Stepping Into Your Own Light
Stop internalizing failure and externalizing success. Own your achievements with confidence.
Last year, I visited Stanford Business School, my alma mater, and stopped by Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s renowned class Paths to Power. Professor Pfeffer is widely regarded the leading expert on power and has published multiple books on the subject including Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t and 7 Rules of Power: Surprising—but True—Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career.
I was speaking on a panel later that afternoon, and decided to sit in on his class before having lunch with him. He started the class by announcing that I was a special guest and praising me for all the things I’ve done and how famous I was, before asking me to introduce myself. I wasn’t expecting to be introduced and shyly played off my accomplishments. Professor Pfeffer wasn’t having any of it. He promptly reprimanded me in front of a class about power, for making myself seem small. He said that many people will brag about things they never really did, and I won’t even talk about the amazing things I actually did!
It was a vivid lesson I will not soon forget.
Asians tend to internalize their failures and externalize their success, because of their upbringing. This is rooted in a culture of saving face and avoiding shame. Parents focus on your flaws, not your strengths, and rarely provide positive reinforcement or praise for success, because success is expected. When you do something well, you are reminded that someone else did it better. So whenever you have a big win, you tend to ascribe it to luck or other people. Although if things go wrong, you tend to blame yourself for the outcome. You won’t take credit for the good, but you always take credit for the bad. This leads to a lot of negative self-talk and misguided imposter syndrome. It creates self-doubt and a lack of confidence that is detrimental to your identity.
For some people, this attribution is reversed. They place the blame of failures on others or to unfavorable circumstances. Meanwhile, they are willing to take full credit for any and all successful outcomes, even if they weren’t responsible for them.
When you own your successes, you build self-confidence and pride in yourself. You carry yourself differently when you walk into a room. You act like you deserve to be in that room and others can tell. You sit at the head of the table, because why wouldn’t you? You contribute heavily to the conversation, because you believe that what you have to say needs to be heard. You have what they call “executive presence”.
When you beat yourself up constantly over small mistakes and give away credit for your success to others, you make yourself smaller and smaller. You walk into a room feeling “grateful” to be included. You sit on the outside chairs, because you want to let the more important people have a seat at the table. You don’t want to draw any attention to yourself, because you are afraid you might say something wrong.
Who do you think is more likely to be promoted to an executive someday? Who would you promote if you were a board member, shareholder or CEO?
Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re always right, it matters if you’re willing to speak up. People have to be willing to buy in to what you are selling. If you don’t believe in what you are selling, why should anyone else? Especially if what you are selling is yourself.
Cultural Programming
When you grow up in a household where you brought home a 97% on an exam and your parents ask what happened to the other 3% instead of praising you, it’s not hard to understand where this self-sabotaging mindset comes from. You never think that you are good enough, because nothing is ever good enough. Even getting a perfect score on the exam gets you a lukewarm response because that is what is expected. It is difficult to feel very special when you never receive any positive reinforcement as a child. You begin to focus on all the negatives and internalizing any failures. Your self critic becomes deafening and needs to be shut down because it is harmful.
You rarely if ever hear, “Good job, you gave it your best!” in an Asian household. In fact, even when you do succeed, you are reminded that someone else did it better. Nothing seems to impress parents, even when you so desperately want to earn their love and respect by performing well. They want you to succeed, but not to get too cocky when you do. This doesn’t mean that they don’t love you, they just show it very differently.
Meanwhile, in other households, you are encouraged to try things and praised for effort, even with mediocre results. When you are raised with positive reinforcement, you carry that attitude with you throughout your life. When your parents vocally cheer you on and instill confidence in you, you start to believe anything is possible. When your opinion is valued and heard at a young age, instead of always deferring to your parents, you are more likely to believe your opinion matters. Instead of being made to feel small, you are made to feel big.
Like many Asians, I was raised to be humble and to think of others before myself. Arrogance and drawing attention to yourself are frowned upon in Eastern cultures. That’s why we instinctively deflect credit to others before accepting any ourselves. But I’ve learned that humility doesn’t mean minimizing yourself or becoming invisible. You can be aware of others, while still being fully yourself. When you shine your light, it doesn’t drown out others light. Everything just gets brighter.
The Power of Owning Success
It is hard to beat a team that is on a win streak. They build momentum and confidence, which compounds into more wins. People underestimate the impact of self-belief. Knowing you have the talent and ability gives you a certain boldness and audacity to take on bigger challenges.
In order to have self-belief, you need to give yourself credit when things go well. You have to own it. You have to say it out loud. Don’t play it down for others. Don’t minimize your success. Don’t give away credit that you deserve.
Being raised to deflect attention and play off success with words like “it was nothing” or “it could have happened to anyone” is detrimental. Self-deprecation is self-sabotage. By diminishing your accomplishments you only end up hurting how others perceive you. They will believe you when you say it wasn’t a big deal or that you got lucky. Instead, simply acknowledge the hard work you put in or the fact that you are very good at your job. It isn’t arrogant if it’s accurate.
