234. You Might Be The Problem
- 11 minutes ago
- 14 min read
Recurring workplace conflict often has a common denominator we would rather not examine: ourselves. Once we get curious about our blind spots, defensiveness, and quietly resentful "niceness," we start to see how our patterns combine with others' to create friction. By asking what part we are playing and taking honest, corrective action, it becomes easier for us to collaborate and accelerate our careers.
No matter how good you think you are at keeping your real feelings contained—the frustration, the resentment, the disagreement you decided wasn't worth voicing—it comes out somewhere.
Are you noticing the same kind of conflict following you from team to team, or manager to manager? Are you quick to explain, justify, or defend yourself the moment feedback feels uncomfortable? Are you the "nice" one in meetings who agrees out loud but quietly withholds effort, context, or honesty afterward?
You'll learn that the moment you can honestly admit some of the friction is coming from you is the moment you get your power back, because it's the only version of the story where there's something you can actually change.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why defensiveness is rarely a reaction to something obviously false
6 practical tips to enable us to see our own patterns more clearly
Why being agreeable on the surface while quietly withholding effort, follow-through, or honesty is still friction
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-four. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
Something goes wrong at work and there's a conflict. It might seem like it's just another day in your world. Things are getting tense, again. Maybe this time different people are involved—but somehow, you always seem to be standing in the middle of it. Because this keeps happening, you tell yourself a story that seems plausible. It might sound like: people here are political, this team is dysfunctional, or that manager never seems to have my back. And most likely, some of that is true.
But here's the question most of us spend our whole careers avoiding: what if some of it is you?
Not all of it. Not even most of it, maybe, but some of it. What if—in some rooms, with some people, on some days—you are the difficult one.
In this episode, we are exploring one of the most uncomfortable and yet, one of the most useful questions you can ask yourself in your working life. Don't get me wrong, this isn't about self-blame. It's more about honest self-assessment—where we can begin taking back the parts of the story that are actually within our control, because those are the only parts we can ever change.
Let's start with why this is so hard to look at in the first place. When a conflict keeps recurring—when you notice the same kind of breakdown showing up on different teams, with different managers, in different companies—there are really only two plausible explanations. Either you have had an extraordinary run of bad luck with difficult people, or there's a common denominator, and it's you.
Most of us, understandably, reach for the first explanation. It's less painful. It protects something important—our sense of ourselves as being reasonable, well-intentioned, and good to work with. Nobody grows up dreaming of being the person their coworkers dread to be paired with on a project.
So, we build a case. We collect evidence for the version where we're the reasonable one and everyone else is the problem. And look, sometimes that version is accurate. Sometimes, you really did land on a dysfunctional team, or you work for a genuinely difficult boss. That happens. I'm not asking you to assume you're always wrong. I'm asking you to get curious about the possibility that you're not always right, either.
Because here's the thing that makes this exercise worth doing, even though it's uncomfortable: the moment you can honestly say, "some of this is coming from me" is the exact moment you get your power back. If the problem is entirely external—be it other people, the way your organization is structured, or even just bad luck—then you're stuck. You can't fix other people. You can't fix a broken system by yourself. Then, you're just along for the ride in your own career, waiting for the next environment to improve.
But if twenty percent of the friction is something you're doing—a pattern, a habit, a way you show up under pressure—that twenty percent is yours. You can work with that. You can change that. And the people who figure this out tend to move faster in their careers, not slower.
They get promoted sooner. They get chosen for the high-profile project, as the best person to manage an important client relationship, maybe even putting them on the fast-track to leadership. Not because they're perfect, but because they've done the work of becoming easier to get along with. Self-awareness, it turns out, is a career accelerant. Owning your role in the friction isn't weakness. It can actually be a form of leverage.
So, let's say the quiet part out loud: you might be the difficult one. As hard as that is to hear, I want to offer you a different way to embrace this, so you can do something about it, before it's too late.
