The Perception Gap

You walked out of that meeting feeling good. So why did the feedback say otherwise?

In this episode of the Psych Leadership Podcast, we tackle one of the most quietly career-limiting dynamics in early professional life: the gap between how you see yourself and how the room actually experiences you. Drawing on 28 years of working with emerging professionals, and grounded in the latest research on overconfidence, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and emotional intelligence this episode covers both ends of the spectrum.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why the least self-aware people are often the least equipped to know it — and what the research says about why that happens
• The two patterns that show up on opposite ends of the perception gap — and why both are costly
• Where the line between confidence and arrogance actually lives — and why it matters more early in your career than at any other time
• A four-question self-audit you can run immediately after any significant professional interaction
• How to ask for calibrating feedback in a way that actually gets you honest answers — and how to receive it without getting defensive

The goal isn’t to be more humble. It’s to be more accurate — so the person the room experiences matches the person you intend to be.

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the Psych Leadership Podcast, the podcast that helps you understand the psychology of growth, leadership, and making big moves in your life and career. As always, I'm your host, Luke Upchurch, and I'm so happy that you took time out of your day to hang out with me. Today I wanted to start talking about something that I've seen play out repeatedly over my 28 years of developing and mentoring people at all levels. And it's one of those very quietly career-limiting dynamics. Um, here's what it looks like, right? You walk into a meeting, uh, or walk out of a meeting, I should say, and you feel like you crushed it, right? You were engaged, you had ideas, you spoke up, and then you get the feedback later on down the line that you were, quote, difficult to work with. Or maybe it's the opposite. You pour everything into a project, you stay late, you go above and beyond what was asked, and somehow your manager thinks that you're disengaged. Well, that gap between how you see yourself and how the room actually experiences you that's that's where we're gonna live today, folks. Psychologists call this the perception gap. It can also be known as cognitive dissonance, right? The the difference between what you believe to be true and what is perceived to be true. And it sits right there at that intersection between confidence and emotional maturity. Or, you know, when I'm working with my interns, I always tell them, I want you to tap dance the line between being confident and being arrogant, right? Because we we don't want to step so over into the arrogant space, but we also don't want to be uh we don't want to shrink away from our capabilities. And the hard truth here is that it's not always uh the the version of you that's in your head is not always what people encounter. And in this episode, we're gonna really hit both ends of the spectrum. Um I mean, ultimately, the damage to this can be real, especially if you don't catch it, if you don't catch it early and course correct. So, to get us started, let's talk a little bit about the science of not seeing yourself clearly. The research here uh it tells us that, and and it really reframes the whole conversation. It takes the blame out of it. And that's why I'm starting with this. One of the most well-documented phenomena in psychology is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The finding that people with limited competence in an area tend to overestimate that competence. The reason it happens is almost elegant in its cruelty. The same knowledge that you need to perform well in a domain is exactly the knowledge that you need to reorganize when you're not doing well. When that knowledge is missing, both your performance and your ability to evaluate your performance suffer at the same time. You don't know what you don't know, right? And you don't know that you don't know it. So in 2025, there was this study on overconfidence uh in young decision makers. And this found that younger generations are particularly susceptible to this. And identified, uh, the study itself identified a specific mechanism worth understanding because Gen Z and younger millennials have grown up with instant access to information. They develop a feeling of confidence much faster than previous generations. So the research calls it the I already know dynamic. You read something, you watch a video, you consume information so quickly, and your brain registers that as expertise. The feeling of knowing and the reality of knowing diverge significantly. And that divergence shows up in professional settings in a way that can be hard to see when you're in the middle of it, right? But that's where the other side, uh, and this is just as important, the same Kruger-Dunning research, uh, or sorry, Dunning-Kruger research shows that people with high actual confidence often underestimate themselves. So high performers tend to assume that what comes easy