106 Why You Feel Overwhelmed After a Job Change

Feeling overwhelmed after a job change, promotion, or reorganization? This episode helps high-achieving women stop spiraling in self-doubt and learn how to create clarity and confidence in a new role.

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Welcome to the Great Leader Great Mom podcast where we trade in mom guilt and burnout for courage, calm and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolly, engineer turned life coach, mom of three and founder of the School of Courage. Here we talk about leading at work and at home without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself.

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This is episode 106, and today we're talking about when you're having a crisis of confidence.

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So many of you I've talked to you lately have recently changed jobs. Like maybe you've changed your team, maybe you have a new boss, you've been promoted, roles have been combined because of company reorganizations. And I feel you a lot of you are very overwhelmed, way more than you expected.

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And just know that you could take a deep breath because nothing is gone wrong here.

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There's no reason to regret changing jobs or not raising your hand to leave or anything dramatic. This is a new job, and we're going to talk about how to sort all this out so that you can shift from feeling like you're in a crisis of confidence to feeling like you got this.

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This new role, this new shift. It's a lot like your brain lost its map. When your brain loses its map, it loves to turn everything into an emergency, right. Because it's not comfortable and your brain wants to panic. It's always looking for danger. And it's just doing his job right now.

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Many of you in this moment may be looking at your calendar and thinking, it's totally packed. There's 1 million meetings to go to. I have so many emails.

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and you're not really sure yet. What are the meetings that matter? What are the emails that you absolutely need to read all the details of? Maybe you're in conversations where the words sound familiar,

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But you're really not sure what role you play.

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You're not sure what the priorities are, what your own job really should look like.

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This can be confusing.

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Especially for those of you that have been through a reorganization. And maybe you lost people. And so you're dealing with the trauma and the fear of going through that, on top of the fact that now you have a new role and you're not sure what the role is or how to figure it out. And at the same time, you're kind of afraid to even bring it up with people to ask questions.

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Our brains in these moments are good at telling us these unhelpful thoughts like, I should know this better by now, I should be farther along. I need to prove that I can handle this. I need to get it together. I can't ask too many questions because I don't want to be difficult or seen as not knowing. And things like everybody's watching or what if I just can't do this role I'm in?

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take a pause and just acknowledge that this is all part of being a human. Brains do this in these moments where there is uncertainty,

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Where we are uncomfortable, and

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We don't have the how to be successful.

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Let's untangle what's going on here, because there's the part of you don't have clarity in the role you're in because it's new, of course. And then there's the what are you making it mean about you? These are very different things. So your circumstance right now, which is pure and neutral, could be the new role, the new structure, a new boss, a new group

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And then there's the story. Your brain adds to it. That is I should know this by now. I'm behind.

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I'm having a crisis of confidence. And once you believe those thoughts, of course we all would feel overwhelmed.

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Not because the role is impossible or because you really don't know what's going on, because your brain is making it mean something about your worth, about what you're capable of.

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So, of course you feel exhausted.

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Now take a deep breath and hear this. You're not supposed to know all the details yet.

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especially those of you where you're in a new role that didn't exist before.

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Maybe your role got combined

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or someone just made it up. This is just part of change. This is part of the deal.

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I know this sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but notice how often your brain doesn't let that just be true. Your brain wants to say yes, but I should still know this. I should be smarter.

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I should have figured this out by now.

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But the reality is, I bet you when you've gotten a new roles before, you've totally figured them out.

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So you're new in a role and beating yourself up, and your negative self-talk is not going to help you get to that version of success that you really crave. When we are in self-judgment, when we're in shame and panic, that doesn't serve us. Let me give you an example about a client. Lately, she had been a clear manager in a role for six years.

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Six years

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she knew all the ins and outs of the team and the stakeholders and all the things that are involved in excelling at this role. And she knew the map, right? She knew everything involved. And then the organization changed. And now she's in a role that is a combination of two other roles that no longer exist.

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Of course, on our calendar are tons of meetings. All these details she's not familiar with

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different people, different expectations,

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Different stakeholders, and so much less clarity. So then what happened? Her confidence in this role was really shaky. She told me, I'm having a crisis of confidence. I just want to leave this job. It's like, no, no, no. Let's just get clear on what's happening right now and separate out the circumstance from the story you're making up, because believing that you're in a crisis of confidence is not serving you at all.

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That's just a thought error your brain is offering you. And I know others out there feel the same way. You're using your new job, the new structure, the new combination of roles

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as proof that something's gone very wrong here, but nothing has gone wrong. You are in a new role and this is your current curriculum to go figure it out.

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You're not supposed to know the how. You're supposed to know that you're capable of sorting out the how.

