Case Study 1: Jordan — The Caveat Problem

Background

Jordan has noticed the pattern in Marcus — the rush to caveat, the deflection of positive feedback, the inability to simply receive a compliment about his work. He recognized it because it is his own pattern, years ago. He thought he had moved past it. He is not entirely sure he has.

When Priya's analysis of their Q3 campaign was praised by the VP of Marketing in an all-hands meeting, Jordan watched himself take a small, careful step back from the success. He noted, silently, that the campaign had benefited from a favorable competitive landscape that had nothing to do with their work. He noted that Priya had been the real driver. He noted that the timing had been fortunate.

By the time he had finished noting everything the success was not because of, there was nothing left.

Dev, who heard his account of the meeting over dinner, looked at him for a moment. "You spent two months on that campaign."

"We did. But the conditions—"

"Jordan." Dev said his name in a way that meant: you are doing the thing again.

Jordan stopped.

The Self-Efficacy Map

Jordan, having read about the four sources of self-efficacy, tried something. He mapped his self-efficacy profile across several domains.

The results were clarifying and somewhat uncomfortable:

High self-efficacy: - Analysis and strategic thinking (built over years of mastery experiences) - Written communication (long history of success; well-calibrated) - Managing direct reports on clear tasks

Moderate self-efficacy: - Influencing upward — affecting decisions made by people who have authority over him (some successes but more uncertainty than he would like) - Public-facing presentations to external clients (works well but high arousal, some catastrophizing)

Low self-efficacy: - The business development proposal (still sitting unfinished; eight months) - Creative ideation — generating genuinely new concepts rather than refining existing ones - Navigating ambiguity about his own career direction

The pattern he noticed: his self-efficacy was highest in domains where he had accumulated clear, repeated mastery experiences, and lowest in domains that were newer, less structured, or where the feedback was harder to read.

The proposal was a particularly interesting case. He had written proposals before. He had succeeded at complex, multi-part projects before. By objective assessment, he should have adequate self-efficacy for the proposal. But this one was different — it was his idea, his risk, his name on it in a different way than anything else he had done. The absence of external validation for the specific venture had left the self-efficacy for it thin.

He had been waiting, he realized, for someone to tell him he could do it.

The Impostor Architecture

Jordan has impostor experiences, though he has not always named them that way.

The pattern, mapped: when he succeeds in ways that feel legitimately his — clear analysis, well-executed strategy, direct contribution he can trace — he can receive that success. When success feels partly beyond his deserving — the favorable competitive landscape, the client who was in a good mood, the timing that happened to work — he externalizes it.

The effect: a large proportion of his successes don't count. They are filed under "luck" or "circumstance" or "it would have worked for anyone," and they do not build the reservoir of genuine self-efficacy that successful performance is supposed to build.

Dr. Reyes's point, from the chapter, surfaced here: he was attributing success to external factors and failure to fixed inability — not, he thought, as dramatically as the full impostor profile, but enough to systematically deplete the self-efficacy bank.

He thought about the campaign. It was true that the competitive landscape was favorable. It was also true that he had correctly identified the opportunity, built the strategy around it, and executed well. Both things were true. He had been keeping one and discarding the other.

The Dev Conversation

Over the following week, Jordan decided to try something Dev had suggested months ago: just let a compliment land. No caveat, no deflection, no immediate redistribution of credit. Just: thank you, and let the recognition sit there.

It was harder than he expected.

After a meeting where his VP said "your team has been doing exceptional work this quarter," Jordan said "thank you" and stopped. His internal response was a series of footnotes about everything the team had done, everyone who deserved more credit, the favorable conditions. He did not say any of them out loud.

When he told Dev about this, Dev said: "How did it feel?"

Jordan thought. "Like holding something that I kept expecting to drop."

"But you didn't drop it."

"No."

"That's what it feels like at first," Dev said. "You get used to it. The holding."

The Self-Compassion Gap

There is a related pattern Jordan has been examining. He is harder on himself than he would be on anyone else he managed or cared about.

When a junior team member makes an error, Jordan's first instinct is to understand the conditions that produced the error and work on correction. His coaching is generally not punitive. He does not define his team members by their failures.

When he makes an error — even a small one — his internal response is more judicial than clinical. The assessment is sharp and focused on character implications: What does it say about me that I missed this? What does this mean for whether I can actually do what I'm trying to do?

Neff's good-friend test, applied: if Marcus came to Jordan with the same error Jordan had just made in his own work, Jordan would say: This happened. Here's what I think went wrong. Here's what to do differently. You're still capable of this work.

He would not say: What does this say about whether you deserve to be here?

The observation sits with him.

The Analysis

Jordan's self-efficacy is domain-specific and historically grounded

The unevenness of Jordan's self-efficacy profile is not irrational — it accurately reflects his history of mastery experiences. Where he has accumulated genuine competence through repeated performance, his self-efficacy is calibrated. Where he is in newer territory (the proposal, creative ideation, navigating ambiguity), the self-efficacy has not yet been built through experience.

The problem is not that his self-efficacy is inaccurate in those domains. It is that he is waiting for external validation to begin building it, when the only thing that actually builds it is attempting the task.

The attribution problem

The impostor pattern is doing real damage to his self-efficacy development. By externalizing successes and not allowing them to function as mastery experiences — by treating them as flukes rather than evidence — he is systematically preventing the accumulation of the self-efficacy he needs for the next challenge.

The most consequential thing Jordan could do for his self-efficacy in the proposal domain is: start the proposal, attempt it, and allow the experience of working on it to generate the self-efficacy that waiting will never build.

The self-compassion observation

The gap between how Jordan treats his team members and how he treats himself is not a small thing. It represents a two-tier system of evaluation in which he is held to a standard that no one else is — one where errors are character evidence rather than learning information.

This will be directly relevant to Chapter 12 (Stress and Resilience) and Chapter 13 (Self-Regulation). The internal punitive stance is a stress amplifier and a motivation suppressant.

Discussion Questions

1. Jordan's self-efficacy is high in domains with accumulated mastery experiences and low in new domains. Is this rational? What would it take for him to develop self-efficacy in new domains without first having the mastery experiences?

2. The "letting the compliment land" exercise is behaviorally simple but experientially difficult. What psychological mechanism makes it difficult? What is the person protecting against?

3. Jordan externalizes successes systematically. What would change in his behavior if he stopped — if he allowed each success to function as genuine evidence of capability?

4. The gap between Jordan's treatment of his team members' errors and his treatment of his own is described as a "two-tier system." Why is self-compassion harder than compassion for others? What would close the gap?

Application Exercise

Map your own self-efficacy profile across five domains that matter to you. For each domain: 1. Rate your self-efficacy (1–5) 2. Identify the mastery experiences (or their absence) that produced the rating 3. Note whether you are externalizing successes in any domain that keeps your self-efficacy artificially low

Write a 150-word reflection on one domain where your self-efficacy could be built through a specific mastery sequence, and what the first step would be.