to them comes easy to others, which leads them to kind of discount their own contribution, right? They shrink, they defer, they hold back insights that the room genuinely needs. And this is also a perception gap. It's just in the different direction. And the most striking research, specifically examining the Dunning-Kruger effect in emotional intelligence, found that people with the lowest EQ had almost no awareness of how deficient their social and interpersonal skills are. Their self-rating were nearly as high as those that are considered top performers. The very skills you need to read a room, to pick up on those social signals, to understand how you're landing, those are the exact same skills, when underdeveloped, prevent you from realizing that they're underdeveloped. Right. So it's kind of a paradox here. So now I'm going to pivot a little bit and tell you kind of how I've seen this play out. Um, so for me, understand in in my time at uh at my day job and also just working with young professionals, I've seen hundreds of emerging professionals, interns, associates, those early in career, or maybe not early in career, but early stepping into a leadership role, right? We we have this, and I see this a lot at my personal company at the company that I work for in my day job. You get folks that have been good at a thing, and they've they've done that thing for a number of years, and then a leadership position opens up. And the assumption is as well, if you can do the job well, you can lead people well, right? And those that that couldn't be further from the truth. Sometimes those go hand in hand. Um, but often, you know, expertise in one area does not necessarily translate to expertise in another. And that perception gap shows up in very distinct patterns, both of which are very costly. So the first is the person that doesn't know, that isn't aware of what they don't know, right? They come in confident sometimes because they've they're used to being the smartest person in every room that they've been in up till this point. So school rewarded them, their families celebrate them, and then they step into this professional environment where everybody around them is also smart, also capable, also experienced, right? And that experience sometimes is a big chunk of the gap, right? It's one thing to have theoretical knowledge, it's another to say I've been in this space, I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt, right? And so essentially these folks haven't recalibrated. So they talk over people in the meeting, they dismiss feedback, they have the opinion on things that that they have, you know, two, three weeks of exposure to at this point. They genuinely don't see it. And that's not arrogance in a character sense, that's a calibration problem. Again, if left uncorrected, this feels like arrogance to those around you. And that closes doors. Now, the challenge here, uh, especially for those of you that are new enroll, uh, or new to a company, it could very well be that you do have the experience. But understand the perception here, that's what we're dealing with. The perception is Joe New Guy came in and thinks he knows everything, right? I'll give you another example, and this is kind of rudimentary, but hopefully it paints the picture. Let's say I walk by my son's room and he's sitting there at his desk, laundry unfolded, room's a mess, dishes all over the place, right? And I tell him to take care of it. And I come back 20, 30 minutes later, and he's still sitting there. Well, where your brain goes is he's been sitting there 20 or 30 minutes. He hasn't moved because I saw him in this position. I came back, he's still in this position. The dishes, the laundry is all still there. I have no idea what happened during that 30 minutes. My brain believes that it knows, right? It I draw the natural conclusion that he's just been sitting there. But who's to say maybe he was knee deep in a homework problem? Maybe he jumped on a phone call with a friend and learned how to solve that problem. Maybe he's not feeling well and he was actually out of the room that entire 30 minutes, you know, getting sick or something, right? But my perception is I saw you in this state. I came back and you're still in this state, therefore, you've been in that state the whole time. Well, the same thing can happen when you're new in role or just new to a team. They see you as this new person, fresh out of college, fresh into the company, and and they have no idea what happened between the time that you were interviewed and the time that you landed the role. They have no idea what happened from the time that you graduated to the time that you sat there in front of them. So in this situation, I'm going to encourage you to lead with questions. Uh, you know, whenever I'm new in role, I like to play the new guy card. And I actually say that exact phrase, like, hey, I'm gonna play the new guy card here. I'm gonna ask you some things that maybe seem rudimentary, but I'm seeking to understand. I'm not challenging what you're doing uh or the way that you're doing it. I'm just trying to better wrap my head around it so that I understand the whys to the what's that got us to the where, right? That how did you get to this state? How did you come to this