You got it. People sent congratulations. You smiled at the announcement and felt as if someone had made an error. The work is mostly meetings now. On Sunday you caught yourself wondering whether you could ask for your old job back. I'm in something bigger than I'd have picked for myself, and I always feel like there's a piece I'm not seeing.
A new role is hard at first for most people, and the job may also simply be a poor fit.
01
What you do in the new job
You may be doing two jobs.
You keep hold of pieces of the old one, because those you know how to finish. You stay late doing them. In the meetings that are now your real work, you say little.
You wait to be found out. You prepare more than anyone needs.
When people ask how the new role is, you say great, busy.
People call it imposter feelings, and tell you everyone has them.
It can leave the new role half done while your evenings go to the old one. Your team may also be left waiting for decisions that are now yours.
02
What the unease may be about
"If I'm not producing, I don't know who I am."
The new work may not feel like work. Under Output, a day of deciding and listening leaves nothing you can hold up at the end of it. Everyone around me at work is supposed to be a star, and I've never once felt like one.
Read about Output →"I'm still working for someone who may not even be watching anymore."
The promotion may have been meant for someone to see. Under Approval, it counts less than you expected because one response was missing, or came and was not enough. It still stings that they didn't believe I'd pull it off.
Read about Approval →Those are two of several, and it may be neither. You may just have liked the old job better.
03
What is under the rule
Under Output, the fear may be that without achievement you don't matter. What would answer it is worth that doesn't require performance.
Under Approval, the fear may be that without their verdict you don't know what you are worth. What would answer it is an internal measure that doesn't require ratification.
04
One question that separates them
If nobody ever found out you'd done it, would you still have done it?
Ask it about the promotion itself. Yes, and you still couldn't stop, is the Output answer. If the point drains out of it, that is the Approval answer.
If you can't tell, there is not enough to go on yet. That is a result.
Some of this is not a rule. Preferring hands-on work to managing is a preference, and it needs no rule to explain it. Wanting a mentor's respect is ordinary, and what tells you more is disproportion and duration.
The question belongs to subtraction. It can remove one reading of the unease, which makes the others easier to see.
05
One thing to try this week
At the end of one workday this week, write two lines: what you can point to from the day, and whose opinion of the day you thought about.
Write them as they come.
Read them the next morning and see which of the two bothers you more.
The flatness that can follow a win, with or without a new role, is on I Feel Empty After Achieving Something.