Vanessa is a highly motivated communications professional looking to move up in her career and make an impact in her community. But she feels overlooked in her personal and professional life. Stevon offers advice on radical self-acceptance, and shares tips on how to build self-confidence by being a work-in-progress.
Stevon Lewis is a licensed psychotherapist and coach. Learn more about his work here. If you loved this episode, be sure to listen to Still Needs Validation and When Self-Doubt Creeps Up.
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Stevon Lewis: What's up, everybody? Welcome to How to Talk to High Achievers about Anything. I'm Stevon Lewis, a licensed psychotherapist in private practice. On this show, we share stories of people who are striving for something big, especially black and brown folks, people who are facing roadblocks, like we all, do from others and from within ourselves. I offer feedback and strategies so that together we'll figure out how to achieve on our own terms. Today, we welcome Vanessa.
Vanessa is a passionate communications and marketing professional looking for leadership roles where she can be herself and make an impact in her community. But in pursuing new opportunities both in her personal and professional life, she often feels as though she's second best. Let's get into it.
Vanessa: I'm Vanessa Alvarez. I am from Chicago. I am a Chicago native. My parents came to the US from Mitracan, Mexico. I grew up on the north side of the city. I work in the nonprofit world handling external and internal communications. I found myself constantly starting new initiatives, but passing the baton along. After this happening a handful of times to me, I'm thinking, I'm 10 plus years in my profession and it not being recognized, this is just not where I should be.
So I started looking and that's where I found myself struggling and starting to doubt my capacities. Because while I would be a finalist for communication leadership roles, I would never be offered the role. I just didn't understand why, to be honest. Of course, it's subjective. I understand this is how decisions can be made, how are people feeling this day, what might someone have that somebody else doesn't have. It was detrimental. I can remember venting with some friends, "Well, what am I doing wrong?" There was some professional growth.
I will own that. In some places I had minor errors that are really flat in that space. I would ask for feedback so that I could grow. Some folks did offer me feedback. One was just a culture fit because I am collaborative, but I am a strong individual. I believe I was asked this question, what kind of animal would I be. I said the condor. I had recently come back from a trip to Lima, Peru, and I was obsessed with how they were obsessed with the condor bird. I was reading about it and I'm like, "That's exactly me." I kind of just want to be my own boss, do my own thing.
Vanessa: And that did not really resonate with them. Ultimately, I did understand that it was just not the right fit for anyone, so it's better that it turned out the way it did. But In that moment, I felt... I'm checking everything on your list and more. I'm pretty honest with myself. I would not insert myself into a space that I did not believe was right for me. When you keep getting the door closed, it's like, what is it about me that... What don't I have or what do I have too much of that they don't want? Do I limit myself? It was a struggle for me because I just couldn't see it and no one really had an answer for me.
I gave myself a timeline. Eventually I found a place that heard me, saw me as an individual. It came to be and I'm in a very beautiful space. I'm enamored with the work that I do, which is exactly what I needed from a professional and personal lens. What I think I recognized that changed was the shift in me as a person just internally. I started practicing what I was helping other people to do. I share what I know as best I can, but when somebody takes it and then turns around and says thank you, it sounds so silly, but that's like, wow.
To know that what I have done for something has propelled someone to get to a new place and they're ecstatic and happy, it definitely gave me confidence like, I know what I'm talking about. I know who I am. I know what I bring to the table. I am who I am, and I have value and I matter. This feeling of being second best is inherent in my life. I was totally second best to my mom. My mom was obsessed with my older sister. We were very different in nature. My mother did not understand me. I was not obedient. I was sassy.
I mean, it's hard to be compared to someone who is smarter, who is thinner, who is said to be prettier, who is everything that your mom wants and you're not and trying to find partnership. Again, this concept of, what is it about me that makes me not be picked? I've had individuals tell me, "I was like dating you and somebody else, but I picked this other person." I'm like, "Well, why?" Sometimes they don't even have an answer. They're like, "I don't know why," which makes me... Again, I accept now that things are as they should be. The universe has its plan.
I don't know. It's like when you're young and people are picking teams and you're the second to last pick or the last pick, it's very sad and it hurts. It hurts.
Lewis: Thank you so much, Vanessa, for coming on the show and sharing your experience with us. When I heard Vanessa's story, what stood out to me is that some of what people really miss when they are a high achiever and they're doing amazing things in life is how much of their perception of self is shaped by their experiences in childhood. And here it is, Vanessa is an adult and she's still.
Lewis: And I hate to use this word, but she's still plagued by the experience she had from her mother and not really kind of being able to achieve or accomplish getting her mother's support at the same level of her sister. She kind of adopted or accepted this narrative about herself that she's just not as good and maybe leaned into it a little bit. When she's applying for things that she knows she's probably capable of, she always sort of feels like she's just not quite there. Something about her fundamentally is preventing her from able to get over the hump.
