Reframing your perspective

Lately I’ve been aware of my tendency to compare my professional experience against an ideal — often in comparison to design thinking methodology. I’m quick to fixate on the lack of experience or imperfections in my experience, while glossing over my achievements. This line of thinking easily leads to a spiral of self-doubt. 

This tendency to view myself as lacking could be due to the fact that girls are raised to be perfect. Certainly the negativity bias—the tendency to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information”—also plays a role. 

With biology and culture working against you, how can you maintain self-assurance, not only for your own happiness, but also to influence others’ professional assessment of you? 

Reflecting on some of my past moments of self-doubt spiraling, I see where reframing the story of my imperfect experience has helped me to embrace it. I’ll admit that this is something I’m still very actively having to work on, so this is as much a reminder to myself as it is something I’m sharing for you to benefit from. 

Adaptability over ticking the boxes

I was interviewing for a role with an organization that I knew to have a pretty mature design practice. I remember confessing to the hiring manager that I was embarrassed by my work because it didn’t “tick all the boxes” of an ideal design project. The hiring manager laughed and reassured me that their application of the design process was also rife with problems, and emphasized her interest in how I navigated situations more so than having the ideal process or outcomes.

As a hiring manager myself, I shouldn’t have been surprised, since I also didn’t expect candidates to completely match the job description. I was more interested in someone’s ability to learn and navigate the organization with grit, knowing that we were a highly imperfect organization with messy processes. 

The reframe I offer here is to focus on how you’ve been adaptable and notice how your adaptability might have eventually helped you tick most (if not all) the boxes.

What I have done over what I haven’t done

I remember downplaying my design experience when talking to another designer, explaining that my company didn’t do “real” design because much of the work we did never materialized into digital products. At that time, I thought this put me on the outskirts of the profession, especially with some many job descriptions emphasizing experience shipping products. 

Eventually, when I was hired into a new role, I asked what drew them to my experience and it was my ability to perform discovery and envision brand new products. It wasn’t until this was brought to my attention that I realized what an asset this experience was. I’d been so focused on where my experience wasn’t so strong — like shipping digital products.

Of course, now I’m also more aware of the number of experimental projects untaken by the world’s largest tech companies that never materialize into digital products — making my experience feel less marginalized. 

The reframe I offer here is to focus on what you have done, realizing this is the secret sauce you have to offer, far outweighing the things you haven’t yet done (and perhaps don’t even want to do). 

Reality over facade

I used to present a case study of design work in interviews and was always terrified that someone would ask about the research that was done to validate the design — because the answer was, there wasn’t any. At some point, instead of glossing over it, I decided to just directly address it by including a sidebar about hindsight is 20/20 and what I would do differently next time. This allowed me to show up honestly, vulnerably and as real as possible — and I trusted that doing so would help me filter for organizations that were open and interested in the real me, not the facade. 

Riding the self-confidence boost I received from being real in my case study presentation, I also started being more direct in initial recruitment conversations about what work I was interested in and what work I wasn’t interested in. I acknowledge that I had the privilege of being in a position to handle the risk of being picky. However, beyond this supporting me in finding the role that fit the best, it also reinforced that in the job hunting process, I was an equal player — like the organization, I was also looking for the right fit.

The reframe I offer here is to lean into realness, finding ways to honor your humanity and imperfections. The more you’ve embraced the reality of your imperfect human experience, the easier it will be for others to embrace it, too.

. . . . .

I offer these reframes to remind you of your vast and valuable experience, so that you can not only tell the story of the greatness of your professional experience, but also actually believe it. 

From this place of self-assurance, you’ll be in the best position to find work that is a good and authentic fit.