When we emerge from chronic illness or/and trauma and begin returning to work, we have an opportunity to do something differently. We don't have to return to the same ways of working that may have exhausted us before. Many of us became ill in bodies already very familiar with striving, comparison, perfectionism, proving, hyper-responsibility, fitting in with social norms that did not meet our unique needs, or never quite feeling we had done enough.
So we can recover physically and still recreate those same conditions in our careers if we aren't paying attention. Highly sensitive people, you all really do need to stay attuned to this in order for your gifts to come to fruition, or to do a job that might not be your purpose but that allows you money to do what you love outside of work, without burnout. One of the deepest resources I have come to value enormously, both in my own life and in mentoring people in helping professions, is humility.
Humility is often confused with making ourselves smaller. It isn't. Psychological research distinguishes healthy humility from self-abasing humility. Healthy humility involves being able to see ourselves and our abilities accurately, while recognising our limitations and the value and abilities of other people. It can comfortably coexist with strong self-esteem and confidence (Weidman, Cheng & Tracy, 2018).
We can know we are excellent at what we do and be humble. We can build successful businesses, charge properly for our work, earn good money, become highly skilled and feel proud of what we have created. Humility doesn't say, I'm not very good. It says, I know what I bring, and I know I will never know everything. There is enormous ease in that, and ease is a channel I am continually guiding the people I mentor into so that they can thrive at work.
I mentor a lot of people in helping professions, and over the years I have watched many of them go on to create very successful businesses. One of the things I notice in those who seem to build their careers most sustainably from this healthy humility, is how much of their attention stays on their own side of the street. They are interested in what they can learn, what they enjoy, their intrinsic (internal) motivators, how they can become better practitioners, what their clients need, what is working in their business and what they might need to change. They focus on what is under their influence.
They aren't spending enormous amounts of energy looking sideways. They can see another practitioner doing brilliantly and think, Good for them. They can admire somebody else's work without immediately needing to establish whether they are better or worse. They can ask for help. They can take feedback. They can change their minds. They can say, I don't know enough about this yet. And because their self-esteem isn't continually on trial, there is much more energy available for actually becoming good at what they do.
Research into intellectual humility supports this. Intellectual humility isn't thinking we aren't intelligent; it is recognising that our knowledge is inevitably incomplete and remaining open to other perspectives. It has been associated with openness to evidence and other viewpoints, better interpersonal functioning and a greater willingness to revise our beliefs when the evidence warrants it (Porter et al., 2022). Those qualities are enormously valuable in almost any career, but I think they are particularly important in the helping professions.
Entitlement creates almost the opposite psychological outcomes.
Entitlement is generally described as the belief that we deserve particularly favourable outcomes or treatment. Research has linked entitlement with self-serving attribution patterns and, in workplace settings, lower job satisfaction, greater conflict with supervisors and stronger intentions to leave (Harvey & Martinko, 2009). It is easy to think of entitlement as an extreme characteristic found in particularly arrogant people, but I think its everyday forms are much more interesting because they are such an accepted part of culture that we are often blind to its impact on our own lens we see the world through. This can sound like:
Why does she have more clients than me? Why is he earning more? I am better than they are. Why did she get that opportunity? Why did they get that support and not me? My business should be further ahead by now. Why aren't people recognising what I have to offer? They charge that much so I should be able to as well
The problem with living from that position is how much monitoring it requires, and how self involved it makes us. We have to keep checking what everybody else has and where we are on a hierarchical scale that is of our own making. We have to continually calculate whether we are receiving enough. Someone else's success can start feeling like evidence of our own insufficiency or unfair circumstances that then lead to anger or resentment, which is not a place we can work from. Every disappointing outcome has to be measured against what we believe should have happened and often through judging others through that lens of entitlement. That is exhausting, and contains no real resource that powers us sustainably in work or life. You will notice people with higher entitlement are often complaining, comparing, and measuring as their default setting.
There is no finish line of feeling contentment and ease, because there will always be somebody with more. More money, more clients, more followers, more qualifications, more recognition, a bigger house, a better book deal, a faster-growing business. If our nervous system is using comparison to establish whether we have enough, it never gets to stand down.
This is where I think humility becomes particularly valuable for people emerging from chronic illness or trauma. Many of us already have well-worn pathways around achievement and worth. Perhaps we learnt very young to perform for approval, anticipate other people's needs, be useful, get things right, work harder than everybody else or achieve in order to feel safe. Then we return to work in a culture that enthusiastically reinforces many of those same patterns.
Daring To Be Counter Culture
I often describe culture as our third parent. Long after our families have taught us what they believe makes a person valuable, the culture around us continues the education. More. Faster. Bigger. Optimise yourself. Grow your business. Build your brand. Monetise everything. Keep watching what everybody else is doing.
