When Your Strengths Start Holding You Back

One thing I've noticed in the clients who are struggling to step into more senior roles is that the qualities that helped them get there are actually hindering them in this next stage of their career.

The Senior Scientist who built their reputation through being meticulous now finds themselves paralysed by perfectionism. The newly promoted Associate Director who was valued for being collaborative now struggles to have difficult conversations and hold people accountable. The Research Associate who was praised for being accommodating and easy to work with finds themselves overlooked when promotions and opportunities arise. What got them here doesn't always get them there and I've noticed it in myself too.

A couple of the qualities I've always been proud of are the ability to see situations from multiple perspectives and the ability to stay calm. Both have served me well over the years. Being able to understand where other people are coming from has helped me build relationships, navigate cultural differences and avoid unnecessary conflict. Staying calm has helped me through situations that were anything but calm.

But in recent years I've started questioning not only these strengths themselves, but where they came from and whether they are always serving me as well as I like to think they are.

Take the ability to see things from different perspectives. Most of us would agree that this is a positive trait. It's useful to understand that your colleague's endless edits come from a desire to do a good job, not from a desire to make your life difficult. It's useful to understand that your manager is under pressure from above, or that your partner's view of the world was shaped by experiences very different from your own.

The problem is that understanding someone's behaviour is not the same as addressing it. I've realised there have been times when my ability to see things from someone else's perspective has stopped me from asking difficult questions or challenging behaviour that needed to be challenged. Instead of saying something, I would explain it away to myself in my head, instead of asking what was really going on, I would decide I already knew, instead of having an uncomfortable conversation, I would convince myself there was no point because I could already predict the outcome.

If I'm being completely honest, I’d had to admit that there's a degree of arrogance hidden in that. When we tell ourselves, "There's no point raising it because they'll only react like this," we're making a huge assumption that we know exactly what's going on in the other person's mind. We're assuming they won't change and that our interpretation of the situation is correct. In doing so, we keep both ourselves and the other person stuck. Nicely, safely, predictably stuck.

We may not like the situation, but as humans we often prefer a predictable discomfort to an unpredictable one. The same thing can happen with calmness. For years I viewed calm as one of my superpowers. Looking back, I can see good reasons why, there were situations earlier in my life where staying calm felt safer than reacting, so it became a useful skill and one that others appreciated...

But every strength has a shadow side.

There have been times when I wasn't staying calm because it was the wisest response. I was staying calm because I didn't want conflict. There have been times when calmness wasn't emotional intelligence, but avoidance. By consistently choosing calm, I avoided developing skills in negotiation, boundary setting and conflict resolution. I became very good at avoiding discomfort and telling myself I was being the mature person in the situation.

The reality is that the subconscious really is remarkably clever at keeping us safe and justifying our reasons for not doing uncomfortable things. It’s something I see in many of my clients. They tell themselves they need more skills, better English, more vocabulary and perhaps another presentation skills or leadership course to help them feel more confident.

Sometimes those things do genuinely help, but often what they're calling skilling-up is actually protection and what they're calling perfectionism is really a long standing fear of being judged. They might believe they’re being accommodating when really their fear of visibility is controlling their actions. Not unlike me, what they're calling calmness is actually fear of conflict and what they're calling being an introvert who couldn’t possibly ‘xyz’ is a perfectly understandable attempt to avoid situations that feel uncomfortable.

The problem is that these strategies rarely announce themselves as limitations, they disguise themselves as sensible decisions. You don't speak up in the meeting because you're still gathering your thoughts, you don't challenge a colleague because it's not worth creating tension, you don't give the presentation because someone else will do it better… and so on.

Each decision feels reasonable in isolation, but over time you’re paying a high cost; your ideas stay unheard, your expertise stays hidden and your confidence shrinks rather than grows because you're not gathering evidence that you can handle the situations you're avoiding. But it doesn’t end there, the greater cost is that people begin making assumptions about your ambition, your capability or your leadership potential based on what they can see, not on what you're actually capable of.

If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, perhaps the question isn't whether you need more confidence, more vocabulary or another training course. Perhaps the question is whether there is a behaviour, belief or identity you've stopped questioning simply because it's always been there. After all, some of the most powerful limitations in our lives don't feel like limitations at all, they feel like personality.

Sometimes we need another person to help us spot the difference between who we are and the strategies we've developed to stay safe. It's a conversation I've been having a lot recently with clients and one that I'm increasingly interested in myself. If this resonates with you and you'd like to explore it together, dm me to arrange a consultation call.