“I'm only as good as my last quarter”

The Myth: Every Quarter Restarts Your ScoreYou believe that leadership is scored like a game where only the most recent move counts. A strong quarter builds nothing; it simply delays the next test. A soft quarter, though—even one—erases the decade before it. You carry the wins alongside everyone else, but you own the losses alone. This asymmetry feels like the actual rule, not a distortion. Your competence isn't a trend; it's a current event that expires every ninety days.

How the Thought Stays Real Without Being TrueYou sit in meetings where the prior quarter's miss is fresh. Your brain has no trouble holding ten prior wins and one recent loss simultaneously—but they don't weigh equally when you're the one signing off. The silence from peers feels like private judgment. An email that used to feel collaborative now reads as evidence. You interpret data through the frame of that quarter, and every data point you notice afterward confirms it. You're not making this up; you're noticing real information through a lens that makes the recent quarter the only one that matters.

Testing What Actually Stays in the RecordPull your own five-quarter review. Look not at your interpretation of the narrative, but at what was actually said about you—words from review cycles, board notes, email trails. Mark which statements reference only the most recent quarter and which reference the longer arc. You're testing whether the erasure is real or whether your single-quarter filter is screening out the actual record. One afternoon of looking at what was genuinely documented takes the myth from feeling like truth to looking like a reading habit you can notice and shift.