96 Feeling undermined at work

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, turn life coach, mama three, and founder of the School of Courage. Here we talk about leading at work and at home. losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself. Well welcome to episode 96. This one is all about how to stay calm when a coworker is undermining you in meetings. Cause how many of you have walked out of a meeting and felt your whole body buzzing was on fire? Your chest is tight, your jaws clenched, and you're replaying one sentence someone said over and over again and planning your rebuttal You're thinking they don't respect me, they're trying to make me look bad, they're undermining me in front of everyone. And the thing is, you want to handle it the right way. you want to start planning your next move. So you think, should I talk to them afterward? Do I call my boss and tell them what happened? Do I go straight to HR? Do I write a message tonight? So I sound professional, but also firm. And now the meeting's over, but it still is taking so much of your energy, so much of your brain power. It's taking your peace. Today I want to talk about how to stay calm when you believe a coworker is undermining you in meetings. Because it's one of the biggest places I see people accidentally giving their emotional power away and wasting a ton of energy And you don't have extra energy to waste on things like this. So we're gonna talk about how to get that power back. Let's start here. When someone says something in a meeting and it feels like a real jab, it It feels very personal. It's a correction, maybe a reprimand, a dismissal. And it feels terrible, especially if you care deeply about the work you're doing. Especially if you're new to leadership and you're kind of uncertain about how to do all this. Especially if you're carrying that quiet pressure of I need to prove myself. I need to get out of feeling this imposter syndrome. So you're not crazy for feeling this way. But what I want to offer you is this. The word itself undermining is very loaded. It's emotional, but the other thing is it's an interpretation. It's a story. As in, if I were to ask all of you what the word undermining meant, you'd probably all have a little bit different definition. and what qualifies as undermining. When we walk around with a story of I'm being undermined, we usually go into one of two modes. First, it's defense mode Where we get sharp, we interrupt, we overexplain, we are defensive, we're coming in hot. Number two, the spiral mode. Here we shut down, we ruminate, we stew on things, we lose our presence for the rest of the day Neither of these modes is your most powerful self to show up at work. It's not you being grounded. So before we talk about what you need to go say to have that tough conversation with the other person, we gotta clean it all up first. Let me give you a work example. I once had a woman come to me and she was a supervisor, relatively new in leadership, and she shut my office door. You could tell. She had a story for me. She said, Liz, you need to tell me how to give tough feedback. We're just in a meeting and someone on my team said something that was really disrespectful. He doesn't value me. She was going on and on about what he said and why he said it and how it's not appropriate and I stopped her. And I said, okay, wait, before you tell me how you're gonna lecture him, that he's not aligned with our company values, that you're gonna write him up, whatever it is, like let's just slow down and let's create some space I want you to tell me exactly what words he said. So we turned to the whiteboard, because that's like my favorite place to break these things apart, and we wrote down his words. These are the pure neutral circumstance. Everyone would agree that he said these words. We don't include the interpretation, we don't include the story about it. And I said, okay, you just told me he said these words, and then you told me that he doesn't value you. And she said, yes. I said, okay, when you make it mean that he doesn't value you, how do you feel? And she said, I feel very disrespected. And I said, okay. So now you're feeling disrespectful. What do you want to do? Like what actions do you take? And she went through and talked about how In the actual meeting, she was furious. She couldn't even think about what was happening for the rest of the meeting. She was looking for all the evidence as to how he's done this before and how it needed to stop. She was planning her whole future, how to have a tough conversation and get him to stop doing this, how to punish him in a sense, how to report him. And then I said something that stopped her and I said, okay, if you look at your actions right now, notice how you're not valuing yourself Because here's what's happening. This man said words, and you took those words and assigned them a meaning about your own worth, about your value. And from that meaning, your entire bl brain went crazy. And from that place of being disrespected. You were taking all this reactive action. You were puffing up in place. You were ruminating. You were ready to get even Meanwhile, he probably literally had no idea what he said or the response that he gave. It literally could have been a moment of he was trying to impress the dudes next to him So I asked her, what if you valued yourself so deeply, your contribution, your role as a leader, your worth, that his words just fell to the ground. Like Hit the ground you walked over 'em. Because those words don't have to stick. Your value isn't decided in a meeting. It's not validated by something someone says or doesn't say It's not granted by the loudest person in the room. It emanates from you. It's what you believe about yourself. So here's the skill I want to teach you all We need to create the space between what has happened and what you're making it mean. You have to wedge yourself in between the circumstance and the feeling which drives all your reaction when you get hooked. So a person says words and then you have this feeling of when you think it's all caused by their words, but the reality is you had a thought about those words. You gave it meaning. And that's what created the feeling. From that feeling, your emotional temperature was set and you took all kinds of action from that. And it created the results. For her, it created that she wasn't even valuing herself She wasn't showing up as the person she wanted to be. And if you don't like your results, if you don't like how you're showing up, then we don't start fixing it by fixing the coworker. We start looking at what is the story I'm making up about the words he said. Because so often, especially women, what we call being undermined is actually that it's touching something tender within us. And we let those words rub up against us and where we're insecure. And we look for all the evidence. We interpret these neutral moments as confirmation of yes, look, like He is not valuing me. Ergo, I need to fix it. So he values me because everybody needs to value me. And I say it that way because sometimes if we play out these stories, they sound almost funny to us, right? It's like So to be valued, you need every single person to value and respect you? No, we all know that's not true. But this is how we act as humans. It's not weakness. It's totally a moment where we have a choice. So let's take this out