为什么你没有白人同事的自信？

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Day Day Up, the weekly podcast for Chinese professionals navigating the Western workplace. I'm Jonathan. Let's get into it. I've been coaching Eve for a year now. In interviews, she's been praying that they won't ask about her no-no project. The way she describes it, my CEO wanted a real-time sales dashboard and nobody could build it, so he asked me. I spent a lot of time, but it didn't go anywhere because I got the data wrong. I feel like it just proves I can't deliver. So I sat with her in that story for a moment. And then I told her the other side of the same story, the one that I could see. Nobody in the company could build what your CEO wanted. So among all his employees, he trusted you, a financial analyst with zero engineering background. You taught yourself Power BI and built the company's first dashboard from zero to one. It wasn't perfect, and the data was wrong. Of course it was, when the company had no data foundations to begin with, but it proved what was possible and gave him the confidence to invest in a full-time data engineer to take it from one to a hundred. You didn't fail to build the dashboard. You're the reason the dashboard exists. She went quiet. Then she said the thing I hear all the time in some version or another. I never thought about it that way. I'm feeling a lot right now. Here's what I've come to believe after years of this work. So many of us Chinese run the same broken code. We internalize our failures and externalize our successes. When something goes wrong, we look inward. It's because I'm too dumb, too lazy, too afraid. When something goes right, we look everywhere else. It was the team. My manager. Luck. But watch your Western coworkers and you'll see the reverse. When it works, it was their vision, their call. When it breaks, it was the timing, the process, the missing data. Every story is just a collection of facts. Select the failures and give away your wins, and you have a self-deprecating story. Do the opposite, and you have a self-appreciating one. Both are true. So tell yourself the better one. Now you might worry this makes you arrogant. It doesn't. When you count your wins, you're collecting evidence. Evidence that proves you're capable. So you can be confident, you can be brave, you can take the risks that used to scare you. The self-critical story doesn't make you better. It makes you scared. So here's what I want you to do tomorrow. It only takes five minutes. Choose one work story you're most ashamed of. Write it down, but in the third person, like it happened to someone else. Select the facts that help you appreciate this person's contributions the most. Why third person? The researcher and psychologist Ethan Cross found that the moment we stop saying I and use our own name, the emotional flooding stops, and we judge ourselves the way we judge a friend. Fairly, this is exactly what I did for Eve. Now you can do it for yourself. I'm not asking you to craft a pretty lie. I'm asking you to choose the facts of a different kind of story. Tell it enough times, and you'll find you've become a different person. Alright, that's your growth tip for this week. Now let's take a melon break. Walk into any grocery store in North America right now, and you'll find that the World Cup has gotten there before you. The mac and cheese is shaped like little soccer balls and cleats. The cheez-its come as flags and stars. There's a Christian Pulisic cracker, a Christian Pulisic cookie, and a Christian Pulisic chocolate bar in case you wanted your snack to have a striker on it. McDonald's is handing out nine different collectible cups with soccer legends on them, plus 23 squishmallows and tiny jerseys. You know the part I find hilarious? America isn't really a soccer country. Soccer sits third in popularity behind American football and basketball, and the gap is not even close. The 2022 World Cup final drew about 26 million viewers in the US. The Super Bowl that same year drew 113 million. Canada is no different. I've loved my maple leafs for as long as I can remember. And at the same time, I know nothing about Toronto FC. Yes, we actually have a soccer club too. And yet the entire snack aisle across the host nations has decided almost overnight to become passionately European about a sport most shoppers couldn't name five players in. My take. This is a country performing enthusiasm it hasn't actually grown into yet, because the cameras are here and the world is watching. If you've ever fake, laughed, and nodded through a conversation on some pop culture topic you have no idea about, just to belong in the room, congratulations. North Americans will be joining you soon. Here's how you can use this topic in Smalltalk next week. With coworkers. Have you seen the World Cup stuff showing up in grocery stores? There's literally soccer ball-shaped mac and cheese now. I didn't even think Americans liked soccer that much. Are you excited for the upcoming games? With your boss. It's fascinating watching every brand pivot to soccer for the World Cup when it's only the third most popular sport here. It's a great example of a host country manufacturing cultural buy-in for a moment, almost a masterclass in riding a wave you didn't create. Day Up is written, produced, and hosted with love by me, Jonathan Lee. To learn more, check out my free weekly newsletter for communicating in the Western workplace, read by over 2,000 Chinese professionals. Just search Daily Up Jonathan and you will find me. That's all for today. See you next Sunday with the Chisang Shao Hopan.