4 Ways To Stop Being A Victim & Take Ownership Of Your Extra-Ordinary Leadership with Jo Rice

In the latest episode of Extra-Ordinary Leaders, I sat down with Jo Rice, CEO and co-founder of Resurgo, which delivers award-winning coaching, consultancy, and employability programmes with the aim of building a “society where everyone works together to mend the tears in its fabric”.

We discussed something we all have in common, no matter how different we are: the “victim mentality”. In this blog, we’ll explore the insidious ways it holds us back and how we can overcome it.

The full conversation with Jo Rice can be found here.

Origins, signs, and impacts of the victim mentality

Jo: “The victim mentality… that is the human condition, right? We all actually really want to be a victim so that someone will feel sorry for us and look after us. There's something very soothing about being the victim.”

At its core, a victim mentality is rooted in trauma. That’s a heavy word, but sometimes this can mean something as simple as repeated criticism in the workplace, leading us to believe that nothing we do is ever good enough, and that becoming better is out of our control.

A leader with a victim mentality:

• Is sensitive to criticism and puts themselves down constantly

• Becomes defensive when they don’t know the answer to a question or feels they cannot do something

• Believes everyone else in the team has it easier than they do

• Obsesses over issues but struggles to do anything about them

• Struggles to be assertive 
  

Consider this – which person would you want to work for?

Victim:

“Everything has gone wrong, but it’s not my fault. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent it because I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to fix it and the odds are stacked against me.”

Extra-Ordinary Leader: 

“This is unfortunate, but I can fix it. I don’t have all the answers, but that’s okay. Where are the gaps in my knowledge? What do I need to know or do differently next time to prevent this from happening again?”

The impact of this behaviour is that we cannot show up as the extra-ordinary leaders we know we can be. Our team feels they can’t trust us, people feel unable to voice their opinions, and the workplace can become toxic. It means that our sense of who we are is no longer based on what we can do, but on what we can’t do. 

A turning point

Jo’s turning point in leadership came many years ago, in the unlikeliest of places: in the toilet!

It was here that Jo overheard a colleague talking about her. 

Jo: “I overheard her talking to another team member about how annoying I had been that day and how badly I’d managed the training room that we were both running at the time. It was a sort of live feedback opportunity, but she didn’t know! And I just hid in the loo listening to this conversation going on.”

When the colleague contacted her later that day to ask if Jo had overheard her talking in the toilets, Jo mustered her courage and walked headfirst into the “conflict”. She confirmed that she had, and the following day the two colleagues had a conversation that led to a lesson in leadership that Jo still reflects on to this day.

Jo: “I was like, ‘You’re right. I haven’t been behaving very well and I have been grumpy when you ask me questions that I don’t know the answer to. I feel so insecure that I get spiky and angular because I feel like I’m failing with every question that I don’t have the answer to.’ We had this very honest conversation about how we were both feeling and I think in that moment I realised that I had to let go of this sense of, ‘Well, you are in charge and therefore you’ve got to know all of it.’” 

How to be a leader and not a victim

The four lessons Jo learned from this incident were: 

1. Embrace conflict 

Jo: “You are either walking towards a friend or you're walking away from them. Those are the two options. You're never standing still, that's a choice you're making. When you decide not to confront something... you're basically choosing to walk away.”

Jo respected the colleague she had overheard, so made the decision to walk towards her rather than away. Twenty years later they are still good friends, but the key element in this is that Jo recognised that the colleague was right.

She didn’t let her victim mentality make the situation unfair, nor did she view it as a personal attack that meant she wasn’t good enough. She took responsibility, worked to understand how it had happened, and put a plan in place to prevent it from happening in the future. 

2. Emotional honesty

Many businesses operate on the basis that emotions have no place in business. They might see discussions about emotional honesty as “fluffy” or “a waste of time”, failing to see the directly positive impact these conversations have on commercial success.

The truth is, our relational dynamics are built on emotions, even in – and sometimes especially in – the workplace. 

Jo: “The reality is we are all emotional creatures. Every decision is emotional. And if you pretend that there are no emotions involved... you're cutting out a whole raft of data on the decision making process.”

Humans are observant creatures and will sense an emotional dynamic, whether it is vocalised or not. Failing to confront an issue means that people are left wondering what is going on, and this is the perfect environment for the victim mentality to proliferate. We can begin to create false explanations for questions we don’t have answers to. 

Jo: “However painful it might be for me to hear that you don’t think I’m doing a very good job…or that the team are all upset with me… I’m more upset by not knowing, because I can’t do anything about the stuff I don’t know. If that’s done well, it generally builds rather than compromises trust.” 

3. Let go of your Shitty First Draft

In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown talks about the ‘Shitty First Draft’ (SFD), a term which was originally coined by Anne Lamott in her book on writing, Bird By Bird.

In short, the SFD refers to the stories we tell ourselves in the absence of these emotionally honest conversations. In her book, Brené writes, “In the absence of data, you’ll make up a story.” 

The brain is not concerned with how true this story is, only that it has one. It is uncomfortable for us to feel at a loss for an explanation, and in these scenarios we will simply make one up. If we have a victim mentality, we are most at risk of creating a story that only emphasises the traits of victimhood explored earlier in this blog, further damaging our confidence, trust, and extra-ordinary leadership ability. 

4. Don’t let the worst things that happen to you define you

This is perhaps the most important one of all.

At Resurgo, Jo has worked hard to build a business that values the three points explored above. Through their award-winning SPEAR programme, they work with 16 to 24-year-olds who have had truly difficult lives, helping to equip them with skills and knowledge to make life and employment that much easier.

During these programmes, Jo noticed that many of the young people they work with often let the worst things that have happened to them be what defines them, rather than being defined by the fact that they have overcome so much in their lives.

Jo: “I realised… I’m exactly the same. I totally define myself by the things I do or don’t have, or can or can’t do. I was living with a victim mentality.” 

My conversation with Jo on the Extra-Ordinary Leaders podcast is an insightful, value-packed discussion of how we can recognise this tendency in ourselves, and flip our perspective to break free from victimhood.  

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The full conversation with Jo Rice is available here. 

For more information on Jo, head over to LinkedIn or visit Resurgo. 

Extra-Ordinary Leaders releases new episodes every week. Follow along on LinkedIn to be kept up to date.