Do you struggle with feeling underappreciated?
When my stress levels are high, I can start to feel underappreciated "on top of everything else."
Is this familiar to you?
I know I'm in good company because my clients often feel like their contributions aren't fully valued when they first start to work with me.
In my experience, feeling underappreciated is often a sign that we've been contorting ourselves to be someone we imagine someone else wants us to be.
If the suffering of trying to fit yourself into an image or ideal has reached a fever pitch, I suggest these reflections:
Have understood the image or ideal I'm striving for wrongly? I'm not suggesting we chase after someone else's fantasy of who we should be...but often we suffer the most when we have strived and strived to meet an ideal and the person we've appointed as judge and juror still finds us to be lacking. It's helpful to know if there has been a misunderstanding.
Have I abandoned my unique gifts and strengths in order to try and achieve this externally imposed standard? Trying to do a job as a carbon copy of someone else is only useful in the very beginning stages of learning. After that, we must begin to work and live leveraging our own gifts and personality styles or risk feeling, at best, underappreciated.
Is it possible I understand the ideal or image clearly, and it clashes in essential ways with my values? Sometimes we see the culture and the goal clearly but it is in opposition to our own core sense of priorities.
The good news here is that by seeing these different nuances clearly we have many choices in how to respond.
If you want to understand how these different scenarios could play out in a simple work-scenario watch this video:
This video walks through the ways that our own interpretations of a simple workplace requests can lead to being and feeling underappreciated.
I use the scenario of a really common and seemingly straightforward request: "we want people to speak up in meetings more." The video shows how each of the 3 scenarios above could lead us into feeling undervalued...and points to some options for how to shift.
Caveat: I love speaking up in meetings (as some of you know from personal experience 😂) so I just want to clarify that this is a perfectly acceptable request...but how we receive, interpret, and act on requests like this can make all the difference in how we feel!
Much love,
Marijke Ocean
P.S. If you are not feeling valued at work ... I'd love to help get you back to feeling like your confident-self again. Contact me here and let me know what you are working through and we'll go from there! -- M