16. The Ecosystems We Live Inside

Why do you feel confident in some workplaces but not in others?

In this episode, we explore how workplace environments shape confidence, belonging, energy and your experience of yourself, and why it might not be entirely about you.

We look at how different spaces can expand or constrain you in subtle ways, and how your experience shifts depending on where you are and who you’re with.

And we begin to understand that what feels like a personal limitation is sometimes a response to the ecosystem you’re inside.

 In this episode:

• Why your experience of yourself changes across environments
• How ecosystems shape confidence, energy, and behaviour
• The difference between personal traits and relational experiences
• How environments signal what is safe, valued, or possible
• Why self-criticism can soften when you widen the lens

Reflection for you:

Where in your life do you feel most like yourself, and where do you feel like you’re holding something back?

 If this resonated:

If this episode resonated, you might begin by noticing the environments you’re part of, and how they’re shaping your experience day to day.

And if you’d like to continue, you can follow the podcast, so you don’t miss what comes next.

Transcript

I’m Patricia Ezechie, and this is Proactive Empowered Careers, a space for thinking about careers differently, not as something separate from who you are, but as an expression of you and the life you want to live.

So over the last few episodes, we’ve been looking at what shapes your ability to change, your life structure, the space you have, and what your system can actually sustain. And all of that matters more than we maybe at first realised. But none of this sits in isolation. Because the life you’re living and the structure that you’re holding, or trying to live that life in, and the space you do or you don’t have, it’s all shaped by something bigger. The environments that we exist in. The systems we’re part of. What I’m going to call in this episode your ecosystem, or systems.

Because there’s something subtle that happens when people begin reflecting on their life or career. They start inward. What do I want? What am I good at? Why do I feel stuck? Why am I hesitating? And all that inward reflection is absolutely right and important. But at some point, another layer becomes visible. You begin to notice that your experience of yourself changes depending on where you are.

And I want to just unpack that. In some environments you feel articulate, in others you feel quiet. In some spaces you feel confident, and in others you second guess yourself. With some people you might feel expansive, and with others you feel more careful. And that noticing can be surprising, because it disrupts a very common assumption that confidence, clarity, motivation, or belonging are all purely personal traits, when often they’re not that at all.

They are relational experiences. They emerge and appear, or disappear, in our interactions with the environments that we’re in, the places that we work, the teams that we sit within, the cultures that we inhabit, the expectations that surround you, the relationships that shape your daily reality. All of these form what I think of as ecosystems, not always dramatic and not always visible, but influential all the same.

And just like the natural ecosystems that we live in in the world, they shape what grows easily and what struggles, what feels possible and what feels constrained, what is encouraged in us and what is subtly discouraged.

I want you to think of a time when you felt fully yourself at work. Just take a moment and think of that time. You felt able to contribute, able to speak up, you felt free to experiment and comfortable to be imperfect in your surroundings without any fear of judgment, retribution, or anything else. You just felt comfortable.

And now think about a different environment when everything felt so much harder. You didn’t feel perhaps able to contribute freely, or to speak, or to experiment. You might have even felt fearful. What changed? You didn’t suddenly become less capable, but the ecosystem shifted. And when the ecosystem shifted, the signals that you were experiencing changed. The level of psychological safety probably changed. The narratives about who belongs and who succeeds probably changed. And your experience of yourself changed alongside that.

And this is something that people often recognise intuitively but struggle to name. And it can be difficult to articulate what’s actually happening because of how these ecosystems operate. They operate really quietly through the tone of them, through what is the norm in those ecosystems, through the micro interactions in those systems, through what is rewarded, through what is ignored, through what is seen, through what is heard, through who is overlooked. I mean through who is seen and who is heard, as well as what is seen and what is heard.

And over time, you can imagine if you’re in those ecosystems and in those environments, the signals begin to accumulate. And as they accumulate, they begin to have an effect on us. They shape not only our behaviour, they shape our identity, who we believe ourselves to be, what we believe we’re capable of. You begin adapting, adjusting, maybe editing yourself. Sometimes this is conscious, and often it’s unconscious. And usually one day you might notice that the version of you showing up in that environment feels smaller, or different, or tired, or separate, or excluded, or slightly distant from who you know yourself to be.

And this is where this work of self-reflection can become tangled in this, because we’re taking those external influences and we might begin to internalise them and make them about our internal experience and say things like, I’ve lost confidence, or I’m not capable anymore, or maybe I’m the problem. When sometimes all you’re doing is responding coherently to your ecosystem.

Now, this doesn’t mean that these environments are entirely to blame, that they’re entirely deterministic, that environments are the only thing that matters. No, let’s think about this. Two people can be in the same workplace and experience it very differently. Because in addition to that ecosystem or that environment, we all bring our history, we all bring identities, we all bring our past experiences. But even having said that, the environment is still part of the equation and a really big part of it. It’s part of the field, if you want to think of it, that we find ourselves moving within, and as such, it has an impact.

And people can and do flourish even in these imperfect environments, usually by doing one of a few things. They find pockets of support, or they create micro ecosystems within a bigger system, or they build relationships that buffer the wider environment and provide some protection. But what all of this means is that you need to recognise that your experience of yourself is not created in isolation, not just by you. It’s co-created with the people you interact with, with the systems you’re operating in, with cultures, with histories, with expectations, with society.

And when we can see that, really see that, something shifts. Some of that internal criticism and that self-criticism begins to soften and reduce, and we can become more curious. We begin to ask different questions. Not just questions that say, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fit in? But more importantly, what am I responding to? What signals am I receiving daily? What feels supported and what doesn’t? What feels constrained? Where do I feel like me? And where do I feel like I’m having to perform? Where am I being seen for who I am? And where am I not being seen? Where am I being heard?

And this is all about increasing that awareness. And that awareness isn’t about immediate change, it’s about orientation, about our beginning to orient ourselves in the system. Because when you understand your ecosystem or the ones you’re currently part of or operating in, you understand your experiences more. You understand why certain environments felt easy, why others felt less so, and in some cases heavy or toxic even, why your confidence fluctuates, why your energy changed and shifted, why your sense of possibility expanded in some environments and contracted in others.

And that understanding is intensely stabilising, because it helps us to separate our identities from our environments, from the context we’re currently operating in. Maybe not completely, but enough to remember that your experience of yourself is changing and dynamic. It’s relational with those environments and people.

So if you’ve been interpreting your hesitation or discomfort in your career purely as being down to you and your personal limitations, or your lack of anything, ability, skill, confidence, I want to gently widen that lens today and offer something else. You are not only a decision maker inside your life, you are also a participant inside these ecosystems. And noticing these ecosystems and how you relate and interact with them, and how they impact and affect you, is part of understanding yourself.

So next time I want to move back towards something more internal. We’ve started on the internal, then we looked out at the external impacts that are affecting how we’re operating our careers and lives. And I want to move back into the internal now. What happens when you begin to return to yourself even within those ecosystems? And that’s not by leaving immediately and not by forcing change, but by reconnecting with your own centre, with you, with what makes you you, with who you really are.

But for the rest of this week, just notice not what you need to fix, but where you’re actually currently situated. Because the ecosystems around you are shaping more than you might actually think. So until then, keep observing, keep noticing, and take the very best care of yourselves.

This has been Proactive Empowered Careers. If today’s episode resonated, subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss what comes next. And remember, your career isn’t separate from who you are. It’s an expression of you and the life you want to live.