Well, hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke, and today I want to talk about a conversation that's happening in your head all day long. It's fast, it's constant, and for a lot of high-achieving professionals, it is considerably harsher than anything that they could ever say out loud to another person. So think about the last time that you finished an important meeting. Maybe the presentation went well.
Maybe the recommendation was accepted. Maybe someone even stopped afterward and said to you, hey, that was excellent. Nice job. And what did your brain do on the walk back to your office, the next quiet moment you were alone, or the drive home that evening? Did it replay the compliment? Did it catalog the things that went well? Did it remind you of the preparation and experience and judgment that allowed you to show up effectively?
Or did it go straight to the one question that you wish that you had answered differently? Or the slide that you probably didn't need or could have cut? A moment that felt awkward? That thing that you should or could have anticipated? For a lot of us high-achieving professionals, our internal voice gets framed as discipline, accountability, drive. Perhaps we call it a commitment to excellence.
I have to be hard on myself. It's what keeps me sharp. Or it's why I've gotten this far. And I want to challenge that assumption today. Because what if the opposite of self-criticism isn't complacency? What if it's accuracy? That's the conversation I want to have. Because there is a very important distinction between holding yourself to a high standard and evaluating yourself harshly every time that you fall short of it. Those are not the same thing. Research on perfectionism actually makes that distinction very, very clearly. There are what researchers often call perfectionistic strivings, or setting ambitious goals, our wanting to do excellent work, and caring deeply about performance. And then there are perfectionistic concerns, fear of mistakes, chronic self-doubt, excessive worry about falling short, and the tendency to interpret imperfections as evidence that something is wrong with you.
Those two things can travel together, but they do not have the same effect. High standards are not necessarily the problem. Harsh self-evaluation is.
And I think that that distinction matters enormously for leaders. Most of the people I work with don't need help caring more. They do not need more ambition. They don't need someone telling them to raise the bar. Their bar is already plenty high. What they sometimes need is help recognizing that the voice accompanying that standard has become distorted because harsh self-criticism distorts the data. It causes us to magnify mistakes and minimize competence.
It causes us to experience success briefly and then immediately move the goalpost. It causes us to treat feelings of inadequacy as evidence of inadequacy. And it causes us to mistake incomplete readiness for a lack of qualification, or to use punishment rather than useful feedback to drive the next iteration. That's not excellence. That's inaccurate self-assessment. And those are two very different things.
Let's start with mistakes. High performers are often very good at noticing what went wrong. That can be a tremendous strength. You see the gap, you spot the flaw, you understand what could have been better. That's useful information, but the trouble starts when observation becomes an indictment.
There's a big difference between saying, I didn't answer that question quite as clearly as I wish I had, and saying, I looked completely unprepared. There's a difference between I missed something important in that conversation, and I can't believe I did that. I should know better by now.
One is data, the other is a story. And this is one of the places where I often invite coaching clients to separate evidence from emotion. Emotion says, I'm behind. Okay, what does the evidence show? Emotion says, I wasn't very good in that meeting. Well, what evidence supports that conclusion? Emotion might tell you, I'm not ready.
Okay, based on what? Because feelings are real. They matter. They absolutely give us information, but they are not always accurate conclusions. And high achieving people are not immune to bad data interpretation. Sometimes we are exceptionally sophisticated at it. We can build an entire case against ourselves using one difficult meeting.
One piece of critical feedback, one awkward interaction, or one missed opportunity. Meanwhile, there may be years of contradictory evidence sitting right in front of us. Trusted relationships, repeated promotions, invitations delivered, invitations accepted, responsibility, people who seek our counsel, a body of work that says pretty clearly, you know what you're doing. And somehow the internal narrator is still saying, not enough. That's where accuracy matters. Not false reassurance, not inflated self-esteem, accuracy. And the same distortion shows up in how we experience success. I've written and talked before about the importance of sitting in the sun.
Letting a good thing actually be good for a moment. When we have a great day, soak it in. When we nail a pitch or a procedure, accept the compliments. When our idea or effort was clutch, we need to relish the moment. Because hedonic adaptation is real. Human beings adapt. The promotion that once felt extraordinary eventually becomes your job.
The opportunity you dreamed about eventually becomes a regular Tuesday. The goal you worked toward for three or 13 years becomes the next line on your resume. That adaptation is normal, but I think high achievers often accelerate it. We don't just adapt to success. We end up discounting it. You get the promotion and start thinking, well, it was probably just my turn.
Or you receive meaningful praise and think, well, they didn't see the parts that could have been better. Or you finish a difficult project successfully and immediately think, okay, what's next? There's a difference between adapting to success and refusing to let success count. And if every accomplishment is immediately reclassified as expected, inevitable, insufficient, or irrelevant because the next goal is already in view, your internal scorecard is rigged.
You can never win because every success becomes the new baseline, and every shortcoming becomes fresh evidence against you. That is not an objective system. So part of self-awareness is asking, what does the evidence say? What actually went well? What strength did I demonstrate? What have I learned? Or what would I want to repeat? Not because we need to sit around congratulating ourselves all day, but because learning requires accurate feedback. And success is feedback too. If you only ever study what went wrong, you are working with half of the data set.
