do well, but because of what we make that mean about us, about our careers, about what's possible for us. And so that brings me to my first point, one of the things I want y'all to think about as you're thinking about your performance review is what am I making this mean?
For a lot of people they're making their performance review mean something about their worthiness as a person. And so what I would like to offer and suggest to you is that reviewing our performance in our jobs and in our lives is so much easier and more effective when we stop making it mean something about us as a person. And when we stop making it mean something about our worthiness.
A performance review is about your performance, which means your action lines. Your activities, the things you do, and the results you've created in a workplace. Or if you're doing this review about your life, in your life. A lot of people confuse what they've done with who they are. And the reason most of us do this is because that's what most of us were taught to do.
We were taught to see our actions, and inactions, and our feelings, and our thoughts as reflections of us and as something that can reveal something about who we are, what kind of people we are. So if that's how you've been thinking, you're in the majority, but it's not very useful because it makes hearing feedback very emotionally loaded.
And when we get good feedback, that feels really good. We almost get like a little high off of it. Like that validation, that praise, that approval. But then when we get negative feedback, it's like excruciating and deeply painful. And that makes it really hard to evaluate our performance, learn from our performance, and improve our performance.
A performance review is just information. What I want to pitch to you is it's like if you were driving from Seattle to Florida, a performance review lets you know where you are on the map between Seattle and Florida.
Where you are in the map doesn't mean anything about you. It doesn't mean you're good. It doesn't mean you're bad. It doesn't mean you're working not enough. It doesn't mean you're working too hard. It's just a reflection of where you have come to be on this journey in space, geographically like where are you?
And sometimes, due to whatever circumstances we're going through or facing or dealing with, we're not as far along as we want to be. I mean, honestly, like most of us are not as far along as we want to be because we want to be at the end already. But that's not how road trips work and it's not how career trajectories work either.
And I know I've talked on the podcast before about how the destination is going to feel like the journey. So learning to enjoy the journey and have fun on the journey and relate positively to the journey is super useful. And I think the metaphor of the road trip is really helpful here because it's like, okay, wherever you are in your career, you're probably not in Seattle, but you're probably not to Florida yet.
And even when you get to Florida, then you're probably going to want to go somewhere else. Because that tends to be how we are. We have a big goal, and then we get there and then we're like yay, for a minute. And then we have another goal.
But if it's really hard for you to hear that like, “Hey, I know you want to be halfway to Florida already, but you're actually in Oregon.” Then you're missing out on information that could be useful. Useful in helping you get all the way to your goal, which in this metaphor is Florida. And useful for helping you enjoy the road trip along the way.
In an actual road trip we have an understanding thanks to things like Google Maps of about how long it will take. And then, of course, it doesn't ever just take how long Google Maps says it's going to take because most of us tend to stop to eat and sleep and use the bathroom.
So if we understand that, and we know, okay, I left Seattle, now I'm in Oregon. I sure do wish I was in Mississippi already, but I'm not. How do I want to handle the trip so I can get to where I want to go? And what factors are actually really important for me to get there?
What factors are important for me to get to Florida? Is it most important that gets to Florida as soon as humanly possible? Or is it most important that I have a really fun time along the way, I want to like take the scenic route or do I really need to go look at the world's biggest ball of twine?
This metaphor has gotten strange, but you see my point. And let me back up a little because I think I got ahead of myself. Performance reviews tell us how we're doing, but usually we have goals in careers about where we want to be going. And that's why I'm using this metaphor of the road trip.
So usually it's like we want to be told we're doing really well and that we're not doing badly at anything, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm offering this metaphor of the road trip because most of us are trying to go somewhere.
And so we can be doing really well and not doing anything wrong and still not be to our goal yet. But sometimes we're doing really well, but someone has a few pieces of critical feedback for us that are actually going to help us get to our goal faster, or maybe at all.
Like if we're looking at my GPS example, let's say you're trying to go from Seattle to Florida, and you're driving on 90. So 90 goes across the top of the US and it goes west to east or east to west. And if you're driving that to get from Seattle to Florida, it's going to take you one direction across the country.
But then when you get to the East Coast, you're not going to be in Florida. I don't actually know where you're going to be because I'm not super familiar with roads. That's an error in my metaphor usage here, but go with me. You're going to wind up somewhere in the northeast, right? So somewhere along the way you need to start also going south if you want to wind up in Florida.
So sometimes when we're in a performance review, and we're struggling to allow people to give us critical feedback, what we're doing is keeping ourselves from hearing the information that would actually help us get to where we want to go.
I know that this happened to me at Expedia. I always wanted to just be told like that I was doing amazingly. But I also had goals while I was there. You know, I wanted to get promoted, and I wanted to move up and have more experiences.