of work for a second. Say you're at home and your spouse says, Oh, um, are you gonna wear that? Those are just words, but depending on the story you attach to that, it can land like a big punch in the face. You might make it mean he thinks I look fat, he thinks I'm not attractive, he thinks I've let myself go And now you're hurt, angry, or defensive, and suddenly you feel terrible and disconnected. Not because of those four words that he said, but because of the meaning you gave it. He literally might have been thinking, oh my gosh, you look really nice. I have to go change what I'm wearing because I'm under dress. But we meanwhile give it all this meeting. Our brain filled in this story super fast and hit on whatever tender spot is going on for us. The same is true at work. So what do you do in the meeting when you feel that energy of defensiveness at work? You feel undermined. What do you do? Here's the steps I want you to practice. The first thing, notice your body cue. When the hair on the back of your neck stands up, your body is experiencing an emotion. You might have tight forearms, your chest is really getting to where it's tight and hard to breathe. The heat is rising in your face. You're getting hot. That's your first signal. My brain is responding right now. The emotion I'm feeling is lighting me up. Now name the emotion. It can literally be as simple as, I feel bad right now. Don't talk about the accusation. Don't go into the story. Just name the emotion. I feel defensive, embarrassed, angry. Dismissed! Threatened. Once you name it, it creates more space between the word someone says and your reaction Now we need to find the thought. Asking yourself, why do I feel this way? Is the window in? You might say, they're trying to make me look stupid. They don't respect me. I'm not credible. I'm failing as a leader That is the actual hook that's triggering you. That is where all your power lies. That's what we need to examine and we need to clean up. Now we look back at what are the words they actually said This gives us the true neutral circumstance. What do they actually do, maybe? Because when you move from undermining me to they said words or they asked me a question, then you get all your power back. Now you can really choose your response. You can choose intentionally how you want to show up instead of reacting to this story that hooked you and derailed you totally in the meeting. Choose curiosity on purpose. Ask yourself, why does it make perfect sense that they said that? And if you make a generous assumption here, what are they trying to accomplish? That's not about you In this moment, choose curiosity. It's not weakness. It's you envisioning yourself sitting in that chair, them saying those same words, and you just being grounded and assured in the moment. That's grounded leadership. So if you want a simple phrase to use when you feel defensive, when you feel devalued or undermined in a meeting, start with something so simple like, okay, well say more, or tell me about your concern. Walk me through what you're seeing or let's just clarify a little bit more so I can understand where you're going. When you say these things from a grounded place, it's a calm, slow voice that happens You're not hooked by the emotion and it can kind of stop people in their tracks because it totally changes the emotional temperature in the room. You're not fighting, you're not defending, you're not shrinking, you're leading from a place of groundedness. Now I want to address what you may be thinking as your rebuttal to me, which is Liz, it's not neutral. They really are undercutting me. They're really undermining me. Okay, well, I get it. If it's political, even if it's messy, even if it really is malicious The point is not to pretend it's fine. The point is to stop giving your emotional power away. Because when you're reactive, you march down into HR or your boss's office. You don't come across as credible, you come across as emotional or dramatic or like you're trying to get someone in trouble. And honestly, showing up like that is way less affected. than if you show up in a grounded way and you instead say, let me walk you through what happened today. Here's the facts. Here's the impact. Here's what I'd like to see different. That's more of your grounded leadership energy. where you can set boundaries from a place of strength. You can have tough conversations from a place of calm and not defensiveness. The outcome is no longer about fixing your feelings. It becomes this needs to be known. The organization gets to decide what to do with it, if it aligns with their values or not. And if the organization does nothing Then you can decide what you get to do without making your worth on the line. Let me share a personal example that really captures this shift. My daughter had told me before that My ex-husband made fun of my job and made fun of the fact that I play pickleball, because he was saying it's for old people. And she looked at me like, Mom, this is really bad. We should be worried about this This is not good. And I just told her, you know what, it's fine. People are gonna say whatever they're gonna say, and they're allowed to think whatever they want. I can't control him. I can't control anybody else other than myself And that's okay. I said I love my job. I love playing pickleball. It's like the funnest workout ever and it's social. And his opinion, it doesn't change my value or whether my job matters or not. I know I can help people. And that I make a difference. Those words can just fall on the ground and it doesn't matter at all. I can just step over them. That is the real shift that I've seen in my own life. And it is amazing how much energy I don't waste on things that just don't matter to me. And I want my kids to know this for themselves because People our whole lives are going to say words about us. They're going to throw stones at us. They're going to throw opinions. They're going to disapprove of us. People are going to try to provoke you. But you don't have to respond. It takes two people to go to war. You can just drop all of it and step over it There's a quote attributed to Victor Frankel that says, between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. That's what this is about. It's not about other people that's causing our suffering or our pain or our doubt in ourselves. It is our thinking and we need to question our unquestioned thinking. Here's two questions you can sit with. One, what words or behaviors hooked me in a meeting today or this week? What do I feel like triggered me What is the meaning I'm giving to those words? It helps sometimes to just say man or woman said words and then go from there. The second question is What would it look like to have my own back so fully that when those words are said that they just fall to the ground and I can be grounded and curious If this episode hits home, take 30 seconds and add a comment. You can tell me what's one thing you want to practice this week. If you want more support on staying grounded and leading at work, go to lizjolly. com forward slash trial and you can join our membership where we practice this stuff in depth so you can be the woman that can sit in that room with all the chaos around her and people questioning and poking holes and you can be steady and assured no matter what. With that I wish you an amazing week and I'll see you all next time.