#123: What do you have to brag about?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your willingness to say nice things about yourself? How about your willingness to point out your own failures and shortcomings? If the first number you came up with is higher than the second, then move along, my friend - this episode can do nothing for you. Gather round, the rest of you. You've been taught all your life that modesty and humility are virtues. But, would you know if your self-deprecation had gone too far? Could your toxic humility be holding you back? And if it is, so what? Better that than being arrogant, right?!

Oh dear, friend. What a mess. But don't worry. Your Imperfectionist friend is here to show how you can do some healthy cheerleading for yourself without turning into a boasty monster. Settle down for the final episode of 2025, and prepare to end it with a smile on your face!

Contact The Academic Imperfectionist here, or via Bluesky, Facebook, or Medium.

Read Emma Beddington's article about toxic humility here.

Transcript

What do you have to brag about?

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

Welcome, imperfectionists, to the final episode of 2025! Interesting that it’s mid-December already. I’ve been on research leave all year - yeah, go on, hate me - so naturally the year has sped by in a flash, and also naturally, I know that January, when I return to teaching and commuting, is going to last for about 8 months. Even longer, probably. In fact, I’m sure most Januaries I’ve experienced have lasted longer than either of my pregnancies, except of course for January this year when, as I said, I was on leave. So, what do I want to leave you with in this final episode of the year? I’ve been pondering my list of ideas for podcast episodes - which, in case you’ve ever wondered, is always fairly hefty, and even on episode a hundred-and-twenty-whatever-this-is, I’m not in any danger of running out of ideas. I’m fantastic at ideas. I sound like Donald Trump here, but seriously, I will die with a list of unmade podcast episodes, along with a hard drive full of unfinished (and, in some cases, unstarted) writing projects, and several cupboards full of unfinished knitting projects. Sometimes, when I’ve been scrolling through some of the online knitting communities I belong to - usually, of course, when I’m supposed to be doing something else - I’m amazed to see that there are some people who have a ‘craft room’ in their homes. And some people also have a ‘yoga room’. My mind boggles at what it must be like to live with so much space. My knitting things are stuffed into endless plastic bags which get piled up around a sofa that I grumble about if anyone else sits on, until it’s time to clean, when it all gets shoved into a cupboard. And whenever I do yoga, which I do a lot, I’m lucky if I can unroll my mat without ending up with a cat underneath it, or a cat toy, or a less appealing cat-related item. I’ve talked before about my envy for Americans and their basements, haven’t I, and that time I consoled myself with the fact that you Americans don’t have kettles, so it all evens out. I’m not sure the kettles are enough to make up for the seemingly endless proliferation of hobby-related rooms too, though. Are there people listening to this from a dedicated podcast-listening room in their giant homes? Don’t answer that, because I might experience unsurvivable levels of envy as a result, and I don’t even have an envy room in my home to do it in. 

Right then - I suppose we should get to this episode’s topic, shouldn’t we? As I said, before I got distracted, I was looking over my list of episode ideas and wondering what to focus on. Happily, Past Rebecca had been kind enough to earmark a topic for exactly this moment. Something a little bit uplifting for the impending holiday season. I mean, I hope all my episodes are at least somewhat uplifting in at least some way, but this topic is uplifting in a quick and easy way, a way that will help put a smile on your face without any angsty soul-searching or confronting of demons. It’s inspired by an article I read in The Guardian last month by Emma Beddington, on the topic of what she calls toxic humility. I probably don’t even need to tell you what she means by that term - like me, you might not only understand it instinctively, but also realise that you have it in spades. So, humour me for a moment while I explain that toxic humility is a reluctance to say anything positive about yourself, alongside a readiness to be self-deprecating. I realise, as I get onto this, that I gave you an excellent example when I was rambling at the start of this episode. I told you that I’m great at coming up with ideas for podcasts, and then - lest, I suppose, you should find me intolerably full of myself - I compared myself to Donald Trump and reassured you that anything impressive about my bountiful ideas is undermined by my difficulty finishing things and my proprietorial attitude towards my sofa. I honestly didn’t engineer that example to illustrate my point - unless subconsciously, who knows? - I was just pleased to see you, as a completely unrelated saying goes. But whatever - you see what I mean. You do this toxic humility thing too. I know you do. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever coached, and plenty of people who’ve emailed me about the podcast too, are far more eager to tell me negative things about themselves than positive things. Anything positive that might slip out - and occasionally that’s unavoidable, because inconveniently for you and your toxic humility, you, gentle listener, are dazzlingly smart and impressive - anything positive immediately gets buried in an avalanche of negativity. Things that you’d never say about anyone else. 

