Me, Myself and my Screen: How working alone can fuel our self-limiting beliefs and what we, and leaders, can do about it

Jen is currently presenting remotely to a number of her colleagues, some of whom are in the office, others, like her, are joining from home. She’s nervous. This is an important presentation and she has been working hard to make sure that she represents herself well, and lands her key messages. While presenting she notices the colleagues in the office lean in and speak to each other, she can’t hear what they are saying, to her they might as well be whispering, so she carries on. She notices those colleagues joining remotely seem pretty engaged, but aren’t giving too much away. Jen finishes presenting and team members ask a few reasonable questions, then smile and wave (the new normal for signing off a video conference), before ending the call. Jen is left staring at her own reflection in the now black mirror like screen.

Sound familiar? This is the reality for many of us at the moment. Going from potentially high levels of nervous engagement to being immediately alone. What’s the problem with this you might ask? Surely Jen can now relax, go and grab a cuppa and take a moment to relish in her triumph. Well maybe, but how often is that really the next thing that will happen? Jen is likely to begin to reflect on what she just presented, and this reflection is a lonely one.

When working co-located with her colleagues, Jen might walk out of a presentation with others, chatting informally about what they had just heard, or making small talk about the weather perhaps – or the fact that neither colleague has long enough to get to their next meeting without running late. This allows Jen’s reflection of the presentation to incorporate social observations or social persuasion. In addition, it allows her previously nervous (even stressed) physical state to benefit from the calming effects of interacting with trusted others. Regardless of the post-meeting conversation, it’s providing Jen with snippets of conscious or subconscious feedback about how her presentation just landed.

But alas no, Jen is alone – no small talk, and no opportunity for social interruption before the self-talk begins, which means that things start to go downhill. Because like many of us, Jen has a few pesky self-limiting beliefs that love to be reinforced whenever they get the opportunity.

Belief baggage in the new hybrid world

What’s a self-limiting belief you ask? Any belief that is held about oneself, usually built up over time, possibly ‘baggage’ or a hanger-on from childhood, which holds us back from reaching our full potential, feeding into our larger sense of capability or self-worth.  Here are a few you might recognise:

• I’m too young to be taken seriously
• I’m not smart enough to do this job
• I can never make my point eloquently enough
• I’m too old to understand the new ideas

Self-limiting beliefs are a problem because they are limiting. They aren’t a driver to better yourself, they are a reason to never attempt to do something you could do well. While supporting others to develop, I am in a position to witness people becoming aware of their self-limiting beliefs as we talk, and then support them to begin to overcome them. More recently, this position has left me concerned that the influence of self-limiting beliefs seems to be getting ever stronger than usual in isolated working environments… and I’m reminded of just how important social interaction is in helping to shape our view of our self and our working lives.

It’s easy to recognise the impact of self-limiting beliefs at an individual level, often touched on and worked through during coaching interventions. However, we often fail to consider the serious business impact if the organisational environment allows self-limiting beliefs to go unchecked – hybrid environments have the potential to do this if left unmanaged.

Let’s say that within your business, which has just started to incorporate a greater level of hybrid working – Jen’s experience becomes the norm. There are inevitably fewer naturally occurring opportunities for feedback or informal social engagement; which helps to feed our perceptions of our performance and how we are contributing.

Consequently, there is a potential for self-limiting beliefs, and the resulting reduced impact of your employees, to flourish if not managed… Meaning you may have a high percentage of your team less inclined to make best use of their capabilities; a workforce less likely to air their views; feel confident enough to try new things and essentially not live up the highly valuable potential that you employed them for in the first place.

So what can we do about this in a hybrid environment? There are two things to consider: what an individual can do for themselves, and what leaders can do for everyone.

As individuals, how can we begin to recognise and challenge our self-limiting beliefs?