There is another cost of perfectionism that I don't think we talk enough about either. Perfectionism can keep incredibly capable people on the sidelines, waiting until they're more prepared, waiting until they know more, waiting until they've closed every perceived gap, waiting until they feel all the way ready. And meanwhile, organizations don't stop needing leaders while you're waiting to feel perfectly prepared.
Opportunities get filled, decisions get made, voices enter the room, and sometimes the distinguishing characteristic of the person who steps forward isn't that they possess more capability. It's simply that they were willing to raise their hand before they felt completely or perfectly ready. And I want to say this carefully because I am not suggesting that everybody should pursue every opportunity. Not every stretch assignment is the right assignment.
Not every promotion is worth taking. Not every invitation deserves a yes. Discernment matters. But perfectionism can masquerade as discernment. It can convince an enormously capable leader that one remaining gap disqualifies them while ignoring the 20 strengths or experiences and relationships that qualify them. Again, that's not accuracy.
Leadership development rarely, if ever, works by you becoming completely ready and then stepping into the next level. Most of us were not fully ready for the role that stretched us most. Somebody saw enough. They gave us an opportunity, and then we learned. We adjusted. We asked questions. We made mistakes. We built capacity by using it. Readiness is often not the prerequisite for the stretch assignment. It is the byproduct of it. And that matters because perfectionism can tell you, wait, wait until you feel more confident. Wait until you know more. Wait until you can guarantee success. But leadership does not offer guarantees. Growth usually asks us to move with some degree of incompleteness. And that is where self-compassion comes in. Now, if you are a high achiever, I can almost hear your resistance to that word. To all of my gunners and strivers and drivers, please don't check out on me right now.
Self-compassion can sound soft. It can sound like lowering expectations, giving yourself a pass, or making excuses. And that is not what I mean. Self-compassion is not asking you to see yourself more favorably than the evidence warrants. It is asking you to stop seeing yourself less favorably than the evidence warrants. And that is a very different proposition. You can acknowledge that you missed something and still refuse to humiliate yourself over it. You can own a mistake without converting it into an identity. You can accept difficult feedback without allowing one piece of feedback to erase nine years of demonstrated capability. You can expect excellence without using shame as a performance management strategy against yourself.
Because think about this: would you lead anyone else that way?
Imagine saying to someone on your team, hey Fred, you did nine things exceptionally well, but I am only going to talk to you today about the one thing that you missed. Or, Emily, every time you succeed, I am immediately going to raise the expectation so that you never have time to feel competent. Or, Maya, I'm going to use shame because I'm concerned that encouragement might make you complacent.
We would never describe that as great leadership. And yet some extraordinarily thoughtful leaders manage themselves exactly that way. So how do we interrupt it? A few practical places to begin. First, pay attention to what you actually say to yourself in the 30 seconds after a disappointment. Not three days later after you've processed it, in the moment.
Do you use words like always, never, should have? How could you?
Listen for absolutes. Listen for exaggeration. Listen for language that you would immediately challenge if you heard a colleague use it about themselves. Second, separate evidence from emotion. Ask yourself, what happened? What do I know to be true? What am I assuming? What evidence supports the story that I'm telling myself? And what evidence contradicts it?
This is not about arguing yourself into believing that everything is wonderful. It's just about interrogating the story you tell yourself, consulting the evidence, being accurate. And third, use the colleague standard. Imagine someone you deeply respect came into your office and described exactly what just happened to you. The same mistake, the same outcome, the same circumstances. What would you say to them?
You probably wouldn't lie. You wouldn't pretend the mistake didn't matter. You might say, yes, you missed that. Or here's what I think that you should do next. And no, this does not negate everything else I know to be true about your capability. That is compassionate accountability, not softness, not avoidance, truth without unnecessary cruelty.
And fourth, complete the learning cycle. After a significant event, ask, what worked? What didn't? What did I learn? What will I repeat? What will I change? And then close the file. Because reflection has an endpoint, but rumination does not. At some point, continuing to replay the experience is no longer producing insight. It is simply extracting an emotional tax.
Maybe you're not ready for every opportunity in front of you. None of us are. The question isn't, am I perfectly ready? A few better questions are: what does the evidence say about my capability? What can I already do? What am I learning? And is this an opportunity I can grow into? Because sometimes waiting until you feel ready isn't discernment. Sometimes it's perfectionism wearing a very responsible looking outfit. And I want you to consider where that might be happening for you. Where are you calling self-criticism accountability? Where are you minimizing evidence of your growth? Where are you holding one gap next to 20 capabilities and deciding that the gap gets the deciding vote?
Where are you treating emotion as evidence? And where might the quality of your leadership improve if you became not more flattering toward yourself, but more accurate? Your inner voice is the leader you live with longer than any other, my friend. Longer than your CEO, longer than your board chair, longer than your mentor, your coach, your team. High standards are a gift. Ambition is a gift.
Caring deeply about the quality of your work is a gift. You do not have to surrender any of those things, but you can stop confusing cruelty with accountability. You can tell yourself the truth without attacking yourself with it. You can learn from a mistake without turning the mistake into an identity. You can let success count. You can grow into opportunities before you feel fully formed for them.
And you can pursue excellence without making excellence the price of your own approval. High standards can make you better. A harsh voice rarely does. So keep the standard and just change the conversation.