Ok, so we’re all agreed that we are raging examples of toxic humility, then. Why do we do it? I mean, why do we have such a problem with saying nice things about ourselves, especially when we’re so often more than happy to say nice things about other people? Beddington mentions a few possible answers in her article. One is the way we’re conditioned to be modest and humble. These are positive terms, aren’t they? To describe someone as modest or humble is, usually, to say something complimentary about them. I don’t know if that’s universal across all cultures, but it’s certainly true in many of them. But I don’t think it’s as simple as finding being too pleased with ourselves unbecoming. We’re also a bit superstitious about it. We worry that being too full of ourselves will sabotage our success. There’s that familiar saying, that pride comes before a fall, which has its roots - or one of its roots, at least - in the Bible. The book of proverbs warns us that ‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall’. There’s the warning from Greek mythology too: Icarus was so pleased with himself when he learned to fly that he got carried away and flew too close to the sun, only to come crashing down to earth like the big smug hubristic oaf he was. That’ll learn him. Plenty of us are inspired by narratives like this to keep a lid on our self-congratulation when we enjoy some success - but, like many patterns of thought that stand in the way of our happiness, it’s pretty nonsensical when we take a close look at it. I mean, does anyone seriously believe that acknowledging our own positive qualities will literally cause something bad to happen to us? I hope not. But even so. We still end up treating our successes as fragile, liable to collapse into nothing, just like Icarus’s wings,  if we try to make too much of them.

There’s something else lurking in the shadows here, and it’s our old friend, binary thinking. We’re either modest to the point of self-abuse, or we’re arrogant braggarts who deserve an embarrassing crash and burn. There’s no room in that binary framework for an appropriate, measured, grounded-in-evidence appraisal of our positive qualities. But, of course, as I’m sure you know if you force yourself to think about it - that’s the reality. You don’t really think of yourself as a despicable lump of unmitigated awfulness, despite the way you talk to yourself. Even the people who come to me for coaching to help them manage their out-of-control inner critic don’t think this - they’re asking for help precisely because they recognise, at some level, that there’s a problem here, and very often what they want help with is getting their head around the binary I’ve just described. They want help steering a course between being so modest that they’re missing out on opportunities, and being so arrogant that they’d find it intolerable to keep company with themselves. There’s a disconnect here between what the head knows and what the heart feels, between rationality and emotion, between fact and value. You know you’re not really as worthless as you sometimes tell yourself (and other people) you are, and I bet you also accept that it’s not a binary question of being either grovellingly self-effacing or embarrassingly arrogant. But, emotionally, it can be hard to inhabit that middle ground. The cold, hard fact that you’ve achieved plenty of impressive things is one thing; the ability to feel appropriately-but-not-too pleased with yourself about it is quite another. Living in the space between those two binary extremes is really difficult. So we err on the side of undervaluing ourselves, which creates its own problem because, like everyone else, we really do need positivity and encouragement sometimes.

So, how do we solve this problem? Well, most of us have found a way to solve it, as it happens, and this is something else that Emma Beddington wrote about. We stick with our self-deprecating way of talking about ourselves, but we do it in the hope that we might provoke someone into contradicting us. That way, we get the best of both worlds. Our way of talking about ourselves remains firmly anchored in the ‘I’m not worthy’ camp, but we end up getting from others the compliments and positivity that we’re too uncomfortable to take for ourselves. Perfect! What a great solution, right?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because what a great way to capitalise on the fact that so many of us are much more comfortable complimenting other people than ourselves: we compliment each other! I’m all for supporting each other to find our way through our emotional struggles, and I’m all for normalising letting other people know when they’re being too hard on themselves, or when they deserve a compliment, especially one that relates to an area they’re not very confident about. However, I think this sort of mutual compliment-giving and modesty-contradicting practice gets misused. What we ought to be doing, in my shamelessly unhumble opinion, is learning from other people’s compliments to calibrate our own sense of ourselves - learning, in other words, that we do warrant positive feedback, and working towards being more comfortable with giving that positive feedback to ourselves. When other people compliment us, and when those compliments are sincere and grounded in our actual achievements and qualities, we could take that as a model for what a genuine, grounded compliment looks like, so that we can learn to compliment ourselves in a way that doesn’t veer off towards raving arrogance. But we don’t do this. Instead, we allow ourselves to become dependent on other people’s compliments. We steadfastly refuse to learn to be nicer to ourselves, and we continue to outsource positive feedback about ourselves to other people. If we do something that deserves compliments or praise, we’d better hope that someone else is going to notice and give it to us, otherwise it’s going to go unrecognised. 

Why is this a problem? One problem is that it makes us needy in a very unhelpful way. We do something good, we wait to be complimented, and if we don’t get the positive feedback we hope for - and there’s some cognitive dissonance with all this waiting and hoping, of course, because acknowledging that we want a compliment would itself make us arrogant, in our own minds - if we don’t get positive feedback from others, we view the lack of compliments as itself negative. We’re so dependent on other people’s validation that we end up really struggling with the concept of ‘doing something impressive that goes unnoticed by other people’. Unless someone notices your good thing and tells you how good they think it is, it’s not a good thing. Bad luck. 