1. Recognise your belief baggage – Take time to understand what beliefs you are holding onto
   Consider whether what you tell yourself about – yourself, your performance, and your capability are fair. By recognising what we tell ourselves we can begin to unpick whether our self-view is based on reality or psychological baggage we have built up over time. Consider the questions: “Is this view of myself helping me to achieve what I would like to achieve, feel how I would like to feel, or act how I would like to act?” “If someone else said this about themselves would I consider it fair or extreme?”
2. Humour could help – cutting through any negative self-talk with humour can really help to disrupt your thinking
   Reframing the self-limiting belief with something funny (and having this written somewhere in your working from home environment) can keep the negativity spiral at bay. For example, switching immediately following negative self-talk with the exact opposite. So, Jen might make this change: “I can never make my point eloquently enough” becomes, “I’m a fantastic public speaker, Barack Obama’s got nothin’ on me”. Allowing this to disrupt an initial thought process can put Jen in a better psychological state to take a realistic look at how she just did. Similarly, once acknowledged, laughing at your self-limiting beliefs, recognising them as extremist or unhelpful begins to break down their worth.
3. Socialise your screen – your screen now provides social engagement – so make it work for you
   It’s a small point, but an easy fix – consider your screen as a source of valuable social feedback. Include your converted self-beliefs on your screen when presenting, and consciously look for positive feedback from colleagues on video conference rather than allowing the potential negative to take hold. Misinterpreting neutral facial expressions or language as negative is common for those under stress or anxiety, remind yourself of this when you are allowing social cues to feed into your self-critique.
4. Consider Coaching – an objective view hears self-limiting beliefs easily
   For some, self-limiting beliefs are highly engrained and freeing ourselves from them can take time. If you recognise you have self-limiting beliefs that have been plaguing you for a while, an objective view can be a really useful source of feedback as well as supporting you to build more helpful self-beliefs.

How can leaders enable healthy self-beliefs in their hybrid working environments?

1. Self-affirming safety – enable a psychologically safe environment
During this article, self-limiting beliefs have been considered to be the enemy, something to be feared and avoided. But just like all enemies, there is a reason they attack and for leaders to help their colleagues, it is useful to understand why.

For self-limiting beliefs, the reason is to protect ourselves from, for example, embarrassment, disappointment, or failing. If we remove this risk, self-limiting beliefs can be much more easily managed and reframed. Therefore, creating a ‘psychologically safe’ environment is critical for minimising such beliefs within your teams. Remember that self-limiting beliefs are belief baggage, often following people from job to job and triggered even before someone joins the business. Consider the internal and external view of the business, does it suggest a safe place to be yourself? an environment that enables learning? is there evidence that a wide variety of people can be successful?

2. Social soup – Increase opportunities for feedback or observation and mix them up into a more natural blend of formal and informal social cues. Feedback processes in a hybrid environment might need a face lift. Working with a screen rather than a physical team leaves the likes of Jen open to mis-reading social cues leading her to become desperate, whether she realises or not, for opportunities to pick up subconscious signals from her peers.
My colleague Mariam Mirza writes more about misinterpreting behaviours in VC meetings.

Reflect on your current working practices as you move into a hybrid working pattern, how is informal feedback enabled? Do your leaders and wider team members understand the psychology of isolated working? And are they emotionally intelligent enough to manage their impact on others?

3. Cognitive Control – Develop thinking as well as behaviour
When exploring opportunities for development across the business, review whether your materials consider the impact of the thinking patterns that might be created in a hybrid environment.

Are you enabling people to be self-aware from a thinking perspective as well as a behavioural perspective? With greater exposure to being alone with our thoughts, understanding them and making them work for us is more critical than ever. Consider programmes that look at cognitive development as well as behavioural.

The example of Jen is a cautionary anecdote of what might happen for many of us or our teams as we begin to increase hybrid working. However, with the right self-support, and business influences in place we can make the most of the hybrid opportunity. Consider the “Jens” that you are going to have in your teams with hybrid working – do you understand what happens psychologically when the screen goes black and are you ready to support them?