Which is interesting, because looking back, I'm like, “Did I want to get promoted? Or did I just want to be doing so well that they continued to promote me because of what I thought promotions meant about me?”
But in any case, let's just pretend you've examined that, and you really do want to be promoted. If all they do is tell you you're doing great, but they never give you the information that you need to adjust your behavior to be considered for promotion, that's not going to be helping you actually get to where you want to go, even if it feels really validating in the moment.
So what I'm pitching here is using performance reviews to understand where you are and where you want to go. And then how do you want to get to where you want to go from where you are? And what information do you need that's going to help you be able to do that?
And we could actually get really deep into this metaphor too of like which route do you want to take? And what things do you need to make sure to have along the way? Like in an actual road trip you need to have fuel for your car. Whether your car needs gas, and so you need to know that there are going to be gas stations to stop it.
Or I know someone who did a road trip in a Tesla. And they did make it to where they were going, but towards the end of that trip it was a little like, “Are we going to make it? Are we not going to make it?” And they did, but that probably wasn't a super enjoyable experience on that last little leg of the trip of wondering if they were going to get there.
So if we're using this metaphor for you, it's like what rest do I need? What learning do I need? What nourishment do I need that's actually going to make this trip doable? Versus a lot of us, I think, in our careers are trying to do the equivalent of just driving straight through from Seattle to Florida, which isn't really possible.
Okay, let's also talk about, I think a lot of people feel emotionally loaded about performance reviews, like I said, because of what we make it mean about us. And we're very attached to the positive information, we're very attached to the negative information, it can really impact our mood. And I think a lot of us are looking to the performance review to tell us how we should feel about ourselves in our career. And I don't think that's useful.
Again, I think the performance review is more about where are you on the map between where you started and where you want to go? And if you want to feel good about the journey you're making in your career, let's not outsource that to a performance review. Let's not outsource that to someone else's opinion about where you are and how you're doing.
I do think when we're getting a performance review in a professional context it can be really useful to be open to the information that the other person is giving us because it may be the blueprint to how we get to where we want to go. But also humans are imperfect, so we want to be discerning about whether we're going to take the information that other person is offering us and upload it to how we're thinking about the situation.
So it's kind of like if our GPS isn't working, let's just say we don't have service in an area, we can stop at a gas station and ask somebody directions. And then we have to be discerning about whether we're going to follow their directions or not.
And sometimes we might ask a few different people before we find someone whose directions we're willing to follow, excited to follow. Someone that we think based on our discernment is actually giving us useful information. And then sometimes, there's no one there and it's just about going in a direction until you can find information that's going to help you get back on track and move forward.
So I think all of these examples, these metaphorical examples are actually really relevant to navigating the trajectory of your career. And using performance reviews as ways to help you get from where you are to where you want to go.
Versus using them as like these kind of, it's almost like an emotional, Russian roulette, where you're like, “Is this going to be amazing and feel good? Or is this going to be terrible and feel bad?” And it's going to have a huge impact on your emotions. I just don't think that is the most fun way to interact with performance reviews, nor do I think it's the most useful.
But in order to not have that experience, like I said, you have to create your emotional experience of your career for yourself, versus letting it be informed by what other people think and whether other people think you're doing really well or not.
And if you're not sure how to do that, I have a lot of podcast episodes that can help. I have one about how to feel more confident at work. I talk a lot on the podcast about writing lists of what is working, I think those can be really useful.
If you want to feel positive about your career, you can write a list of what is working, and that will kind of generate positive emotion for you. And that may even help you look at what's not working. And then problem solve through what's not working from a more beneficial head space.
Versus a lot of people try to do it from what's not working, but then they get kind of like, “Oh, it's not working, this isn't working, that's not working, nothing's working.” And they can kind of get trapped in that fuck-it effect or pit of despair that we've talked about in some of the more recent podcast episodes. And if you missed those, be sure to go check those out. They're super useful.
Okay, so that's all information about how to kind of navigate your thoughts and feelings around a performance review that someone else is giving you maybe in a professional context. But I think it's also super fun to think about how do I want to review my own performance?
Where am I actually trying to go? Where did I start at the beginning of this year? Or where did I start at the beginning of the journey, which may have been several years ago, it may have been halfway through this year. Where am I now? And how am I going to evaluate this performance in a way that's going to be useful to me?
When we're evaluating our performance, I think it's really helpful to look at it through the lens of how will it be useful to me to evaluate this? If evaluating it really harshly is just going to make us feel like shit and then not want to do anything, then I would argue that that's not useful.