Humility is a wonderful antidote because it brings our attention back to our own life. I am a huge proponent, in both my teaching and my work with people, of building internal influence: which strengthening our sense of what we can directly influence, while also recognising that we can indirectly influence our experience of what we cannot control through how we respond, cope, adapt and care for ourselves. We cannot control other people, the economy, whether someone chooses to work with us, or exactly how our career unfolds. But we can directly influence the quality of our work, what we learn, how we treat people, the pace we work at and the choices we make, and our growth. And when something genuinely sits outside our control, we still have influence over how we meet it: the meaning we make of it, the skills and resources we draw upon, and how we support ourselves through disappointment or uncertainty. The more we build this muscle, the less we need to manage our anxiety by trying to control other people or the world around us. Instead, we can ask: What actually matters to me? What would enough look like for me exactly? What pace supports my health? What kind of practitioner do I want to become? What am I genuinely interested in learning? What is within my influence today? And how can I meet my own core needs while offering something meaningful that the world needs?
This isn't lack of ambition at all. It is just a flavour of ambition without quite so much threat attached to it and without entitlement.
Humility And Healthy Leadership - Becoming A Business Leader The World Needs
A meta-analysis drawing together 53 independent studies and more than 16,000 participants found humble leadership was associated with outcomes including greater trust, engagement, job satisfaction, psychological empowerment, creativity, self-efficacy and task performance (Chen et al., 2023). Other research has found that humility within workplace relationships can contribute to psychological safety and, through that, better performance (Lehmann et al., 2023).
Confidence and humility are not opposites. In many ways, I think genuine humility requires confidence. When our self-esteem is fragile, being wrong can feel dangerous. We have to put others down to elevate ourselves. Another person's success can feel threatening. What someone else is earning is perceived as unfair. Feedback can feel like criticism. We may need clients to behave in certain ways, for colleagues to recognise us or the world to confirm that we are as good as we hope we are.
When our sense of ourselves becomes sturdier, we can say, "She's brilliant at that". "I don't know." "I made a mistake". "That person knows considerably more about this than I do". "I need some supervision". "I've changed my mind". None of that takes anything away from us. It actually frees us to grow, enjoy our work, to have a lot of ease and comfort in our own skin.
And I see that freedom in the people I mentor who build successful practices from this place. Their confidence grows alongside their humility rather than replacing it. They know what they are good at. They become increasingly skilled. They earn good money. They develop reputations and successful businesses. But they remain curious and teachable. They are largely focused on their work, their clients, their learning, their influence and the lives they actually want to live rather than continually establishing their position relative to everybody else.
Growing Into A New Chapter
For those of us returning to work after periods of chronic illness or trauma, we don't have to become well only to reconstruct the same exhausting internal conditions under the more socially acceptable heading of ambition. We can work hard without living in urgency, be confident without needing superiority. We can become experts over time (and honestly, having the humility to know there is nothing that can get you to expertise without the hard work of practice hours, learning from our clients and teachers, mistakes, and growth over time) without pretending to know everything. We can earn very well without money determining our worth. We can watch somebody else shine without experiencing their light as evidence that ours is dimmer or they are somehow taking ours.
And when old childhood patterns tell us to prove ourselves, or our third parent; culture; whispers that whatever we have achieved still isn't quite enough, we can notice that too. Humility gives us a new solid foundation to stand on as part of our internal influence of how we CHOOSE to work, that will last a lifetime of career (and personal) growth. In my practice, the most unhappy people have high entitlement, and the happiest, have high humility.
It allows us to know we are good without continually proving it. To learn without shame. To succeed without constantly checking whether we have succeeded enough. To keep our attention on our own influence rather than trying to control outcomes or monitor everyone around us. For those building lives and careers after profound periods of stress, humility allows us to carry ourselves, our work and our success more lightly, with innate dignity and the joy of sharing with others. It asks: what can I give wholeheartedly, while also giving myself what I need, which models healthy reciprocity. What a wonderful blueprint for a society that dearly needs to evolve beyond the never-ending hunger of what can I get, that damages us all, including our home planet.
Chen, Q., Zhang, K., Wang, Y., & Peng, J. (2023). Humble leadership and its outcomes: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 980322.
Harvey, P., & Martinko, M. J. (2009). An empirical examination of the role of attributions in psychological entitlement and its outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30(4), 459–476.
Lehmann, M., et al. (2023). Relationship-specific (dyadic) humility: How your humility predicts my psychological safety and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(5), 809–825.
Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E. A., Shibayama, T., Jayawickreme, E., & Grossmann, I. (2022). Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 524–536.
Weidman, A. C., Cheng, J. T., & Tracy, J. L. (2018). The psychological structure of humility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 153–178.
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