Benefits of the (Self-)Doubt: How it can Accelerate your Career
What is limiting you is often not the external circumstances, but the negative voice in your head.Our natural reaction is to fight it. The problem is we beat ourselves up when our inner thoughts take over. It becomes a vicious cycle.
What if we can leverage them, rather than making it work against us?
Self doubt in every transition
I got better at managing self doubt every time I switch a career and jump into a new industry. I have not only learned to live with it — but even use it to accelerate my career.
Here is my journey. I wrote about the full story here.
Researcher in Biology → Sales, Marketing & Customer Support in Ecommerce → Account Management in Tech → Project & Product Management in Tech
Every transition I made, I found a sense of transformation.
Hockey stick growth = career transition
Hockey stick growth is a term used to describe the journey of a startup. It takes years to find the product-market fit where a customer is willing to buy what the company offers.
Once the product value and customers’ needs are aligned, the startup hits the inflection point and experiences exponential growth.
Your career is comprised of a series of hockey stick growth. You are the startup. The job market is your customer.
Just like the entrepreneur, you experience tremendous self-doubt when you are on a plateau. You question who will offer you the job when you have no experience. After you got the job, self-doubt creeps in again when all the seasoned employees know about the product and process from the inside out.
I wrote about how I reached my inflection points. My hope is to inspire those who feel that they are reaching a career plateau.
So what are the benefits of (self-) doubt?
Fear of being judged motivates you to learn
In meetings, we often second-guess ourselves before speaking up to ask questions or to make recommendations.
As a product manager myself, I work closely with domain expertise — from Data Scientists to Dev Ops Engineers. That means I am always working with people who know more about a domain than myself.
My fear of looking like a deer in the headlights propelled me to spend my spare time learning about the concepts that my co-workers and customers speak — from technical terms to project/product management frameworks.
Seeing their heads nodding as I corporate their languages gives me confidence. In the long run, I earned the trust of my engineers team — cause they recognize I take the extra steps to understand their world.
Fear of being wrong motivates you to plan
Knowing that I don’t have all the answers, I become a better listener, observer and researcher. I ask questions to understand how my team members analyze a problem and gather information to increase my certainty of making the right decision. Synthesizing data from different sources gives me confidence in making better decisions.
With a sense of paranoia that something may go wrong motivates me to plan and prepare. Anticipating the possible outcomes gives me a sense of control and confidence, as I see the plan coming together.
It is easy to talk about the benefits of self-doubt. But it is hard to not let it distract you from achieving the task at hand while you are experiencing the feeling. In this article, I will share the tips that have helped awaken the confidence me and quiet my negative voice.
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