Say you’re a senior member of your team at work. You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is your old friend’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” You laugh and explain the disastrous traffic, difficult drop-off at your kids’ school, or whatever it was that messed up your morning. The moment passes and the conversation moves on. You turn to the job at hand, focused and ready to go.
But what if you’re a junior staffer, still feeling your way. Same thing happens: You’re 12 minutes late to the weekly staff Zoom. Once you’ve “joined audio,” the first thing you hear is the boss’s voice. “There you are! So glad you could fit us in.” A few colleagues chuckle. You consider making excuses—about traffic, drop-off, whatever it was—but the moment passes, and the conversation moves on.
Your mind doesn’t, though. It’s still ruminating. Was that snark in my boss’s voice? Were they talking about me before I logged on? Do I fit in here? Am I any good at this job? You might not be fully aware of these questions. Your mind works quickly on multiple tracks at the same time. And those questions are nasty; they threaten your sense of belonging, your worth, and your value, at least at work. So you try to push them away, to suppress them. But they’re still there. And once they’ve been triggered, it might feel like the evidence keeps pouring in.
Someone makes an inside joke in the chat. You don’t get it. I don’t belong here. Someone rolls their eyes while you’re talking. They don’t respect me. The boss ignores you for the rest of the meeting. No one sees me. Again, these thoughts may not be fully conscious. But there’s no mistaking the fact that your motivation to get back to work has waned by the time you log off. What was it you were supposed to look into?
Was that snark in my boss’s voice? Were they talking about me before I logged on? Do I fit in here? Am I any good at this job?
Next thing you know, you’re idly messing around online when a text comes in from the person who rolled their eyes. “You okay? You seemed out of it at the meeting.” You ignore it. But your mind doesn’t. It’s busy composing possible replies. The full spectrum from passive-aggressive to career imperiling. Eventually you pick up your phone. What will you text back?
This is how self-defeating spirals start and how they gather speed. Let’s break down the moving parts:
A circumstance places a big question on the table—about identity, belonging, or adequacy: You’re new at work. You want to succeed and belong, but you wonder . . . That question looms, latent and inactive, but present.
A “bad” thing happens: Your boss is a little snarky.
That question gets triggered: You read the room for answers, drawing negative inferences from ambiguous evidence. You’re distracted from the task at hand. Your pessimistic hypothesis becomes more entrenched.
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