The difference between what you can do and how you’re doing

Ability is what you’re capable of. Performance is what came out under a particular set of conditions, and those conditions include everything you were carrying that week and everyone who was in the room with you. Most people who decide they aren’t good enough are describing a stretch of poor performance and mistaking it for a fixed limit. Change the conditions and the output usually changes with them.

If any of what follows lands close to home, the numbers are at the foot of this post. Lifeline is on 13 11 14, any hour of any day.

The first was that we were the two percent. Only two percent of the population had what it took to do this job, apparently, and whatever that was, we had it. It’s a seductive thing to hear when you’ve just walked in the door.

The second was that if we failed any assessment twice, we were finished.

Nobody in that room seemed to notice those two statements sitting next to each other, and it took me the better part of a year to work out what they do to you when you hold both at once. We were rare and irreplaceable. We were also one bad afternoon away from being nothing at all.

Twelve theory exams in twelve weeks, then the simulator, where the learning curve was parabolic and almost no consolidation time was built in. Someone had written on one of the whiteboards: the beatings will continue until morale improves. It was a joke. It was also an accurate description of the training model.

I failed and re-sat two of the three major simulator assessments.

On the first radar tower assessment I made a critical error five minutes into the hour, knew immediately I was finished, and then sat there and worked the remaining fifty-five minutes with the outcome already decided.

I scraped through that course. I use the word deliberately. I did enough to pass and not a great deal more.

Read my file at the end of that first year and you’d have concluded something fairly obvious about me: marginal, struggles under pressure, probably shouldn’t be here in the first place.

The rest of the record reads differently. Across the fifteen years that followed I met or beat every training milestone I was given, and I never once took a training extension. I became an on-the-job training instructor, a workplace assessor, a subject matter expert and a check and standardisation controller. More than forty controllers passed their final field check under my training. In sixteen years working live traffic I never had a breakdown of separation.

Same man. Same brain. Same ability.

Two things, and only one of them is comfortable.

The first was the environment.

My first posting was Cairns Tower. I arrived in June 2007 and held a licence a month later, the first of my course to get one. Nothing about my capability changed in those four weeks. What changed was that I’d walked into a building where everybody had an interest in my success.

That sounds soft. It’s structural. A training course exists to work out whether you should be there, a workplace exists to get you operational, and those are different jobs with different incentives. In the first one your struggle is evidence against you. In the second one your struggle is information about where the gap is, and closing gaps is somebody’s actual job.

I could ask questions in Cairns, and I could talk to controllers two steps ahead of me who’d light the way, and when I got something wrong the response was help rather than a note in a file.

My performance changed. Not my ability. My performance.

They’re not the same thing, and I’d spent a year confusing them.

There was a second half to that year the training system had no mechanism for seeing. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship at the time, carrying something at home that was doing to me roughly what the course was doing to me at work. In the February, one of our coursemates was killed riding home from a shift. He was months short of twenty-one.

None of that appeared anywhere in an assessment report, not one line of it, because the reports were built to measure output and the people writing them drew their conclusions from what they could see.

So did I.

The environment isn’t the whole answer.

Years later, at my final assessment on Melbourne approach, everything arrived at once. A property was being sold as part of my divorce settlement that week. My check had been brought forward a fortnight. And an hour into day one a squall line moved through the terminal area and took every procedure we rely on with it, which left a thousand feet, three miles, and a great many aeroplanes.

At the final break the assessor told me he knew I could do the job and knew I’d rate. I finished the sentence for him. But not today.

Nobody was coming to fix any of that for me, so I made my case.

I told him I understood the risk he carried in endorsing me. I told him some of what had been going on that week, and I admitted I should have said something sooner. Then I asked him whether there was anything specific he could fail me for.

There wasn’t. So I asked for one more hour, and said I’d wear whatever he decided at the end of it.

He gave me the hour. He endorsed me.

Both halves of that are true at once, which is the only reason the story is worth telling. The environment was against me, and it was still on me to speak, and nobody could have worked that hour for me. I very nearly didn’t ask, because asking meant saying out loud that I was struggling, and I’d spent thirteen years in an industry where admitting that could cost you your licence.

I should have said something sooner. I’ve never stopped thinking that.

You’re probably not an air traffic controller. The pattern travels anyway.

Somewhere in your life there’s a period you’ve turned into a verdict. A job you lost. A stretch where you couldn’t perform and never worked out why. A review, a redundancy, a relationship that ended with you looking like the problem. You’ve filed it quietly as evidence about who you are.

It might only be evidence about where you were.

That’s not an excuse and it isn’t a way out of responsibility. It’s a more accurate reading of the data. The question isn’t am I good enough. The question is what you were carrying, who was in the room, and what you needed that nobody gave you.

The trainee who scraped through and the controller who never took an extension are the same person. The difference was never him.

It isn’t you, either.

• Separate the two words before you use either. Ability is capability, performance is output under conditions. When you catch yourself saying “I’m not good enough”, work out which one you’re actually describing, because it’s almost always the second one wearing the first one’s clothes.
• Write down what else was happening. Take the period you’ve turned into a verdict and list what you were carrying at the time that never appeared in anyone’s assessment of you. Most people are surprised by how long that list gets.
• Audit the room, not just yourself. Are you somewhere your struggle is treated as information, or somewhere it’s treated as evidence against you? That’s a real question with a real answer, and the answer changes what you do next.
• Ask for the specific thing. I didn’t ask for sympathy at that final check, I asked whether there was anything he could actually fail me for. Specific requests are far harder to refuse than general ones, and they give the other person something to work with.
• Say it sooner than I did. It doesn’t have to be a counsellor, it can be anyone you trust. The longer you carry it on your own, the longer everyone around you assesses your output with no idea what it cost you to produce it.

This week: name one person you’d tell if you were struggling, and tell them one true thing about how the last month has actually gone. Simple, not easy.

Ability is your underlying capability, which is relatively stable. Performance is what you produced on a given day under a given set of conditions, including workload, support, sleep, and whatever you were carrying outside work. Confusing the two is how a difficult period turns into a permanent verdict about who you are.

Not on its own. Before drawing that conclusion, look at what the conditions were and whether they’ve changed, because the same person can perform very differently in two workplaces with different cultures. If the pattern holds across several quite different environments, that’s more useful information than a single bad stretch.

In a lot of industries, and safety-critical ones especially, disclosure carries a real cost. It can affect your standing, your progression, and in some cases your licence to work. That’s a rational calculation rather than a character flaw, which is why the fix usually has to involve the workplace and not only the individual.

There’s no single right answer, and it depends on what your workplace does with the information. Some people find it easier to start with someone who has nothing to gain or lose from the answer, which might be a friend, a partner, or a counsellor. What matters is that it gets said to somebody, sooner rather than later.

Yes. A great deal of counselling is with people who are functioning, working, and finding a particular period harder than usual. Understanding what counselling actually involves can make the decision easier if you’ve never done it before.

Usually it’s both, in some proportion, and separating them is much of the work. A useful starting point is to ask what would have to change about the room for you to perform the way you know you can, then ask what would still be on you if all of that changed tomorrow.

If any of this sounds like the period you’re in now, a free fifteen minute introductory call is a low-cost way to find out whether counselling would help. No cost, no pressure, no obligation, and no need to have it worked out before you call. Have a look at how I work, or read what happens in a first session if that’s the part that’s putting you off.

• What is counselling?
• What to expect in your first counselling session
• Do I need a counsellor or a psychologist?
• Is counselling worth it?
• How to find the right counsellor for you
• My approach to counselling