I think a lot of that is rooted in her experience as a child with her mom. What I see happening with Vanessa isn't uncommon to what I see in my work with high achievers, especially true for Vanessa and her situation of feeling second best and maybe some of that is also having parents who immigrated to this country and herself being a person of color. Oftentimes when we're in environments that don't affirm who we are, we often downgrade ourselves and don't question the environment.
If we're in a space where we aren't being encouraged or supported or validated in the way that we see the world, then we'll say something must be wrong with us and we don't say something is wrong with the environment. I think an analogy, it's thinking about it of a diamond miner. I'll explain it like this. If I'm a raw diamond, I look like a rock. I'm not all shiny. I'm not all perfect. I'm not all the four C's at the highest level. I just look like a regular rock, but it's not my responsibility to know my worth, right? I know that I'm a diamond. I don't need to question that part.
It's the diamond miner's role to identify me in my raw form and recognize the value. I think that's kind of what's happening with Vanessa. That internally she recognizes who she is, but oftentimes the people around her don't. That's not her fault. That's the fault of the other people for not being able to recognize the value of a raw diamond, even though it's not in its final finished form. For high achievers that are experiencing something like this, my work is really a goal of trying to get them to accept themselves.
: And I say radically accept themselves because I want them to be able to accept themselves in a way that includes their faults or weaknesses or areas of improvement and also their greatest strengths. For someone like Vanessa, I want her to recognize that maybe she did grow up in a household where her mother wasn't really supportive or wasn't her biggest cheerleader and maybe praised her sister a bit more. That does not define her as less than and she still has talent and values and gifts to offer into the world.
Lewis: It's really important for her to rest upon or remind herself that, yeah, just because my mom didn't recognize it, that doesn't also mean that that's true. And just because I'm a work in progress, meaning I have a goal that I haven't attained or reached yet, doesn't mean that I'm a failure or that I will never reach that goal. I can be happy and satisfied and confident in what I'm doing today and also want and desire to do more in the future. Radical acceptance itself is a difficult concept for people to get behind and I think it's for a couple reasons.
One, I think that the way we operate in the world is in a more binary way, that we are either this or we're that. The technical term is kind of dichotomous thinking. You might have heard it as all or nothing thinking or black or white thinking, but it's saying that if I'm not at my goal, then I am failing. I think it's hard to accept the fact that we're working towards something and we can be happy in that process. That usually what happens is we tend to feel unaccomplished or behind.
: It's hard to convince our ourselves that we're on the right track, that we're making progress, and that's an okay position to be in. The other aspect of radical acceptance itself that makes it really difficult for people to adopt it as a way of being or a practice is that we live in an environment or a society where we're often comparing ourselves to others. I think part of radical acceptance itself is for people to be okay with doing things the way they do them if it's bringing them success, so that I don't have to look or mirror someone else's process in order for it to be correct for me.
I think that's a really difficult thing to do when environments try to push us to conform or to look like most everyone else. Some tools to assist with people being able to build upon a more appropriate perception of themselves is to create an evidence sheet, which is really a sheet that contains actual objective information about things that they've accomplished, compliments they've received, and areas that they've approved upon. It's an actual sheet. You can do it in your phone, or you can actually write it down a notebook and you can refer to it.
Maybe I didn't get this new role or new position that I was trying for, but that also doesn't take away or negate all the other good or all the other ability that I have based on these other three areas: what I know about myself, what others have told me about myself, and what I've seen in terms of progress of things I've worked on for myself. Another thing we can do is kind of create affirmations. Saying something like, "I am good. I am capable." Those sorts of things allow us to retrain our brain to say, "Maybe in this moment, people aren't treating me as such, but I still know that to be true."
We don't always have to have outward confirmation to know what's true for us internally. I think when we get to a place of where we accept our humanity, we realize that we aren't perfect. And that as long as we're alive, that we will never be a finished product. I can be happy and satisfied and confident in what I'm doing today and also want and desire to do more in the future.
And that's a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to How to Talk to [High Achievers] about Anything. We have really big plans for our show and we want you to be a part of it. We want to hear about your successes and challenges, your sacrifices, the ways you've celebrated, and what's ahead as you grow. Send our producer Virginia an email, and we'll get your story on the show. She's at virginia@lwcstudios.com.
How to Talk to [High Achievers] about Anything is an original production of LWC studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Juleyka Lantigua is a creator and executive, I'm Stevon Lewis. On Twitter and Instagram we're @talktoachievers. Bye everybody.
CITATION:
Lewis, Stevon, host. “Tired of Being Overlooked”
How to Talk to [High Achievers] about Anything,
LWC Studios., May 2, 2022. Talktohighachievers.com.