Another problem here is that other people - even if they’re well-intentioned, generous, and happy to lift others up - are busy with their own lives, and they just don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to stand around watching out for your achievements so they can jump up and shout about it. We tend to overestimate how much attention other people pay us, a phenomenon that psychologists have called the ‘spotlight effect’. There’s a very positive side to this - it means that when you fall over in public, or when you fumble that presentation, or when you inadvertently go about your day with your trousers undone or custard dribbled down your front or unmatching shoes on your feet, while you might feel that the whole world is watching and laughing at you, other people probably barely noticed at all, or if they did notice, they probably won’t remember it, or if they do remember it, they will soon forget it was you. But just as falling over in public isn’t exactly aspirational even if nobody else notices, your achievements are still achievements even if nobody else compliments you on them. We make trouble for ourselves when we allow ourselves to operate on the assumption that our every move is being watched and evaluated by other people, and that if they’re not complimenting us, it’s because we’re not doing anything worth complimenting. Usually, if people aren’t complimenting you, it’s because they’re focused on their own stuff.

As well as outsourcing positive evaluation to other people, there’s another way we try to work around that self-effacing-or-arrogant binary. We say things about ourselves that take the form: ‘I’m good but …’ I’m smart but I just got dumped. I’ve won a Nobel Prize but I don’t know how to work a washing machine. I just beat 300 other applicants to get this job but only after my last 800 job applications got nowhere and anyway I missed the train home after the interview. We’re trying to balance an imaginary set of scales when we do this. We’re lifting ourselves up and knocking ourselves down at the same time, lest we end up flying too high and melting our wings. If we’re going to give with one hand, we’re going to make sure we take away with the other. We’re working, when we do this, to keep ourselves in the same place - to make sure we don’t get ahead. And then, of course, we end up feeling frustrated and disillusioned because it seems that no matter how hard we try, we don’t make the progress we want to make. 

In case you haven’t guessed, this, too, is an unhelpful way of navigating that binary. Instead of reassuring ourselves (and other people) that any time we take a step forward, we immediately take a step back, with the result that we stay put, which is what we deserve, let’s work on questioning that assumption that we deserve to stay in one place. Try on the idea that sometimes people - you included - deserve to take a step forward. Sometimes, the equilibrium of the universe (such as there is one) is best served by allowing people to take a step forward when they’ve earned it. An unmitigated step forward, one that’s not matched by a step back. And it’s safe to do this. Nothing bad is going to happen as a result. Nobody is coming to slap you down. You’re not Icarus ignoring his father’s advice and flying too high. You’re an alternative version of Icarus who takes on board his father’s wisdom and flies at an appropriate altitude before returning to earth safely and allowing himself to acknowledge a successful flight without adding any ‘buts’. 

Now, I promised you that this topic would provide you with a quick and easy way to lift your spirits. So, how do you do that? I’m going to endorse the advice that Beddington gives at the end of her article, which is to practise saying positive things about ourselves. She cites a recent study in the American Psychologist showing that self-affirmations improve our well-being, in case you need any further convincing. She ends her article with a compliment about herself: apparently she is pretty good at meeting deadlines. Emma, if you’re listening, this truly is a superpower, and I hope you’re going to be enjoying your holiday period content and relaxed in the knowledge that all loose ends are tied up, as you deserve. 

If you want to follow Emma’s lead by experimenting with saying nice things about yourself, I have a couple of suggestions for you. One is to share this episode with a friend and ask them if they’d like to partner up with you and do the exercise described near the end of the episode. If you’re listening and wondering, ‘What exercise?’, it’s this: have a chat with a friend (in person, by text, over the phone, whatever) and tell them something you admire about yourself. Make it something you really do view as a positive quality, mind - something that you’d be happy to be complimented on by someone else, but which makes you a bit uncomfortable to blow your own trumpet about. Swap self-compliments, and be on guard for any ‘buts’. No attempting to balance those non-existent and meaningless scales. You can stop at the self-compliments, if you like. Doing that alone is valuable. But if you like, you can also discuss how it makes you feel to talk about yourselves like this. Is it uncomfortable? Freeing? Does it feel dangerous - those superstitions about pride coming before a fall and flying too close to the sun? Does it make you feel arrogant, and if it does, do you really think, on reflection, that you’re arrogant? If you do all this, I hope you learn something about yourself, and that maybe it helps you see that it might be possible to be positive about yourself without turning into a monster.

And/or another thing you can do is write to me with your compliment about yourself. I might read some of them at the start of the next episode, appropriately anonymised - so, if you don’t want me to do that, make sure to tell me. You can contact me via the form on my website - there’s a link in the episode notes - or on Bluesky (where I’m Academic Imp), or on Facebook or Medium (where I’m Academic Imperfectionist). 

Here’s my own compliment about myself, to tie things up. I’ll admit that I had to think hard to come up with something, and that I was besieged by thoughts along the lines of ‘I can’t say that, I’ll sound like I’m bragging’ and ‘I can’t say that, people will dislike me’ - so, no, it’s not just you. But here goes: I’ve actually done pretty much everything I was supposed to do during my research leave this year, and the stuff I’ve written is actually pretty good. 

Ok. That’s it from me for 2025. Thanks for listening this year, my friends, and I hope you’ll be back for more in 2026. Take care!

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at www.patreon.com/AcademicImperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - www.academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!