solution? And if I don't, if I don't seek to understand, if I come in believing that I already know, right, turn that exact same scenario the uh the other way around, right? They don't know where you've come from. Dude, you don't know where they came from either. So this is where you need to just pump the brakes, step back, and come in from a place of I'm seeking to understand, I'm not seeking to challenge. Okay. So the second pattern is the person that shrinks back. So they've been conditioned, sometimes it's by their environment, sometimes it's by best past experiences. They've been conditioned to question everything they think and feel before they say it out loud. So they hold back, they wait to be called on, they qualify every statement with something like, well, I might be wrong, but, or, you know, forgive my ignorance, it's okay to use those kind of statements every once in a while, especially to build a rapport with a team. But especially if I've been there a while, right? My perception of you, if I'm if I'm in that role and you're Joe or Jane New Guy, new gal coming in asking these questions, and every time you say, Well, I might be wrong, or correct me if I'm wrong, right? I hear that one a lot. At some point, I'm beginning to wonder, well, you came in here with a piece of paper that said you were smart, right? You had a degree, you had a resume, you had some sort of backing that led me to believe that you are where you should be, but you're constantly questioning everything and tearing yourself down, right? That negative self-speak, uh it perpetuates the problem. So when you say I might be wrong at a subconscious level, you believe that you might be wrong. The reality is you might have come in with way more experience than anybody in the room. It might have nothing to do with that piece of paper. It might have to do with your life, right? With your life experience. But if you constantly plant the seed of I might be wrong, is it a far stretch for me to say that the room might agree with you? Right? That the room already believes that you believe that you're wrong. So why wouldn't they believe you're wrong? Right. You've basically discredited yourself before you even finished the damn sentence. You've already told me that you have zero confidence in yourself. So what motivation do I have to listen to the rest of your idea? Right? Hopefully, you have emotionally intelligent leaders that recognize this pattern and can help you work through it. But is the opposite true as well? Well, yeah. Yeah, it is. And and so when this happens, right, when they lead off, when the new guy leads off with I might be wrong, but they have no idea what the room is reading. Uh this this whole concept of reading that is a lack of preparation, a lack of investment, a lack of capability. So that's just as damaging and just as visible from the inside, or invisible rather, from the inside. So in both cases, the problem isn't the person, the problem is the gap between their internal experience and their external impact. And fixing that in both directions is that that calibration that we're talking about. So let's talk about uh let's lean first into the conf the confidence versus arrogance dilemma. I want to spend a little bit of time on this because I see this a lot. Um, I I think I see this maybe, I guess it's a generational thing, if I'm being honest. The uh the younger generation that I'm seeing fresh out of college today tends to have the opposite, right? They come in and they they're not aware of what they don't know, but they second guess themselves. They play Mother May I, and we've talked about that before. Um, so now let's spend a little bit of time then on that confidence versus arrogance piece. Um, that's typically what I'm going to see in your millennials, a little bit in your Gen X. Um, so it it kind of bounces around, but yeah, it's that's still out there. So confidence and arrogance, they're not opposites. Confidence is an accurate belief in your ability to contribute. Arrogance is simply an inflated one. And again, we're talking about the perception problem here. So if I, as the outsider, if I perceive that you do not have the ability, by definition, I believe that your confidence is an inflated version of the truth. Right. My perception might change, but if you don't step into that situation, that's what I believe to be the truth, right? So arrogance is the inflated version of confidence. And critically, arrogance almost always comes with the devaluation of others. So true arrogance says that, and this is coming from the internal self, right? Arrogance doesn't just think highly of themselves, but in order to do that, they think less of the people around them. But if we're talking about the perception, right? If you come in and you are super confident, but you haven't proven that you earned the right to be that confident, if you haven't shown me that, then I believe that you're arrogant. And because I believe that you're arrogant, now, you know, going back to the beginning segment there, maybe I believe that you don't play well with others because you came off as I've got this, I know it all. And therefore, do I think that you're tearing down the rest of my team? Right. So, and and really how you how you start to separate