Wikipedia defines cognitive dissonance as follows: Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously.
At times I feel this cognitive dissonance. In my job, people are paying me to be "the expert". I feel the need to march into a new client and present to them the best solution they've ever had. In my industry, people are hiring you because of the knowledge you possess that can help them. Since you can never possibly know everything, you are going to always have, at the back of your mind, this nagging sense of "What if I'm not good enough? What if I don't know everything? What if they figure that out?" At times I feel a dissonance between the image I have to portray: "Becky the confident expert", with the "other" me: Becky the person who doesn't like attention and just wants to put on her jeans and sneakers and go to the coffee shop and hang out with her girl friends or read a good book; Becky who sometimes gets things right, but very often gets things wrong, as well; Becky who actually needs sleep and believe it or not, doesn't relish working at 6:30 in the morning or midnight, like she's done this week.
The follow up to the definition of cognitive dissonance, according to Wikipedia, is this: The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. I have to say that it's easier for me to "act the expert" than it used to be, because the more you do it, the more you believe it; I change my belief in the direction of "I am an expert, so there aren't two sides of Becky." But at other times my response is to go in the other direction; to want to hang up the hat of trying to pretend I'm any good at this job, and wanting to run in the other direction, to affirm the "normal" Becky.
I suppose a healthy response is to place my self image somewhere in the middle, and I suppose that's called humility... the ability to truthfully assess yourself, including both the good parts of you and your flaws. I tend to be a "black and white" kind of person, but I think there's something to be said for aiming for the middle, even if I can't be an "expert" marksman.
1 comment:
Every year at work I think, Okay, this is it, this is the year that they figure out that I really don't know what I'm doing and I'm just faking it. But the more I share that with others, the more I find that other perfectly qualified and capable people--like you!--feel the same way. One person told me that feeling just a little bit unsure at one's job was a good thing. People who know they don't know it all are more likely to ask for help and seek out more training.
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