First, almost everyone is perceived as "the difficult one" to someone. It's just what happens when humans with different needs, communication styles, and emotional baggage try to build things together under the pressure of deadlines. Not everyone is going to like you, and that's okay. It's good information to have.
Second, acknowledging this doesn't mean you're a bad person, a bad colleague, or even bad at your job. It means you're human—with blind spots, stress responses, and habits you picked up long before you ever joined this company. Being the difficult one in a particular dynamic is not a verdict on your worth, but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do to improve the situation, even just a little.
And third—this is the part that matters most—knowing it is actually good news, because it's the only version of the story where you have something to do next. If you're purely a victim of circumstance, then there's no action available to you except waiting and hoping. If you're a participant, even partially responsible, there's a path forward. That's the opening we're looking for.
A blind spot is exactly what it sounds like—a part of your own behavior you genuinely cannot see, even though everyone around you can. This is where most of us get stuck. You're not lying to yourself on purpose. You may not be able to see your behavior the way others do. That's what makes them blind spots and not just things you're choosing to ignore.
Normally, the only way you find out you have one is by someone telling you, either directly or indirectly. It sometimes comes as a piece of feedback, a joke that isn't really a joke, or a pattern someone finally calls out after months of not saying anything. And in that moment, something predictable happens in most of us—we get defensive. And that's normal.
But I want you to pay close attention to that defensiveness, because it's important information. Defensiveness is rarely a neutral reaction to an unfair accusation. Far more often, it's a signal that something landed—that some part of you recognizes a little bit of truth in what's being said, even as the rest of you is scrambling to reject it. We don't usually get defensive about things that are obviously false. Nobody bristles when they're wrongly accused of being something they know they aren't. We get defensive about things that are close enough to true to threaten the story we tell about ourselves.
So, the next time you feel the urge to lash out—the desire to explain or justify your actions, rhyme off a list of your good intentions, or turn it back on the other person—try to catch it before you succumb to that strong desire to defend yourself. Not because your reaction is wrong to have. It's completely human. But underneath it is usually a piece of information you need to hear. The task isn't to suppress the defensiveness. It's to get curious about what it's uncovering for you.
Now, let's talk about a particular flavor of "difficult" that's easy to miss, because it doesn't look like being difficult at all. It's called the polite saboteur.
This is the version of being hard to work with that hides behind good manners. You're pleasant in meetings. You never raise your voice. You say, "sounds good" or "happy to help" and "no worries at all". On paper, on camera, in the room—you're easygoing, agreeable, nice.
But underneath the niceness, something else is running. Resentment that never gets spoken. Anger that gets swallowed instead of addressed. Disagreement that gets nodded through in the meeting and then quietly undermined afterward—with the slow followthrough, the missing context you conveniently forgot to share, or the enthusiasm that mysteriously evaporates once you're out of the room. You're not yelling at anyone. You're not causing a scene. You're just a little less available than you could be, a little slower to help, and a little more likely to let something fall through the cracks than to admit, out loud, "I don't agree with this".
This is friction, too. It's just friction with better manners. And it's worth naming because "nice" and "easy to work with" are not the same thing. Easy to work with means people can trust what you say matches what you do, and if something's wrong, you'll say so, and that your 'yes' means yes. The polite saboteur is agreeable on the surface but unreliable underneath—and eventually, people stop trusting you, even if they can't quite articulate why.
If any part of that description made you wince a little, then good. That wince is useful. Hold onto it.
No matter how good you think you are at keeping your real feelings contained—the frustration, the resentment, the disagreement you decided wasn't worth voicing—it comes out somewhere. In your tone, even when your words are perfectly polite. In how quickly you respond to someone's message, or how slowly. In the meetings you find reasons to skip. In the warmth that's present with some people and mysteriously absent with others. In a sigh. In a pause half a second too long before you answer.