that, one of the easiest ways, folks, is just how you listen and respond to feedback. It's how you occupy the space in the room. So, the research on self uh self-enhancement bias, the tendency to rate ourselves above average on traits that matter to us, shows that this is essentially a universal human tendency. We all do this to some degree. The question isn't whether you have self-enhancement bias. Trust me, you do. The question is whether you have the emotional intelligence and the external feedback mechanism to calibrate it. Okay. So especially if you're new in role, be aware of this perception. And the easiest way to combat to combat this is to shut up and listen. Right? You should always listen more than you speak. And so if I'm trying to make sure that I don't come off the wrong kind of way, I try to take a lot of notes and ask a lot of questions when they make sense. So, in other words, when and and let's clarify that when I say ask a lot of questions, um, I had a leader, and I think I've mentioned this in a previous podcast. I had a leader that at the beginning of every meeting, he would take some coins out of his pocket. They were usually pennies, but it was just whatever he had. And I started noticing he would keep them over to one side and like over at his right, and as the meeting would go on, he would move one of the coins, just kind of separate it from the rest of the pile. And what he was doing here, he would give himself four opportunities to ask a question. That's it. Only four for a standard 30-minute meeting. Maybe he'd add a couple extra if it was a long, you know, full day session or a full hour meeting, right? But that was how he kept himself in check. Instead of cutting people off to ask his question, he would wait for an opportunity because he knew he only had four in the hopper. Okay. Um, and that also helped him to, you know, and and frankly, this guy had so much experience. If anybody had the right to be a little cocky, a little arrogant, it was this guy. Um, but he managed it so well by through this method, through setting back. And and this does two things, folks. This will not only allow the rest of the room not to see you as arrogant, but indirectly, it actually gives them permission space to speak. So if you're a new leader, especially, this is an easy way to help build the team. Okay. It lets them know I don't know everything and I'm reliant on the people that are closest to the work. It's servant leadership at its finest. All right. So here's what I've observed in practice that the research also supports. The damage from unchecked overconfidence tends to be long-lasting because it compounds. The person who dismisses feedback early in their career doesn't just miss that one piece of information. They build a pattern of not receiving the feedback well, and that pattern becomes a reputation. And that reputation, once it's established, is genuinely hard to undo in an organization. People form impressions quickly and they update them slowly. This is why catching that gap early matters so much. So, next, let's talk about how do I calibrate? How do I recalibrate, I should say? This is a self-audit and an external check. So, how often, uh, so how do you actually close that gap, right? These are tools that I want you to take away with you. And I'm going to give you two different ones, one internal, one external. So, the internal self-audit, after any significant interaction, a meeting, a presentation, a tough conversation, I want you to run through these four questions. The first one, question number one, did I listen as much as I spoke? Not in terms of airtime, but in terms of genuine engagement. Were you actually taking in what others were saying, or were you just waiting for your turn to speak? That's a distinct difference. Next, I want you to ask yourself question number two, how did people respond to me physically, both body language and in the spoken word? And folks, body language doesn't lie the way words do. Um, where people leaning in or pulling back, uh, or sorry, were people leaning in or pulling back? Were they making eye contact or were they looking away? Right? These are real-time data points that most people miss because they're so focused on their own performance, they're not paying attention to the audience. Now, by the way, a lot of us are in a workspace that is digital, that you're not physically in the same room as those with whom you are meeting. This is why turning on your camera is so powerful. I preach this to my work to my work team and my day job all the damn time. If you turn on your camera, it lets me read the room, it lets you read me. Right. So if I've got that look on my face like I don't understand, it gives you the permission space without putting me on the spot, right? It opens the door for you to say, you know what, Luke, you kind of look puzzled. Let me explain that in a different way. Right. So turn on your cameras, folks. But again, um question number two was just how did they respond to you physically? Question number three Did I qualify my contributions accurately? If you have three weeks of experience on a topic, did you speak with three weeks of confidence? Or did you speak as if you had three years? If you have deep expertise, did you share it clearly?

