Come out of your own shadows
And stop hiding behind fear, perfection and blaming others
I subscribe to a daily newsletter by online marketer, creator, author and remarkable human being Seth Godin. In his January 26 post, Seth’s title got me thinking about how we as engineers do a lot of hiding. First, the title that caught my attention:
Grandiosity as a form of hiding
What Seth is referring to in this post calls out businesses and non-profits that have both overly large and vague mission statements that create unending churn, little to no impact, and a lot of ineffective virtue signaling. Ironically, it allows these organizations to not reach their stated goals and remain in the shadows and fairly irrelevant.
But this post is not just about businesses and non-profits - it is also relevant for us engineers and engineering leaders. As Seth writes in the first sentence of his post:
A business that says its mission is to, “reinvent local commerce to better serve our customers and neighborhoods,” can spend a lot of time doing not much of anything before they realize that they’re not actually creating value.
How exactly is this relevant to us technical folks?
We commonly hide behind unrealistic visions for ourselves and our teams that are not based in reality. We have convinced ourselves that we’re creating a lot of value by over-engineering and over-emphasizing things that are mostly irrelevant to the business missions we work to support.
To illustrate my point, ask yourself if any of these common statements by engineers seem familiar:
If we could only get 6-12 months to rewrite our product’s main backend, then life would be really simple! Those folks on the business side of our company don’t care about engineering.
If my teammates would start better communicating with me without me having to get better at communicating my own needs, then I’d feel better and get to do the kind of programming work I want.
I’m really scared of being fired for making any kind of mistake in my code, so I polish it and polish it until it’s perfect!
Our team has the best and the most experienced engineers, so we should get to experiment with new technology and prototype all major new features ahead of the rest of the teams. Why should we have to waste our time working on boring maintenance and integration user stories?
Everything about this company is broken and backwards - if I were in charge, it’d be so much better!
Do you see how these are all examples of engineers hiding in the shadows, unaware that they may be keeping themselves small because they feel fear about something? They’re examples of engineers who aren’t slowing down enough to notice and talk about their own fears within themselves.
Fear drives us to keep ourselves small and many times, allows us to cast blame on other people instead of ourselves. We end up blaming others for getting in our way of growing into doing the exciting type of work that we long to be doing. The ironic part is, there’s no need to blame anyone, including yourself.
So here’s a challenge to you to slow down with and consider. Where and how are you avoiding your fears and creating self-narratives that keep yourself small? Where do you blame others for not being where you want right now in your engineering career? And if you were somehow able to grow beyond these fearful narratives for yourself, what would become possible for you to realize?
Find someone you have an open and trusting relationship with and discuss with them how you might be hiding in a narrative about yourself that doesn’t serve you well. If you’re struggling to identify these areas, then consider starting from the opposite perspective - what would you love to be doing or working on as an engineer that you’ve found challenging to realize for yourself?
Perhaps you find it challenging to realize these desires for yourself because you’re afraid of something about yourself.
Your fear does not need to keep you hiding and ineffective. You can become aware of your fear(s) and use them to grow from an increasing self-awareness.
Give yourself a gift of great compassion - facing your fears is not easy work. And if you want to grow and achieve the goals you have for yourself in your engineering career, there’s nothing more effective than confronting your fears!
Would you love some experienced help working through your fears with someone who’s intimately familiar both with fear and hiding? I’ve struggled through deep, paralyzing fear for much of my career as a software engineer, pre-sales engineer, engineering manager, director and now small business founder. I’ve been able to grow into each of these different career chapters in spite of the fear that I’ve felt by learning how to understand my fear, its roots and how to move forward one step at a time.
I’d love to support you in coaching and help you grow through the fear that’s keeping you smaller than you want to be in your career.
Book some free time with me and you’ll see first hand how raising awareness of your fears won’t destroy you - it will liberate and catalyze you to stop keeping yourself small and achieve what you’ve wanted for so long!
As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to meeting you and supporting you in your desire to step out of your fear and become the confident engineer you know is inside of you!
P.S. If this was comforting and helpful to you and you feel brave enough to share with me and other readers, feel free to leave a comment below.