Key Takeaways
When an outcome doesn’t look the way you expected, it’s easy to read it as a verdict on your ability. That’s often where doubt creeps in and imposter syndrome starts.
Sometimes the answer is improving what you bring to the table: developing a skill, deepening your knowledge, or showing up differently. Other times the work is more personal: acknowledging what is (and isn’t) within your control, and adjusting what you expect..
Loosening your grip on an outcoming isn’t lowering the bar. It’s getting clear about what your real goal is and honest about what you actually control.
One idea has been following me around lately. It came up over coffee with a friend one morning, again in a coaching session a few hours later, and it has been a theme with several other clients over the past few weeks. The idea is this: when we're working toward something, we have to learn to hold the outcome loosely. Not the goal itself, but our attachment to exactly how it turns out.
That sounds simple, right? In practice, it's one of the hardest things to ask leaders to do, and one of the hardest things I ask of myself.
Where effort and outcome get tangled
Most of us were raised, and then promoted, on a fairly reliable equation. Do the work well, bring the right skills, put in the right effort, and the result follows: the raise, the promotion, more influence, the next job. Hard work by a smart, capable employee leads to success. For a long stretch of a career, that equation mostly holds. That's part of why it's so disorienting when the outcome you expected doesn't show up.
The promotion goes to someone else. The initiative you championed stalls in a budget cycle. The team you rebuilt still isn't where you hoped it would be a year later. The raise you were promised never materializes. You did the work. The outcome didn't come.
What happens next is where I see people get stuck. Because the equation has always run in one predictable direction, we run it backward. If the outcome didn't come, my work must not have been good enough. If my work wasn't good enough, I must not have put in enough effort, or I don't have the skills I need.
“If the effort was wrong, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought.”
That's the moment a missed outcome starts to feel like imposter syndrome. The reality is often far less personal. Timing, market conditions, someone else's priorities, an org structure you didn't design, a decision made three levels above you. None of those are a verdict on your ability. But when you’re gripping the outcome tightly, and believe (consciously or not) that one specific result is the only way to prove you're worthy, it's hard not to take it personally.
Why this matters for leaders
Leaders who can't separate effort from outcome tend to drift in one of two directions. Some double down, pushing harder on a result that won't move and burning themselves and their teams out in the process. Others pull back, quietly deciding the problem is them and playing smaller than they need to.
Neither one helps the people who are counting on them to lead the way and deliver results. A leader who has done the internal work of holding outcomes loosely, and who stays clear-eyed about which parts of an outcome they control and which they don't, can stay steady when results wobble. They can tell the difference between “we need to change our approach” and “we need to change our expectations.” And they can give their team the same grace when a result isn't what anyone expected. That steadiness is contagious. So is the alternative.
I’m not immune to this.
I've run into this myself, many times. I ran into it inside large organizations, where outcomes depended on boards, budgets, and decisions I had a voice in, but not always a vote. I've run into it as I've built Rainey Strategic Advisors, where effort and results don't always arrive on the same timeline. And I run into it outside of work, in friendships and, nearly every day, as a parent.
Which is part of why I love this work with clients.
Figuring out which outcomes we're holding too tightly, and practicing how to loosen our grip, is some of the most freeing work we can do.
So I'll ask you what I've been asking myself. Is there an outcome you're holding a little too tightly right now? And if you let go of it, even slightly, what would you be free to focus on instead?
I’d love to hear what you’re holding on to. Click the “Let’s Talk” button below to schedule a free 30-minute discovery call.