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Or

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Did you hedge into your invisibility? Right? How do you tap dance that line? Question number four. Would I want to be on the other side of that interaction? Folks, this is the hardest question. If someone showed up in a room and did the exact same thing as you, as you just did, how would you experience them? And be honest with yourself here. Okay. Um, that one's a little tough to do, but I really encourage you to lean into that. So then the external check. Research on 360-degree feedback is clear. Self-ratings and observer ratings diverge significantly, especially early in career, which means your self-audit, while it's a useful tool, is not significant on its own. You need a trusted external source. So find a person in your professional life. This can be a mentor, a manager, a peer that is always straight with you, and ask them the specific question. How am I doing? This question gets you a general specific answer. Instead, maybe we can ask, is there something about how I showed up in this context that might come off in a way to which I was unaware? Specificity is the key. The more specific your question, the more useful the answer. And then the critical part, I want you to listen without getting defensive about it. Receive it, absorb it, thank it, go sit with it before you react. Okay. This is something, folks, I think is one of the hardest things to do. Um, but I like to lean into uh, I kind of go after this a couple different ways. So I like to have mentors, and we've talked about that several times in this podcast. Multiple mentors is your it is it should always be your weapon of choice. Um, but your mentors aren't going to be in every room. So on any team that I'm on, there's somebody there that is likely a develops into a friendship. And this might not happen right away, but over time you're gonna develop this. Okay. I have a guy that I work with that he will call me on my bullshit. He will straight up tell me when I am chasing the wrong thing or when I'm coming off like a jerk. He's the one who will ask me, Hey, are you feeling okay? Like you're you're you're stressing out, so it's stressing me out, right? He's the one that'll call me on that. So, first off, I don't just ask the question now and again. I just kind of, you know, we had that heart to heart one time that I said, you know, hey, listen, uh, you know, and I'll give you a real world example. I struggle with some health issues. And sometimes those health issues, when you're dealing with chronic pain, it manifest in ways that you don't always realize. Okay. So I've told them point blank, you know, like, hey, I'm not on my game today. If I come off as snarky, I need you to check me on it. You know, do it politely, respectfully, shoot me an IM like, hey, back down, uh, ease up, things like that. And Manny's kept me in check for a long time. Um, and I hope that you have somebody in your professional career that's like that. Um, but again, if you're going to ask the question, you forfeit the right to be all pissy with the answer. So I want you to ask the question, be specific, absorb it, and pivot. Right. Research on feedback, um uh research on feedback um shoot. Research on feedback receptive, uh, receptivity shows that people who benefit the most from external feedback are those who treat it as data, not as a verdict on your self-worth. So you can disagree with the feedback after you've genuinely genuinely processed it, but you can't grow from the free, but you can't grow from feedback that you've completely dismissed before you've sat with it. All right, so we're almost done here, folks. This is a little bit of a longer one, but content is is valuable here. So I think it's worth it. So I want to close the content on today's episode with reframing what I think is important. The goal of closing the perception gap is not to just it's not to make you more humble. It's to make you more accurate. Accurate about your strengths so that you can deploy them deliberately, accurate about your gaps so you can address them intentionally, accurate about your impact so you can show up in a room with full confidence that the person in the room is experiencing something that matches what you intended to showcase. That alignment between your internal experience and the external impact is one of the most powerful things that a leader can develop. What makes it what makes people trust you? It's what makes feedback conversations productive instead of defensive. And it's what makes growth possible because you can't fix what you didn't what you can't see. So if you're listening to this podcast, um it and if you've been listening to this podcast for a few episodes, you've already been building towards this. We've talked about initiative without waiting for permission. We've talked about setting boundaries that are new respect. All of this is only effective as your ability to read how that's being received. The swag gets you moving. The perception gap keeps uh works to keep you calibrated while you're moving. All right, so again, the perception gap, folks, isn't a caliph isn't a character flaw. It's a calibration problem. And the calibration is something you can work on. So I want you to run that self-audit, ask those specific questions, receive answers without defending, and remember that the goal is not to shrink or to perform. The goal is to be exactly who you intended and landing exactly the way you intended to land. Because in the end, leadership isn't just about what you bring to the room, it's about what the room experiences when you do. All right, folks. Thanks for being here. If this one resonated, I want you to share it with somebody that needs to hear it on either end of the spectrum. And until next time, we'll talk soon. Bye bye.