Reflecting Through Guidance

Uncovering my own worth and uncovering my hidden strengths have likely been the biggest challenge I’ve had to work through in my career, maybe in my entire life. My work ethic and drive to keep up as best I could regardless of who I was competing against certainly helped offset some of my self-imposed inadequacies but it’s been a constant battle to develop an appropriate level of pride and ownership of even the things I do well; I routinely downplay the work involved having multiple books hit #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller List. As much strength as there is in humility, we’re not being humble if we’re unwilling to accept the impact of significance of what we offer. That’s belittling a gift God’s blessed us with and I’m as guilty of that as anyone I know.

You may know some of my backstory, but here’s the “Reader’s Digest” version just in case… I didn’t struggle in school, I was just bored. I hated sitting still (and do to this day) so reading the required books and writing papers on random topics held my attention. Math was easy, science annoyed me. I was only on a few sports teams and didn’t have enough involvement to develop any skill to speak of. I squeaked through high school, barely, but poured myself into the areas I found fulfillment from: work and an assortment of other shenanigans. I hit community college with a stick before deciding I could make nearly as much operating a press in a factory as I could in the field I was considering without racking up student loans.

I’ll bet you can think of dozens of people who fit that same mold. Just a few years into that factory career, though, I found myself in those roles I’ve mentioned several times already, providing direction and feedback to people much older and with significantly more prestige. To this day, I feel some level of inadequacy routinely. In early 2019, I had an opportunity to make a proposal to provide services for a large, global petroleum company. The work would have involved traveling to an offshore drilling platform in the North Atlantic for a week at a time over the course of a few months, which would have required me to complete a cold-water helicopter crash survival simulation beforehand. I spoke with two mentors prior to submitting the proposal, both of which strongly suggested a rate substantially higher than I could imagine. My final proposal included fifteen days on the platform plus a day of travel to and from for each of the three trips. The final number I proposed, for 21 days away from home, was more than half the highest annual salary I ever received in a full time role. That said, it was still well below what either mentor suggested and so low for the work I would have been doing that the organization didn’t take it seriously. 

Opportunity lost? Maybe… Lesson learned? Kind of… Connecting the dots on how to put an appropriate value on any of the services we provide has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. From the bottom of my heart, I still feel like so much of what I do is incredibly basic. Throughout my career, though, be it during my time in behavior-based safety, human resources, or now speaking to and training leaders across the United States, I’ve been blessed with numerous seasoned professionals in each field who continue to provide me with input on the value I offer and the potential I hold for having a positive impact on the people I serve. As with so many other amazing people I’ve known, learning to shed that feeling of inadequacy and replacing it with the healthy balance of humility and confidence we looked at before has been hard. I’ve found that reflecting on the guidance we receive from external perspectives can reveal our worth, reducing (at least some) insecurity in interactions. Even then, though, we’ll need to truly embrace our distinct voice so we’ll look at that next time.