Why we can't stop fixating on that one thing we could have done better

It’s crazy. You’ve had a good year and delivered well for your organisation and yet you aren’t really looking forward to the dreaded performance review.

Perhaps you have prepared and sent a self-review to your boss ahead of your meeting. Or you’ve made a list of achievements because you work in a organisation with a more casual approach to performance reviews. Either way you’ve got that sinking feeling as you walk into your meeting.

There are a bunch of reasons why performance reviews can feel so gawd-damn awful. Even when you are talking about what you have done well, there is that squirmy feeling that you get when you have to own your performance, you have to talk about what you did. Then your boss gets complimentary about how you did, and the feeling gets worse. Both because it’s hard to take positive feedback / compliments on your competency when most of the time you feel like an imposter. But also because you are already anticipating the one thing.

The one thing. That area for improvement that inevitably follows the positive feedback, the thing that you’ve got to work to improve. Whatever it is, it inevitably lands with a thudding mental body blow. In that moment all the things you have done well, fly out the window and you feel like you are back to ground zero. It’s as if all those things you did well just didn’t count.

Sound familiar?

Right from when you are born your female brain is wiring itself for connection. There are loads of studies out there that show how girl brains and substantially different from boy brains. Girls are all about connecting and talking, reinforcing the social bonds that support us throughout our lives.

Even as babies girls will observe faces and people. On top of that is what psychologists call positive - negative asymmetry (or Negativity bias). In short this is all about feeling the sting of rejection more that we feel the warm inner glow of recognition. Bias towards the negative mean that we also think about these events for longer, which makes them seem that much more important (or why else would we be worrying about it?). Even worse, a study completed at the University of Mannheim in Germany showed that we tend to think that negatively framed statements were more truthful!

So in that moment, when we hear that feedback, what we hear is not the literal meaning of the words being spoken, but that we haven’t done enough to keep that social connection strong. And whoops, there goes that amygdala into fully disco mode and all our biases come rushing in, and all of a sudden the feedback becomes disproportionately crushing. Career threatening, Almost life threatening. So we feel diminished and lesser. Small. Not enough.

The good news is that you already have everything you need to turn this around. Your pre-frontal cortex where all your executive function occurs (things like rationalising, analysing and language) is perfectly capable of settling that feisty amygdala down.

This month I’ll be focusing on how to turn your performance review into a catalyst for your career, helping you to take steps into the roles you want. Along the way I will show you how you can use your performance review to prime your boss for a successful pay rise negotiation.