341. The Importance Of Q-Tips In Your Career
Q-Tips push all the bad stuff deeper inside. All they do is make things worse. As it turns out, the same thing happens at work when you take things personally.
This is The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever, the most fun way to learn life’s leadership lessons. My name is Jeff Matlow. I am a leadership coach.
I help leaders solve their biggest problems fast so they can sleep better at night.
I had to go to urgent care last week.
No, not for that rash. Dammit, I told you not to tell anyone. And by the way, it’s been cleared up, thank you very much.
Anyway, I had to go to urgent care for a pain in my ear. It was annoying. And painful. But I said that already.
I had tried using Q-Tips to see if I could ease the discomfort, but no such luck. It didn’t work.
So there I was, sitting on the crunchy-papered table in the urgent care room as the doctor pulled out that ear explorer device and looked into my ear.
Suddenly, she leaned back and gave me that look. You know the look - it’s the same one you give to your kid when they do something so idiotic you don’t know if you should be angry or in awe.
“Tell me you haven’t been using Q-Tips in your ear,” the doctor leered at me.
I shifted my body in embarrassment. The crinkling of the tabletop paper filled the room. What is it with this paper in every single doctor’s office? With all the technological advancements of our time, couldn’t some scientist figure out a better cover for medical tables than parchment paper?
I looked over at the doctor. Her eyes beamed at me with laser-like judgment. She was disappointed - that was obvious.
“Ummm….,” I responded sheepishly. “Yes…?”
She shook her head and tsk-ed at me. She actually tsk-ed. “Don’t use a Q-Tip. It just pushes the wax deeper,” she said.
As she went back to exploring my ear, she mumbled something that sounded a lot like “No Q-Tip.”
Yes, I felt embarrassed.
Sure, I felt demeaned.
Yes, I shut down with shame.
But here’s the thing… she was right.
Q-Tips are bad.
But not solely for the reason the doctor said.
I’m not writing this whole thing to talk to you about good aural hygiene. Believe it or not, the Q-Tip impacts your career trajectory in a big way.
But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, I need to tell you a different story.
When Your Boss Says You’re Work Isn’t Good
One of my coaching clients, a female VP at a Fortune 100 company, is a very smart woman. Like, crazy smart. She doesn’t even realize how smart she is - that’s how smart she is.
She started her own company at a young age, and it made some meaningful waves in her industry. Then COVID happened.
During the lull, she got recruited to be a leader at this F100 and decided to take the job.
She has a big presentation to the entire global executive team tomorrow. This morning, she showed her boss the final presentation.
She had worked hard on this presentation. She was proud of it. She should be.
She was eager to show her boss and, undoubtedly, get his accolades.
But that’s not what happened. Her boss didn’t tell her it was great. He told her it wasn’t.
He said she missed the point and had to change a big portion of it.
My client called me shortly thereafter. She was practically in tears, ready to jump off any proverbial cliff she could find.
She was so proud of all she had created that her boss’s comments felt like a personal attack on her moral character.
She only had a day to fix the deck. She had to get to work, but she couldn’t.
She was angry at herself. She was embarrassed at her performance. And she was angry at her boss.
She was productively paralyzed. She simply didn’t have the headspace to be creative.
She was ready to quit.
And then I mentioned the Q-Tip.
Q-Tip: It’s Not Just A Cotton Swab, It’s A Way Of Life
It’s sometimes hard not to take things personally. I completely get it.
It’s one of the most challenging dynamics that happens in almost every single company. As a leadership coach, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders on this issue.
There are many problems with taking feedback personally, but no problem is bigger than the fact that taking it personally always makes the problems bigger.
That’s bad.
And that’s why you need to stop.
And that’s the message I wanted to tell you about the Q-Tip.
It isn’t just a cotton swab, it’s a mantra:
Quit Taking It Personally.
QTiP
The Failure Of A Fragile Ego
Maybe you recognize that you take things personally, maybe you don’t. But to rattle your brain a bit, here are some of the most common QTip issues I see with people:
When someone disagrees, you think they’re insulting your intelligence
When you don’t get immediate praise, you think you failed
When you don’t get invited to that meeting, you think people hate you
When you failed to complete 3 weeks of workload in 3 days of work, you feel inept and useless.
Those behaviors are not about leadership - they are simply the failure of a fragile ego.
Just like the urgent care doctor taught me that a Q-Tip only packs the problems deeper, taking things personally does the same exact thing.
When you take things personally, it makes the situation worse by packing the problems deeper inside you. It creates resentment.
In the end, you turn yourself into the center of a story that probably has nothing to do with you.
It’s time to change that.
It’s Time For Emotional Hygiene
Here’s the harsh reality of what you’re doing.
Most of the time, the issue is not actually an issue, and it’s not about you.
People are struggling with their own lives, their own insecurities, their own workloads.
Their actions reflect them, not you.
If you take feedback personally, all you’re doing is converting another person’s issues into your own personal drama.
Think of it like a QTip (the cotton swab variety).
If you use a Q-Tip to fix a clogged ear, you feel like you’re doing something helpful. In reality, you’re only making it worse.
Similarly, to be a better leader, you need to stop cleaning every emotional moment like it’s your mess to scrub.
When people take feedback personally, they shut down. That’s bad
When people take missed deadlines personally, they start to micromanage. That’s bad too
When people take disagreements personally, they stop listening. And that’s the exact opposite of what needs to happen.
When something pushes your button, you need to pause.
And that brings me to my challenge to you.
The Challenge: Put Down the Q-Tip
My challenge to you is to consciously go an entire day without taking anything personally.
When someone pushes your buttons… stop your emotional mind.
Find a good place to sit. Or stand. Or walk.
Think of what they said.
Think of why that triggers you.
Imagine what it would feel like if it weren’t about you.
That’s what great leaders do. They stop shoving Q-Tips in their emotional canals and start listening instead.
You don’t need to fix every problem.
You don’t need to defend your ego.
You just need to QTIP.
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