And that doesn't mean we're not honest with ourselves about our own shortcomings, or the places where we're not making as much progress as we'd like to be. I think it just means starting from the lens of what's going to be a useful way to look at this information and dig into it from there.
And how do I need to think about my shortcomings so that I can get useful information here and be honest with myself about the places where I'm not living up to what I would like to be doing? But not get so bogged down in that that then I feel like I want to give up on everything and not even try.
And this is a different way to relate, I think, than a lot of people are doing. But I think it's so much more helpful, especially for keeping us in a place where we can continue to show up for a goal that's taking a while to come into being.
And some goals in life don't take that long, and we can kind of power through, or push through, or willpower through. But increasingly, the older I get, the more my goals are things that I'm working on for much longer. And things where I start strong, and then I wobble a little, and then I figure it out. And then I wobble a little bit more.
And when I was younger and much more self-critical, it was really hard for me to sustain attention and focus with something when that's what I was doing. Because I would just go to that place I was talking about earlier, that fuck-it effect, that pit of despair of like, why am I even bothering? It's never worked before it's not working.
Versus now I'm like, “Okay, well, there are plenty of things I've worked on since I learned about coaching that weren't working for a really long time. And I didn't give up and I kept going with them and kept going with them. And eventually, I made progress and things got easier and things clicked.
And yeah, I can be honest about the ways that I wasn't doing as well as I wanted to in the first few months or few, whatever, units of time that I was dealing with a thing. And I can also see how continuing to do it and continuing to bumble through and see where I was doing well and basically mentally sustain myself, allowed me to do the thing for long enough for a shift to take place for me to get better at things, for my capacity to expand. And then I did, you know hit the goals I had and beyond.
And the easiest example of this is money, just because it's measurable and very cut and dried, easy to look at. So in the very beginning of my business, I had this goal to make six figures in the first 12 months. And I made like less than $15,000.
So I was not arriving in Florida on schedule. And that was painful because of what I thought about it and because of what I made it mean about me. But I navigated through that, and I looked at what wasn't working through the lens of what was useful as much as I could.
I didn't even do it perfectly, y’all. It was a hot ass mess, and it was great. But enough of my energy was looking at it in useful ways that I was able to continue and keep going. And I did get in fuck-it effect sometimes and I did get in self-sabotage sometimes, but I was also able to get back out of that.
And you have the benefit of not having to go on the exact journey I went on, because I can be here telling you about what I learned and helping you avoid the pitfalls that I got stuck in. And I think that's a beautiful thing.
And I'm glad I had my experience the way I did, even though I didn't enjoy a lot of it at the time. Because it taught me so much and it's allowed me to coach other people and help them avoid some of the places that I spent several months before I was able to make it back out the other side.
Okay, so let's review. Performance reviews often feel painful because of what we're making it mean. What we're making it mean about us, what we're making it mean about our career, what we're making it mean about our worthiness.
One thing I didn't even mention before, but I'll just quickly mention here is maybe you're like me, when I was in corporate I was always really afraid of being fired or laid off. Not because I was getting any negative feedback, but because I'd already been laid off once. And my brain was just really heightened and attuned and aware that that was a possibility that could happen.
And that made everything feel really loaded, too. So it's super useful to just pause and be like, “What am I making this mean? What if I make it mean something else? What if I make it mean this is just information about where I am on the map to my goal? And information is helpful and then I get to decide what to think and feel and how I want to navigate from wherever I am to wherever the goal is.”
And then another thing we talked about is, if you want to feel good about your career, let's not outsource that to other people and their opinions about us. Let's create that for ourselves so we have a strong basis of confidence and joy about our work. And we're going to do that using things like the what is working list.
Which doesn't mean we ignore what's not working, it just means we build a solid foundation of noticing things that are going well. And we do that because the brain has a negativity bias. So focusing on what's working isn't actually being delusional or anything, it's actually giving us a clearer and more realistic view of what's actually happening.
And then, the other thing I want to re-mention is thinking about creating your own performance review for yourself. Evaluating your performance in your work, and in your life, and in your relationships, in any area you want to.
Not as a way to create an artificial high or an artificial low or tell yourself you're only doing amazingly or telling yourself you're failing at everything, but as a way to see where you are as compared to where you started. And as compared to where you want to go. And to help yourself have a more delightful, fun experience of getting to where you're trying to go. Because that's super fun.
All right, y’all, that's what I have for you this week. If you want to dig more deeply into designing your life, and designing your career, and mapping your performance, and really blowing your own mind with what you can be. and do, and accomplish I would love for you to come work with me one on one. I've got some client openings starting in the next few weeks, and I would love for you to be one of them. So come hit me up on the website if that sounds like you.
All right, y'all have a great week. Bye bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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