“Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us, when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen.” – Brene Brown

This week concludes my third week working at Amazon, and things are picking up very quickly! To start, I returned from AD1 in Seattle Friday night, rested Saturday, and then started bright at early for my first shift on the operating floor at 6AM. I was still jetlagged, but I was excited to get to know my future associates and co-workers. Pretty soon I was thrown out of the world of training modules and SOP protocols and fully immersed in revolving KPI metrics, changing process needs, and queries from associates. I was told that Amazon was a fast place to work at, and I wasn’t disappointed on that front. It’s a whirlwind! I still have plenty of training modules to work on because Amazon’s onboarding process is extensive, but I have all the trainings I need to participate in the critical process paths.

I spent all day Sunday shadowing on the floor, and then I spent only the first period on the floor on Monday and the rest of the time I dedicated it to other supplemental training provided by my L&D department, as well as some other training modules. I didn’t return back on the floor until the last period on Tuesday, but something strange happened. The more that I became known to the associates, the more that they started to bombard me with questions about where they should be, what they should do about X concern or Y event, and the like. Even though I know how the process paths work at a high level, I don’t have the practice yet to determine which process paths need more attention than others, and I don’t have the experience to know how to staff different areas according to business needs. All I could do for 10 minutes was direct the associates to my shadowing AM for their requests, but the strange part is this: I started to get overwhelmed, something I thought wouldn’t ever happen to me. I told my fellow AM that I was done shadowing for the day and that I would go work on training modules for the rest of the day.

What no one ever tells you about transitioning into a new role is that some parts of you change and others don’t. With every change in roles and responsibility in our lives comes a shift in our identity, or our self-concept as psychologists call it. Before I was an Area Manager, before I was a college student, I was a Receiving Supervisor at a different warehouse. I started at the bottom as a receiving auditor, and I spent over 4 years transforming myself from someone who was eager, curious, and energetic, into someone who was dependable, resourceful, and still just as energetic. I got two promotions in my first year and doubled my pay, and I got multiple offers to work as an inventory controller – the coveted role every zealous associate longed for. As part of inventory control, you are a touchpoint and escalation path to every process in the building; inbound, outbound, quality control, production, and non-inventory are all departments that followed the direction of inventory control. When something went wrong, I was notified; I helped come up with a solution; I was there. And after two and a half years being intertwined with seemingly all the operations of my warehouse, I decided to step into the managerial realm as a Receiving Supervisor where I gained direct reports and assumed higher responsibilities.

Taking a respite from full-time operations and going to school full-time was a huge shift in my identity. Instead of being someone that others depend on, that can problem-solve for others, I was thrown into an environment where I started to focus on myself, my needs, my well-being, and my academic development. Although it was a needed change,this heavily impacted my self-efficacy, which is your sense of competency in different tasks. I remembered that I used to be someone that would go out and get results without complaints, but now I was stuck in a classroom receiving instruction from a tenured professor with very little urgency – other than going to the bathroom I guess. I was not used to being on the “taking” side of the transaction for so long, and if you’ve ever worked in operations, it’s constant information being given back-and-forth either in-person, over the radio, over text, or on a laptop. I would constantly participate in class and ask questions to the joy of my professor and to the chagrin of my peers. But this was a way for me to feel valuable and to reclaim a part of that lost identity.

But now that I’ve graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Analytics and working once again in an operations management role, I was more than ecstatic to go back to my problem-solver, superhero persona. But although Amazon parallels a lot of the functions my former workplace used to include, I’m not yet knowledgeable in all the things I have to know. Even though I felt the training modules weren’t teaching me anything that I didn’t already know, there’s lots of language that’s different, and acronyms, and a whole lot more KPI’s to keep track of. Not to mention that the business division is entirely different because I’m not dealing with nearly-uniform pallets of produce anymore, but thousands of boxes of varying sizes which require different labor tasks and procedures. Although I can look around and see the same walls and windows, the same operating equipment, the same smiling faces, it’s not the same job. And from that realization came the discreet tug of perfectionalistic impulse with a soft yet salient mutter, “I’m not good at this, and I have to get good at this”.

Karen Horneye talked about the “Tyranny of the Shoulds”; it’s a dark act of cramming a bunch of shiny and jumbled thoughts between the crevice of disappointment between you who are (“The Despised Self”) vs. who you want to be (“The Idealised Self”). For example, if you’re not at your ideal weight, you say things such as “I should work out more”, or “I shouldn’t eat so much on the weekends”, so that you can feel that there’s a way to become that thinner person. The human psyche doesn’t like the feeling of not having an answer for everything, and when we realize that there’s a part of our identity that we don’t like, we need to find a path there so we could reach it. But what happens when the distance between you and your idealised self is too wide? What we usually do is fill the crevice with more shoulds, more expectations, and that eventually turns into missed expectations, broken promises, and soon enough you’re consumed by anxiety and nothing ever feels like enough.

Perfectionism happens when we try to bridge an impossible goal. Perfectionists are people who find a lot of success in the “shoulds”, set the bar very high for themselves, and then never see the bar again. It’s like how in Season 2 of Loki, Kang says Loki “will never be able to accomodate for an infinitely growing multiverse”. Any time they sense a slight room for improvement, their goals shift, and when they don’t feel like there’s any room to improve, they get nervous, because they “should know what they need to work on”. Perfectionists are good at taking feedback, but they’re never good with complements, and they’re so consumed with whittling themselves down to become the ultimate cross-breed between form vs. function that they don’t ever consider being worthy of a person for who they naturally are, and that they are allowed to take up space. When we start down the path of the shoulds, we lose sense of who we truly are; we lose the sense of contentment.

As my mentor Caro Mercado often quips, “I am a recovering perfectionist“. She even gifted me the book “The Gifts Of Imperfection” by Brene Brown, whom she knows is my favorite management scholar. A part of my journey of growth these last few years was to give up the mantle of perfectionism and realizing that I’ve done more than enough to develop myself, my family, and my co-workers, and I should feel proud for the spaces I’ve become a part of and the community I’ve helped build. Growing up, I never really felt that anyone expected much from me. When I first started getting praise at work and rewarded for my efforts, it was like having a need never once having been met, like all of a sudden all the doors were open for me; people were cheering me on to do more, and I could do a whole lot more. But after a while my efforts became commonplace, the cheers faded, and I became just what everyone expected of me, even though I never stopped trying. Being in college gave me a unique perspective to look at what truly matters to me and my life and to be grateful of the accomplishments I’ve made and how to look at myself in a more positive light.

So why bring all of this up? Because when I got overwhelmed on the operations floor, I realized that I became prey to the “shoulds” once again. I’m a former operations supervisor, I SHOULD be learning quicker than this, I SHOULD have all the answers by now, and so forth. Even though I thought people expect a lot from me for coming into Amazon as an L4 Area Manager, in reality they don’t expect a whole lot since, to them, I don’t know the business. I spent a lot of time trying to convince my Amazon peers that I don’t need help, when I clearly have no idea what I’m doing, and that’s okay. Even though my past experience will be helpful in setting up a strong foundation at Amazon, I need to give myself more grace and be confident that I will be more useful to the associates in time. I am not under attack, and I will put down the 20-ton shield.

When I left college, I lost my self-efficacy, but I will soon have it again. I’m currently still learning through many training modules including the P4L (Proficiency For Leaders) and I won’t have any direct reports until I come back from Seattle next month after LEW (Leaders Experience Week). I have plenty of time to get used to the job, the metrics, and everything else that I need to prepare myself to be an effective leader. I’m not where I want to be, but I’ve come a long way. I’m not perfect, but I am enough.