There have been stretches, a couple of weeks at a time, where things have gone fine. Decent progress, no dramas, a sense that I'm finding my feet in this first C-suite role. Then someone says something, a colleague makes a small comment, a peer gives off some signal in a meeting that I read as a verdict, and within the day I'm telling my wife and friends I've made a catastrophic mistake taking this job. That I should never have left where I was. That I need an exit strategy, right now, even with nothing lined up to go to.
I've called myself fragile for this. Hyper. Manic. Pathetic, really. Why do I fluctuate this much, when surely other people at this level don't?
I don't think the swinging is a character problem. I think it's what happens when you're trying to work out, in real time, whether you're doing okay, and you don't yet have anything steady to measure that against.
In my last job I had years of reference points. I knew what a bad meeting looked like because I'd seen plenty of them and survived. I knew which comments meant something and which were just noise, because I'd heard the same comments before and watched what happened next. None of that exists yet in this role. Every signal, a raised eyebrow, a quiet response to something I've said, a meeting that didn't go the way I expected, gets treated as proof of something, because it's the only data I've got. There's nothing built up yet to weigh it against. So a small thing lands with the full weight of a verdict, because right now it's the only verdict available.
That's not the same as being unstable. It's closer to trying to read a gauge that hasn't been set yet. The needle moves, and because I don't know where normal sits, I assume whatever it says must be true.
I'd assumed other people at this level don't go through this. That composure is just what seniority looks like once you've arrived at it, that the people across the table from me are steady because they've settled into something I haven't. I don't actually know that. What I know is what they show me, which is a calm exterior in meetings. I don't know what any of them tell their own partners at the end of the day. The performance of being settled and the experience of being settled aren't the same thing, and I've been comparing my experience to their performance, which was never a fair comparison to make.
This connects to something I keep coming back to on here: the people who do fine in these roles over time usually aren't the ones broadcasting confidence the loudest. They're the ones who keep showing up, keep doing the work, and don't let every signal become a referendum on whether they should quit. Maybe that's closer to what's actually required here than the calm I thought I was supposed to already have. Not performed steadiness. Just staying at the desk through the bad day and finding out the next one is ordinary again.
That reframe helps a bit, but it doesn't make the panic button feel further away. When the comment comes, when the signal lands, it still wants to send me straight to the exit, and I still half believe it. Knowing that the instruments aren't calibrated yet doesn't calibrate them. It just gives me something to say to myself in the gap between the comment and the panic, which some days is enough to stop me acting on it and some days isn't.
I don't think this resolves into "I've worked it out now." I'd be lying if I said the fragile feeling has gone. What's changed is that I no longer take it as proof I'm not cut out for the role. It might just be proof that the role is new, and that new things don't come with a baseline attached. You build the baseline by staying through enough ordinary weeks that the bad day stops feeling like the whole verdict. I'm not there yet. I'm still catching myself halfway through drafting an exit from a job I haven't even properly started, on the strength of one comment in one meeting.
Maybe that's just what the first year of a role like this is. Not proof I've broken under it, but proof I haven't done it before.