Here is the complete transcript of the podcast
Welcome back to Success for Srini. Happy Monday morning to you today’s podcast episode is based on a question from a longtime listener of this podcast. And they’re saying, “Srini, I’m going through a mental challenge lately. Wherein I’m feeling I’m not competent anymore to do the work that I’m doing. This has been going on for a long time, it seems like COVID has contributed to this. But even though I’m doing my job, I feel what’s the point? Because I’m not going to win anyway. I thought of asking you this question for a long time. But now that I listen to your podcasts a lot, and you’re asking people to ask questions. So I thought of asking this question, but I’ll catch up with you later and we’ll talk more.” In fact, is a long question. I’m just paraphrasing, I’m reading between the lines as I’m recording this. So what should I say to this?
Now, it’s very natural to have this feeling. And if you have been listening to this podcast, multiple times, I’ve mentioned this here, it’s very natural for the mind to hit the lows throughout the day, multiple times. Recently, I talked about this. So it’s a natural thing. If you’re competing, you’re a professional, you’re very good at what you do. It’s natural for you to stop and question yourself. And second, guess everything you’re doing. In fact, I see it differently. I think that a good competent professional should always question and second guess, in fact, the success that people have, has to do with their questioning of the capabilities of their abilities, and everything. So I think it’s a good question, to begin with, it’s a good question. But here’s what I want you to do, I want you to find out whether this feeling is factual, or just your perception of yourself. And everything I say, beyond this point, has to do with this question, is it factual or is it perceptional?
If it’s perceptional, then yes, can be fixed. But if it’s factual, it means there are people telling you, you are not working, you’re not producing, you’re not competent, you’re not meeting the numbers, you’re not meeting the expectations. Now there is something going on there. So beyond that, let’s say you have the answer, let’s say everybody’s happy with you. But somehow you’re feeling you’re disconnected or let’s say you’re doing your best, and somehow other people are feeling that you’re not performing. And let’s say none of those things are true. And you want to compete, and you want to excel, but something is stopping you. Now, once we get beyond that point, I want you to get to the core of this, once you get beyond that point, I want you to create a recovery plan. And a timeline, a recovery plan would be like, I need to go learn something, I need to acquire some more knowledge, or I want to change this place, I want to go to a different place. And I want you to start enlisting the help of other people. If that is a part of the recovery process. Where recovery plan has to be in place, I think your question is because I think some are very deep behind. In your mind, you’re thinking of a recovery plan. That’s why you asked this question. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be asking this question, at least to me.
Let’s talk about competency for a second. Every time there is a feeling of lack of competency, there are two things you can do. And only two things be accomplished this individual does this, and only two things can be done. One is immediate mastery of the competency. Where you go, you start to learn, you start to do things, you want to gain the experience and you get back. So a pursuit to master or reclaim the competency. So you get mastery in one area or two areas, whatever you identify. And the second approach is to leverage the competency, which is you go hire people or you put in systems to play maybe both. So either you go personally mastery and build mastery around a few areas, or you leverage those areas where you hire people and deploy systems. Only two ways to do this. The reason why you do this is that you want to better the competition. There’s a competition going on, you want to be better, you want to be good, you want to be good. Now, in this specific scenario, based on your question, it seems like you’re competing with other people. That means maybe you want to get to the next level, get a bigger promotion, or get yourself a little bit more significance, whatever that is.
So it sounds. if that is the case, by acquiring competency, what you’re doing is you’re turning the competition around with other people and you’re making the competition more based on capabilities. So you are in a capability-based competition. I hear this all the time from people When people tell me I want to acquire a skill, I want to gain some more knowledge, a little bit more experience so that I can compete better. So there is a perception, at least in people’s minds that by raising capabilities, they can compete better. But it doesn’t guarantee success. It can eliminate many things, it can get you closer to success, but simply reading capabilities doesn’t assure success. There are no guarantees. Because some people are in opportunity-based competition, you are trying to play capability-based competition, others are trying to play the opportunity-based competition which means people are looking for various things that I am looking for, and where does that exist? So what can I do to get there?
Back in the day, I used to hear people tell me, I want to go work for this company because this company is doing a good thing. So they go get there. And then they’re there for six months. And then they’ll they’re looking again, I want to go work for another company. And they somehow get some recruiters and some connections and they get themselves hired into these companies. They are opportunity-driven. Nothing wrong with it. But you get the idea. Now, every time you are going after increasing competency, it cannot be done overnight. You can’t learn something overnight. I mean, you can excel or accelerate the learning process. But to excel, it’s hard. It takes time, but we can learn. But it has its own cycle. The brain has functions in its own way. This is hard to do it overnight. And companies struggle with this. And obviously, as individuals, we are also limited. So we also struggle with it. So competency cannot be changed overnight.
Now, I’ll tell you, one of my personal, I’ll give you one example, my own story. Now I started out as a creator and I was producing courses, training stocks, the video shows keynotes, all that, and I was coaching. Along the way, as the business started taking different directions, I started to behave like a manager, like a marketer, like a sales guy, all those functions I had to take on myself. So more and more hiring more and more outsourcing retention, people culture, all that came in. And then more sales service, because we have sales now service, pursuing different media outlets to promote my products, all that happens. So as I started focusing on managing and marketing my stuff, I started to feel less and less competent when it came down to me creating more courses, or producing more talks and radio shows all that I started to suffer. So you see one area, the competency goes up the other area it goes down. As a part of you getting to the core. As I mentioned earlier, I want you to find out what areas do you lack competency in? See, there are two broad areas. We have strengths and weaknesses. That area we call internal area, and we have external area, which is our opportunities and our threats.
So I wanted to find out where you feel at a broader level. Do you feel internal that you lack competence? Or it is, Is it true that externally also exists? So you said you lack competency at work, the work that you’re doing? And sounds to me more internal? But then are you also feeling there are more threats? Now, Is it possible that you are not wanted anymore, or you’re getting that feeling, and maybe other people may take your position? Those are types. So I want you to start looking into that as a part of your fact-finding work. For then I want you to start putting a plan together a recovery plan very, very quickly and a timeline to achieve it. And start leveraging wherever possible and start mastering wherever possible.
I hope this is helpful. This is the best I could do, at least in this podcast setup. But if you have a question for me beyond this, please text me on the same number 888-818-0404. And I’ll do whatever I can from this site to make sure that you get clarity on your site. That’s all for now. Wherever you are, you’re listening to this podcast as a podcast. You did not ask the question but you happen to be listening to the podcast. Thank you. You’re watching this on YouTube. Thank you. Leave me a question. Leave me a comment, and subscribe to the channel. And I’ll be back here again tomorrow with another podcast episode. Stay tuned.