People pick up on this, even when they can't name exactly what they're picking up on. They just know something feels off with you. Often, the people around you know something is wrong long before you're willing to admit it to yourself. That's worth sitting with. You're not as good at hiding your true feelings as you think you are. Trying to mask something you actually feel doesn't make it disappear, it just makes it come out sideways, in ways that are harder for everyone, including you, to work with directly.
So, how do you know if this might be you? Here are a few signs worth paying attention to, honestly, without judgment:
You notice the same kind of conflict recurring—maybe not in identical ways, but with some similarities—across different teams, different managers, different companies. You are, more often than feels comfortable, the one common thread running through the story.
You get feedback—in a performance review, in a passing comment, in something a friend finally worked up the courage to tell you—and your first instinct is to explain why they're wrong, rather than sit with whether there might be some truth to what they shared with you.
People start leaving you out of conversations you'd normally be part of, not dramatically, just quietly. You're looped in a little later. You notice that you're included a little less often than before.
More than one person, in more than one context, has said some version of the same thing about you. That's not a coincidence you can talk yourself out of. Independent, repeated feedback is one of the most reliable signals there is and shouldn't be ignored.
And maybe the quietest sign of all: you feel tired, isolated, like work has gotten harder than it should be, and you can't quite figure out why. Sometimes, that exhaustion is the result of having to do more on your own, and maybe realizing that everyone around you is walking on eggshells because you've become unpredictable, unreliable, or simply just not yourself.
None of these signs on their own prove anything. But together, they're worth taking a closer look at.
Which brings us to what I think of as a sort of forensic investigation, where we go back into a conflict, a breakdown, a relationship that went sideways, and actually look at what actually happened. Because here's the thing that the stories we tell ourselves about our own conflicts: we tend to like telling the version where we're the nice person and a terrible thing has happened to us. That version is comforting. And yet, it's almost never the complete picture.
Life is rarely that simple. Most workplace breakdowns aren't villain-and-victim stories—they're two people, each operating from their own stress, their own past experiences, their own blind spots, sometimes unintentionally clashing. When you actually go back, more like a detective than a defense attorney, and lay out the timeline, what was said, what wasn't said, what you assumed, what you avoided, what you needed and didn't ask for—that's when something shifts.
You start to see that you had as much to do with it as they did. Not necessarily equally. Not necessarily in the same way. But what you did and said contributed to it. You were involved, whether you like it or not. You were a participant, not just a bystander.
They brought their patterns of behavior and you brought yours. And the two patterns interacted in a very particular way that produced a very particular result—one that neither of you fully intended necessarily, but both of you had a part in creating.
This is not about assigning yourself more blame than you deserve. It's about self-awareness, because that is what makes change possible. You can't fix something until you are aware that it needs fixing.
Becoming more aware starts with asking yourself three important questions:
What is the part that I am playing in this?
How am I contributing to this situation?
Who am I blaming for this situation that I'm experiencing?
These questions aren't about blaming yourself unnecessarily. They're a way in. They're how you start to unpack your own contribution to the problem—and by unpacking that, you uncover what you can actually do about it. You can't change someone else's behavior. You can only ever change your own. So, that's why these types of questions are so useful, in that they help you pinpoint what is within your control.
Once you start seeing your own part in all of this, you arrive at a fork in the road where you get to choose what to do next:
Option 1: The one where you opt out. Where blaming others feels so much better than looking closer that you just stop looking. You disengage. You decide the job isn't worth this level of honesty and you coast, or you quietly plan your exit, or you keep the story exactly as it was and let it harden into your explanation for everything that happens next. You become cynical and jaded. In some ways, I understand the appeal. It's the path that provides some immediate relief, but it can do lasting damage to your mental well-being.
Option 2: Going through it. If you feel like something is blocking your way, genuinely blocking it—like a relationship you've neglected, an unfortunate reputation you've developed over time, or a pattern of behavior that keeps costing you opportunities—the only way past is through it. Not around. Not by waiting for the other person to change first. Through your own honest look at what happened and what you'll do differently.