The Danger of Internalizing Failure
When you turn external setbacks into personal flaws, you turn “I made a mistake” into “I am a failure.” Self-blame turns emotional distress inward, often leading to negative self-talk, anxiety, and reduced motivation. You overgeneralize a setback as proof that you will never succeed, so you give up trying again. You fall into the trap of focusing entirely on internal and unchangeable traits (talent and intelligence), while ignoring external factors.
While some unreasonable people always blame external circumstances for everything that goes wrong for them, and never take ownership, it is entirely valid to look at external circumstances. Things like timing, bad luck, or other systemic issues are out of your control and always in play. It is irrational to believe that you can be 100% responsible for any outcome.
Many Asians I know are deferential and play defense. You tell yourself that it’s okay if things don’t work out because you’re hedging against failure. You’ve been beat up so much growing up that you use this as a way to cope with bad outcomes. You inevitably suffer from imposter syndrome because you continue to focus on and magnify the 3% you missed, not the 97% you got right. You have all the talent and ability in the world, but none of the confidence, because you have been programmed to fixate on the flaws.
A prime example of how this plays out in the real world is when you are looking for a job. If you suffer from this failure fixation mentality, you will see a job posting and not apply because you only hit 7 of the 10 bullet points listed in the job requirements. Meanwhile someone else who only meets 3 of those bullets will have all the irrational confidence and self-belief in the world to apply. They honestly believe that they are capable of doing all 10 even if they haven’t before. These individuals aggressively play to win, they don’t play not to lose. This shift in mentality makes a huge difference not only in self-perception, but ultimately how others perceive them.
The real world isn’t a meritocracy. Self-perception often drives reality.
How to Shift Your Perspective
When you’ve spent your whole life beating yourself up over mistakes, it’s hard to change. Here are some ways to catch yourself from internalizing failures and mistakes by reframing them:
Separate Behavior from Identity - Recognize that failure is a data point, not a verdict on your self-worth. It’s always helpful to see yourself as a third party. If a friend was in this exact situation, would you tell them they are a failure, or help them to see what went wrong? Would you beat them up over it? We would never do this to someone else, so why do we do it to ourselves? One mistake or outcome does not define who you are.
Name the External Factors - Step back and evaluate the situation objectively. Acknowledge the uncontrollable factors (environment, resources, others’ actions). that contributed to the outcome. The more you are able to understand why you failed, the less likely you are to internalize and blame yourself. Doing this actively allows you to reframe your negative self-talk. It gives you the opportunity to learn from the situation and grow from it, instead of merely chalking it up to a “you” issue.
Limit the Scope - It’s always helpful to put things in perspective. When you take a failure in one area (not passing a test, a presentation going badly, a disappointing job interview), it is easy to project that to everything else in your life. Shrink the impact of your setbacks, because these incidents are just that, isolated events. They do not define you or your worth.
The process of changing self-perception takes time. Be kind and patient with yourself as you transition your mindset into one of self-belief, so give yourself a lot of grace.
I am obsessed with golf. I discovered it in my mid-thirties and spend any free time I have playing golf. There is something about playing a game where it’s just you vs. yourself. When you hit a good shot, you take full credit for it. When you hit a bad shot, you can only blame yourself and not an opponent or a teammate. But my friends have always told me that whenever I hit a good shot, I still manage to find something wrong with it or say I got lucky. And when I hit a bad shot, I beat myself up and become so negative that it compounds into more bad shots.
My golf game is a metaphor for this essay. I won’t take credit for the good, and I beat myself up for the bad. I constantly think I have a bad swing that gets lucky with some good shots every now and again. Whereas a good golfer has the confidence to trust their swing, even if they occasionally make bad shots which are the exception. They let the mistakes roll off their back like it’s no big deal, because they are anomalies. They don’t suddenly think they’re bad golfers because they hit a bad shot.
Even though I still struggle, I am doing my best to trust my swing with confidence because I know I hit far more good shots than bad. And when I do hit a bad shot and make a mistake, I learn from it and move on. There’s no sense in dwelling on it, because it’s done and I can’t do anything about it. I just need to regather my confidence so I can hit the next shot. My game has improved so much because of this positive shift in self-perception.
Trust your swing, because even if it feels lucky, it’s still all you.
Learning how to shift your mindset from owning your success and accepting your failures takes time and effort. That’s why so many people have executive coaches to help point out the self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors. It’s why I encourage so many people to seek out coaching, because it’s the best investment you can make in yourself and your career. All of these things like having a growth mindset, embracing conflict, pursuing power, not being so transactional, having main character energy and the importance of storytelling, are a process. We are all works in progress, but we have to be self-aware enough to recognize that the work has to start somewhere.
I relate to this so much! Even when I got 100%, I would still get asked "did they not have extra credit" :) So glad you're sharing this, Dave.