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Because that's who you are

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This is just your chance to grow and see more about what you're capable of. Many of us get into a role, and we feel like everything is urgent and we haven't sorted out what is the priorities, what actually matters here. And that makes us exhausted because we try to juggle all the things all at once perfectly.

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So here's the way out of all of this to more clarity and confidence. That is really true for you. I want you to ask the first question in the Power Question framework. This is what does good look like?

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so let's go into the future and we'll stop at the end of this year, right before you wrap up your performance evaluation

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and let's pretend that you had the most amazing year, you nailed it right out. Every single thing that you know you did to just have an incredibly successful year.

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At this point, we're defining what good looks like. What would you have accomplished?

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What projects would you have finished?

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How would you have supported your team? How would you have worked with other teams?

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This helps you determine what is the priority versus let's just go do everything.

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It answers what actually matters to be successful.

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Everything may feel like it's a priority, but when everything is a priority, nothing's priority. So by defining what success looks like, you can get really clear on what matters in this role and define it for yourself. Then you can shift your whole calendar,

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around this.

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Now for question two, how are you going to know you're making progress toward that version of success? Not perfectly, but we're making it more measurable. Like if you tell me, I would have collaborated really well across these teams, how would you know you're collaborating like that? Is it that the teams keep calling you is that you're constantly sharing schedule information or other data that's critical on both sides?

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This matters because

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Your brain loves to stay general. It's like, I'm good at this. It's like, well, how would you know? You're good at it. So this is the part you get more clear and more defined and quantitative as to how are you going to know you're making progress. Your brain will answer a question like that. So often we give our brain very little evidence, and we just make it all soft and assume, oh, I'm making progress, but we really don't know.

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So this is a game changer. And this is where you almost make your own kind of KPIs, your key performance indicators in the space. So you know you're getting to your version of success. Now comes my favorite part. This is question three. What makes getting to success at the end of the year tough? And I love this question because it brings us back to reality.

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Our brains going to offer all kinds of reasons as to like, oh my gosh, well, you know, that other team, they never reach out or they're kind of difficult or well, there's the people in the operation that make it hard. Your brain will always offer blame and pointing fingers and complaining at this point. That's totally normal. Just keep asking why?

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Like if they're hard to catch,

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then what meetings do you already have that you could connect with them? If they don't care about knowing the schedule, then find out why. Why is it make perfect sense that they don't care? This is really big because what stands in the way becomes the way.

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And so as you identify all of these barriers in place, you will have the pathway to get to success. And this is truly going to define your how as you go forward. Of course, there's going to be things that come up that's totally expected. But at this point you're digging into your barriers to see, here's the things that if I do them, the meetings that I set up, the conversations that I ensure I have, then I will know I will be successful.

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It's a totally different feeling

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from just setting up sunshine and rainbows and hoping it happens. Like I said, a big goal and I just hope it magically happens to here's the things that make this hard, and here's what I'm going to do about it.

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this can feel confusing and overwhelming, but a lot of times what I find for people is if you spend 30 minutes asking these three questions and really digging in, you could use a whiteboard in your office.

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You could do it on a random piece of paper in your office. If you define this, your brain loves to answer questions like this. Take the time to do it. You will free up the confusion in your day and have so much more time, and be able to be present and listening with such clarity.

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Now you've created your map, your map as to how to get to success. This brings all of your agency back within your control. Now you're not blaming the other team, your boss, for not giving you all the description on exactly what you should be doing in your new role, which is totally normal. Don't be mad at yourself.

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You'll stop using the lack of clarity as evidence against yourself. You will shift your brain from. This is a crisis of confidence because I don't know what to do to. I don't know yet. So let's figure it out. I can figure this out. Totally a different energy. This is one that comes from a grounded feeling. It's your prefrontal cortex coming back online.

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It's you being your ground itself in the middle of a messy work situation that causes many of us to just waste a bunch of energy and feel overwhelmed and burned out.

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So in summary, when you feel like you're having a crisis of confidence because of your new role,

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question the thought that's causing your confusion and then move to the power question framework. Ask yourself these three questions. If I'm at the end of the year and I've nailed it.

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What did I do? How am I going to know that I'm making progress to get to that version of success?

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What makes getting to success tough?

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and then you'll know what's the priorities, what are the things that you need to take action on to get to success?

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This is your curriculum right now in life. And you got this. Who better than you to take all this on? If you want to catch the next end overwhelm workshop, go to Lizjolley.com/overwhelm or check the show notes. Jolley is spelled with an ey and I hope to see you all there with that. I'll see you guys next week.

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Take everybody.