Going through it doesn't mean pretending everything is fine. You don't have to pretend you're okay when you're not. If something doesn't feel right, figure out what you can do about it. If a relationship is genuinely strained, you don't have to smile your way past that. Going through it means staying present and honest with what's actually true—including the parts that are uncomfortable.
And part of going through it is also making peace with something most of us resist: people don't always do what we think they should do, or what we want them to do. You can be honest and take responsibility for your part in the situation, and the other person involved still won't respond the way you'd like. That's not a reason to give up. There's still value in doing this type of work, for your own clarity, your own growth, and recognizing the power you have to make your own choices. None of this guarantees you will gain their approval, if that's what you're seeking.
So now, let's get practical. If you've made it this far and you're seeing that maybe, just maybe, you might have played a role in what you're experiencing, here's where to go next.
Start by asking for specific feedback, and actually making it easy for people to provide it to you, honestly. Vague questions like, "How am I doing?" invite vague, safe answers. Try something more specific: "Is there anything about how I communicate under pressure that makes me harder to work with?". Then—and this is the hard part—say thank you and don't argue, even if it stings.
Then, get curious instead of defensive. The next time feedback lands wrong, before you respond, ask yourself: what if there is something in this that has some truth? Maybe you could sit with that small nugget of truth before discarding the rest as just noise.
Look for your patterns across all your professional relationships, not putting too much weight on any one person's opinion. It's possible that one person's feedback might be shaped by the other person's past experiences. But when there's a pattern in the feedback you're receiving, it's more likely that there could be something in there that's worth paying attention to.
When something you've done has caused some friction, repair it directly instead of just moving on and hoping it fades. A short, specific acknowledgment like, "I think I handled that conversation poorly and I want to do better" carries enormous weight in a professional setting. No one expects perfection, and we all have those moments when we recognize that we could have done better, and yet, so few people ever do anything to attempt to repair it.
Consider running your own forensic investigation on the conflicts that still bother you. Separate what actually happened from the story you've been telling yourself (or others) about what happened. Look for the role you had in it and choose to make some adjustments going forward.
And get support doing this. Choose someone who can reflect things back to you that you can't see on your own, because that's the nature of a blind spot, whether that's a coach, a therapist, a mentor, or even a genuinely honest colleague. Sometimes, it can be hard to identify it in ourselves. That's when it's helpful to have another set of eyes.
This exercise is not about judgment. It's more about self-discovery and self-knowledge. Uncovering something uncomfortable about yourself, whether it's a pattern, a habit, or a way you protect yourself that ends up creating more of what you were afraid of in the first place, is not the end of the story. It's the beginning of the part where you get to do something about it.
Once you can see it, you can work with it. You can make a change. You can recover parts of your working relationships, and even restore your reputation that might have gotten damaged or eroded when you were unaware of the behavior pattern.
People notice who's willing to do this kind of work on themselves. They notice the colleague who used to be prickly and isn't so much anymore. The one who used to go quiet and resentful and now says what they are thinking more often in the room. The one who takes feedback and actually makes some changes, instead of explaining it away. That person gets trusted with more. They get assigned the harder project, the bigger team, which gives them a more prominent seat at the table because they get recognized as someone people enjoy working with.
So, while the question "what if I'm the problem?" feels like an attack the first time you reflect on it, the longer you sit with it, the more it starts to look like something else entirely—more of an opportunity to reflect on what's within your control that you could change to make things better. It's the one question that hands you back your power, because it's the only version of the story where there's something for you to act on.
You don't have to have all the answers today. You just have to be willing to ask yourself: What part am I playing in this? How am I contributing? And who have I been blaming that I might need to look at a little more honestly?
That's the work. It's not comfortable, but it might be the most useful thing you can do for your career.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download yourGuide to Uncovering Your Blind Spots At Work at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-four.
Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.
Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.
