The First Person You Should Hire Is Yourself

Early in her career, fresh out of graduate school, Susan Schmitt Winchester worked for a boss who kept a small statue on her desk. One side showed Glinda the Good Witch. The other showed the Wicked Witch of the West. Each day the boss turned the statue to match her mood, and everyone who walked into her office learned to read it before a word was spoken. Schmitt Winchester tells the story with some humor now, but it captures something many capable professionals recognize immediately: the habit of letting someone else’s mood decide how we feel about ourselves. For years, that habit ran her career, and she believes it quietly runs the careers of a great many people who look perfectly successful from the outside.

Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. Over a career of more than 36 years, she served as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, for a combined sixteen and a half years. Her work sits at the meeting point of workplace performance and emotional healing, and its central idea is disarmingly simple. The first person you should hire is yourself, because the approval that finally settles the question of whether you are good enough was always yours to give.

Two Career Paths, and Almost Nobody Chooses Between Them

Schmitt Winchester describes two very different ways to experience a career. The first is what she calls the unconscious wounded career path, and it is the default. She spent 30 of her 36 years on it. The second is the conscious healing career path, and it is not a destination you reach once. It is a decision you make and then keep remembering to make.

The unconscious path has recognizable features. Stress, anxiety, and worry become the everyday condition. You stay on alert for what the people around you think. Feedback feels like an indictment rather than information. If the boss is in a bad mood, you assume you have done something wrong. You take responsibility for things that have nothing to do with you, and you let other people decide your worth. Schmitt Winchester adds one pattern she saw constantly in corporate life: people changing companies to escape a difficult personality, only to meet the same kind of person at the next job.

The conscious path looks different, though not perfect. Schmitt Winchester is clear that people on this path still get upset, because they are human. The difference is that they have fewer triggered moments, recover from them much faster, and spend far less time beating themselves up afterward. The inner critic gives way to what she calls an inner coach. Boundaries get easier to set and to keep, both with others and with yourself, and decisions start coming from a place of growth rather than fear. At the center of all of it, she says, is self-acceptance, and everything else is downstream from that.

The practical starting point is noticing which path you are on today. When you catch yourself replaying a meeting or assuming someone’s silence means you are in trouble, that is the default path at work, and it is also the moment the other choice becomes available.

What the Wicked Witch Taught Her About Giving Away Power

The statue story has a second act, and it is the reason Schmitt Winchester still tells it. One day her boss called her into the office with the Wicked Witch facing her. The boss explained that Schmitt Winchester’s team had won the President’s Award of Excellence, and then told her she would not be receiving the award herself, even though she had led the team through the project. When Schmitt Winchester asked why, she was waved off.

Confused, she went to her boss’s manager the next day to ask whether she had done something wrong. He had not even known that the team had won. Soon afterward, her boss called her back in, the Wicked Witch now teetering on the edge of the desk, and flew into a rage. Schmitt Winchester remembers sitting in a wooden chair with hot tears on her face, thinking that she deserved it and that it was her fault. A month or so later, she resigned. She did eventually receive the cash award, and she still does not know what set her boss off.

What makes the story instructive is how she would handle it today. She says she would let her boss finish, stay calm, and then simply say that she could see how angry her boss was and ask what was going on. In her words, she had been recruited as the villain into someone else’s story without knowing it. The anger belonged to her boss, and she had taken full accountability for it anyway.

To explain the distinction, Schmitt Winchester turns to a daily reading called Property Lines in Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go. Your reactions, decisions, and choices are your property. Another person’s emotions and behavior are theirs. When a boss or colleague erupts, the useful question is whether you are about to take on their property. That single check can be the difference between an afternoon of curiosity and a resignation letter.

Build a Personal Board That Does Not Know It Exists

Hiring yourself, in Schmitt Winchester’s framing, includes making sure you are not facing hard moments alone. One of her most practical tools is what she calls a personal board of directors, or personal board of advisors. She never convened a meeting. Instead, she intentionally asked people she trusted and could learn from whether they would be willing to offer coaching and advice now and then. They did not know they were part of a group.

Her board was deliberately eclectic. One member was a friend grounded in Eastern and Buddhist approaches to caring for oneself, whom she would call to understand the emotions she was feeling. Another was a Canadian colleague, now a friend of more than 30 years, with deep experience handling difficult and complex personalities. He knew her well enough to point out when her need for validation was playing out and to remind her that validating her was not the other person’s job. When she stepped into her first Chief Human Resources Officer role without knowing much about executive compensation, a board member who had worked in that field helped train her.

The value of this kind of board, Schmitt Winchester explains, is perspective from someone who is not emotionally involved in the situation. When you are upset about something at work, a trusted outside voice can see what you cannot.

