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It’s perfectionism and the fear of negative feedback that make us scared.
The thing with communication is that everything is back and forth. You answer back and make sure you’re understand and work towards understanding. I think we fear asking questions because of this stigma that we are dumb for doing so.
Phrasing my questions as “let me make sure I understand this. Here’s what I think you mean. Is that right?” has helped. Because it doesn’t feel like I’m asking like I’m lost in the words (which you aren’t, but perfectionism makes any question you ask feel that way).
Communication will always be vague because what I have in my head and what you have in yours will always be somewhat different. Maybe we were yelled at by parents or teachers who were bad at explaining things and we felt bad asking for clarification. Now I find that reasonable people would rather take time to make sure everything is understood so that you can do the work correctly and they get what they need.
I hope this has been helpful. I’m writing in between answering Skype/Teams messages.
I have trouble making decisions too sometimes, and sometimes I write the email, click delay send in 15min, and I feel better because I still have a chance to change it if I think of something. But 99% of the time it just sends and I forget about it. There’s something about it not being final and able to change that makes it feel easier.
I have this problem too. I haven’t had a ton of luck in conquering it, but I’ve tried mentally timeboxing things (“this email will be sent in the next 10 minutes”) and that’s helped a bit
👀
Come clean to a superior about this. Tell them you need to feel comfortable erring
To be clear, I have the same problem that OP has, and I didn't mean to come off as unsympathetic. Feeling this way means that's you know you're not meeting expectations. Rather than waiting to be told that or leaving it unsaid, I think it's better to get ahead of it and say something like.. "I know I'm not meeting expectations. I'm guilty about this, and I feel so nervous about screwing up that it's paralyzing me and prohibiting me from developing the skills to meet expectations. I need to feel comfortable making mistakes so that I can eventually improve."