Navigating self-doubt: Reflections on my recent promotion

this post was created with help from generative ai

I’m back with exciting and terrifying news: I received the promotion I wrote about last time. In less than two weeks, I will start my new role as a Senior Customer Service Representative. But to be honest, I’m also feeling a lot of self-doubt. Did I truly deserve this promotion? Was I the best candidate for the position? Or was I selected solely based on my high metrics, without considering whether I could excel with more responsibility?

I know these thoughts are irrational and unhelpful. I have plenty of evidence that I’m qualified and capable of doing this job well. I have years of experience in customer support, excellent feedback from my supervisors, colleagues, and customers, and numerous other accomplishments. However, I can’t help but wonder if they made a mistake in selecting me. Perhaps they had unrealistic expectations of me, or they overlooked some of my flaws or weaknesses. Maybe there was a better person for the role, and I have stolen their thunder. That’s why I decided to write this post: to sort out my thoughts.

One way I deal with these feelings is by channeling them into productivity. If I feel like I don’t have what it takes, then I should work on improving myself and my skills. I should strive to be better at what I do. If I can’t feel competent, at least I can fake the actions of the competent.

That’s why I’ve been investing more time and energy into organizing my work, keeping records, and using tools that help me be more efficient and effective.

For example, I recently started using generative AI to help me with coaching sessions. Instead of taking informal notes, I created a note template that captures all the important details of each session, such as the goals, challenges, feedback, action steps, and follow-up tasks.

This way, I can review the notes later and see how everybody is progressing, what issues they are facing, and how I can help them more. It also allows me to capture what I did during coaching so I can pass it onto my supervisors.

Another example is how I used AI to help me create a task list for migrating our current knowledge base contents to SharePoint. This is a huge project that will involve moving hundreds of articles and documents from one platform to another.

Instead of manually creating a list of all the tasks and subtasks involved, I used AI to generate one based on a quick brainstorm of all the different challenges that came up in the first project meeting. It was amazing how quickly it took a list of scattered thoughts and condensed them into an actionable task list. I even discovered some new tasks that may have been missed in my initial brainstorm.

Using AI not only made my work easier and faster, but it also gave me more confidence and clarity. It helped me see what needs to be done, how to do it, and why it matters. It also helped me avoid mistakes and oversights that could have cost me time and money.

By focusing on improvement, I hope to overcome my self-doubt and prove myself worthy of this promotion. I hope to demonstrate to my boss, my team, and myself that I can handle this new role and responsibility.

What is the takeaway from this post? Perhaps nothing; it may just be a monologue into the void. But perhaps sorting my thoughts in writing could help somebody else. Maybe my style of dealing with these issues can be thought of as maladaptive. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine a world in which even mimicking competent behavior wouldn’t help me feel more competent.