She pairs the board with a second commitment: investing in your own development. She has worked with an executive coach for most of her career, and one coach told her something she initially laughed off. She was addicted to anxiety. Schmitt Winchester came to see that the adrenaline and cortisol of an anxious state had become exciting to her and had fueled her drive to prove herself. With her coach’s help, she learned practices to calm her nervous system so those chemicals were no longer running the show. As she puts it, if you are going to hire yourself, you cannot keep showing up in a state of depletion.

Joy Is Something You Can Practice

One of the more surprising claims in Schmitt Winchester’s work is that joy is learnable. Many people assume that naturally joyful colleagues are simply wired that way. She disagrees, and her explanation begins with a belief she holds strongly: that to experience joy consistently, you have to begin believing that every moment is designed perfectly for you. She describes this as the difference between her soul’s journey and her ego’s journey, which can get very noisy, and she is careful to say that a person’s faith does not matter for the idea to be useful.

She illustrates it with a meeting where she felt judged for not having a strong enough talent strategy. Her old response was to spend the evening in what she calls a performance review of herself, replaying everything she should have said or done. The shift came from recognizing that she had brought the best work she knew how to do. If someone was unimpressed, that was their reaction. That recognition let her hear the input, make adjustments, and move forward instead of spiraling.

Gratitude is the other half of her practice, and she keeps it concrete. Schmitt Winchester has kept a gratitude journal for 27 years and is now filling her 27th, a format she took from Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance. She believes staying in a state of gratitude, even when things are hard, is what allows more joy. She also offers a reframe for disappointments such as a missed promotion. When something does not work out the way you wanted, it is possible you are being protected from something you cannot yet see, and she says she has many examples from her own life where a devastating outcome turned out to be a gift.

The concrete takeaway is small enough to start tonight. Write down what you are grateful for from the workday, including the parts that stung, and notice what changes when you practice that for a few weeks.

The Questions You Ask Yourself Shape the Answers You Find

Another tool Schmitt Winchester uses constantly, which she credits to Tony Robbins, is paying attention to the quality of the questions you ask yourself. Most of us run a steady stream of internal questions without noticing them. Why didn’t that work out? How come I didn’t get that promotion? Why is my boss such a jerk? She calls these low-quality questions because the answers they invite only confirm the complaint built into them.

She explains the mechanism through the reticular activating system, which she describes as a kind of radar in the brain that responds to what we tell ourselves. Ask a question built on defeat, and you tend to find evidence of defeat. Ask a better question, and the brain goes looking for a better answer. Instead of wondering why a job feels so miserable, she suggests asking how you could experience the job in a more rewarding and satisfying way.

She shared an example from a recent coaching conversation. A client preparing for a major event kept asking what would happen if it went wrong or if people did not find it valuable. Schmitt Winchester told the client those were the wrong questions. The better question, she said, was what experience they wanted people to have, and how they could create an event so meaningful that it would affect the organization in ways beyond their wildest dreams.

The practice is easy to try. The next time you notice a question in your head that assumes failure, rewrite it so it asks how you could get the outcome you actually want, and then let your mind work on that version instead.

Helping Others Without Abandoning Yourself

Many people who chase approval are also the colleagues everyone leans on. Schmitt Winchester recognizes the pattern well, and she ties it to the roles people learn in their families growing up, such as the pleaser or the caretaker. Those roles are deeply ingrained, which is why stepping in to rescue a struggling coworker can feel automatic.

Her guidance is not to stop helping. She believes caring about colleagues is a good quality and that offering assistance at work is appropriate. The question is why you are doing it. If the help is really a bid for approval from that person or from your boss, she suggests rethinking how much you offer. Approval seekers, she notes, often wear themselves out helping everybody else do their own work and then go home to eight more hours of their own, which leaves them exhausted, resentful, and edging toward the martyr role she knows well from her own career.

Schmitt Winchester returns here to property lines. Some people want someone else to step in and save them, she notes, and that is the point where helping crosses into another person’s property. Healthy boundaries can be as simple as telling someone who drops by daily that you have five minutes and asking what is worrying them most right now. As she puts it, each of us is only responsible for saving ourselves.

The Approval Was Always Yours to Give

Schmitt Winchester is candid that she would not have hired herself many years ago. She describes her younger self as needy, and she says that neediness pushed people away. What changed was not a promotion or a title. It was a conscious decision to choose the conscious healing career path, and to keep choosing it every day.

She offers that decision to anyone who recognizes themselves in the unconscious path. It starts with noticing what your property is and what belongs to someone else, paying attention to how you talk to yourself, and getting support, whether from a coach, a therapist, or a personal board of people you trust. None of it requires anyone else’s permission.

So carry one question into tomorrow. The next time you feel yourself waiting for someone’s approval, ask what it would look like to give yourself that approval first. After more than 36 years in corporate leadership and two Chief Human Resources Officer roles, Susan Schmitt Winchester has come to believe that this one shift is where a more joyful working life begins.