You’re Not Being Graded
Most of us spend at least 13 years in school from Kindergarten to senior year. Many of us spend quite a few more. When I graduated from law school, I'd been in school for 88% of my life.
Since then, I’ve taken a bar review class to study for the bar exam, earned a certification in healthcare compliance and become a certified life coach tacking on another two years of school. So even all these years later, two weeks away from turning 41, I've spent 59% of my life in school.
You’ve probably spent half to two-thirds of your life in school as well.
Which is why it's no surprise we think our lives are being graded. We hold ourselves to standards set by other people- experts, teachers, the ubiquitous "they" instead of trusting ourselves.
We're even inundated with "grades" on social media and pop culture as a joke.
I coached a client last week who told me she feels like invisible people are watching her work and giving her a grade on how she does. Which, of course, makes it harder for her to work and adds tons of unnecessary stress to her day.
After our session, my client is now asking herself, "would I do this if I wasn't being graded?" before she does anything. She's learning to listen to herself, work when she has something to do and rest or have fun when she doesn't. She told me yesterday she's producing just as much as she was before while also feeling more relaxed and having more time for things outside of work.
You can try this too.
Even if there are some aspects of your life where you get feedback such as a performance review, it's still not a grade. Go ahead and read that again. A performance review or anything along those lines isn't a grade, it’s just feedback
I spent six years of my legal career as a public speaker and instructor. I traveled around the country speaking at conferences, training clients and teaching courses. Part of the job involved being evaluated by bosses and through post-event surveys.
Meaning I got a lot of feedback.
At first, I treated it like a grade. If everyone who attended didn't think it was the best class they'd ever attended and I was a fabulous instructor, I thought I'd failed. Over time as I gained more experience receiving feedback and being evaluated, my perspective shifted.
I started seeing myself not as a student being graded, but as an expert in my field doing my job. Which meant I didn't view the evaluations as my grade, but as data to help me be the best advisor, speaker and instructor I could be.
To do it, I asked myself these three questions:
Do I agree with it?
What can I learn from it?
Do I want to make any changes based on it?
The difference between data and a grade is a grade is final and data is just a starting point.
