Learning Without Being Taught
A reflection on mistakes, feedback, and the quiet moment when doubt enters the room.
There’s a strange kind of silence that happens when you’re trying to learn something, but no one actually teaches you how.
For the past few months, I found myself asking a question I never thought I would seriously entertain: Am I actually good at what I do?
Before this experience, I never really had to ask that. I had spent years working in leadership roles -- managing people, solving problems, navigating difficult situations, making decisions when things became complicated.
I wasn’t perfect. But I was confident enough to know that I could figure things out. Then suddenly, I felt like someone who couldn’t even do the basics right.
And it made me pause.
Maybe I do have an inferiority complex that I never noticed before. Or maybe I was just pretending to be capable all along. What do they call it, imposter syndrome?
That’s the thing about doubt, it creeps in quietly. Once it’s there, it starts asking questions about every version of yourself that existed before it.
There’s a particular kind of discomfort when your past experiences suddenly stop feeling like proof of your capability and start feeling like coincidences. I began wondering if everything I had done before this role was just luck.
Maybe I had simply been in environments that were more forgiving. Maybe the version of myself I thought was competent was just someone who hadn’t been tested properly yet.
To be fair, I know I made mistakes. I won’t pretend otherwise -- I am not the type who'll fake it 'til I make it. The role required skills that I was still learning, and there were outputs that I struggled to deliver the way they were expected.
But what made the experience difficult wasn’t simply the mistakes themselves. It was the way feedback happened.
During meetings where my work was reviewed, the mistakes were always clearly pointed out. What was wrong would be identified, sometimes in detail. But what rarely followed was the correction -- the how.
What should the correct output actually look like? What was the proper process? How should it be done differently next time? When I asked these questions, the answer was often a variation of “Sinabi ko na sayo yan.”
Maybe it had been mentioned before. Maybe it had been said briefly somewhere in the middle of a meeting. But understanding something enough to correct a mistake requires more than hearing it once.
Over time, something else added to the confusion. The expectations themselves seemed to shift. What was acceptable in one submission would suddenly be incorrect in the next. Instructions, or at least the interpretation of them, seemed to change depending on the moment.
So I adjusted. Then adjusted again. But without ever fully understanding the standard I was supposed to follow.
Because of that, meetings about my submissions slowly became something I started to dread. Not because I didn’t want feedback, but because I knew the conversation would focus on what went wrong without necessarily showing me how to make it right.
Looking back now, one realization bothers me. I kept making the same mistakes. Not because I didn’t care enough to correct them, but because the correct method was never fully taught.
It’s a strange feeling to go from leading teams to questioning whether you can even perform a rank-and-file job properly.
Two weeks into my employment, I remember being told something that stayed with me. “If nahihiya ka, hindi ka para sa A****N.”
At the time, I had made a light comment that I felt shy reaching out to certain people. They didn’t know me yet. I didn’t know them either. I was still trying to understand the environment, the relationships, the unspoken rules of how things worked. What if I messaged someone and they thought, “Who is this?”
It wasn’t fear. It was caution. In my mind, I was simply trying to navigate respectfully within a new space.
But sometimes caution and hesitation look the same depending on how someone chooses to interpret them.
There was also a moment during one of our meetings that stayed with me longer than the rest of the conversation. S/he mentioned that one of his/her biggest pet peeves was people making mistakes.
I remember pausing internally when I heard that. Not because I felt defensive. But because I felt… confused.
Mistakes are usually where learning begins. So I found myself wondering (quietly, only in my own head) how someone could dislike mistakes so strongly when mistakes are part of being human.
A strange thought crossed my mind (Of course I didn’t say that out loud): If you make mistakes too, do you end up hating yourself? Do you get mad/angry at yourself?
That was the moment something shifted for me. Because for the first time, I considered the possibility that the problem wasn’t entirely about my capability.
There was a time during a quieter conversation with other members of the team, they told me something that helped me understand the dynamic a little better. Someone casually said, “Ganyan talaga siya. When s/he talks, parang higher than thou dapat siya.”
It wasn’t said maliciously. More like an observation people had already learned to live with. Hearing that didn’t erase my mistakes or the things I could have done better. Those are still mine to own. But it did shift how I understood the experience.
Because when mistakes are treated not as part of learning but as something that irritates people personally, the environment stops feeling like a place where you can grow.
Instead, it starts to feel like a place where every misstep confirms a conclusion that may have already been made.
When I eventually looked at my evaluation sheets, something else stood out to me. The form was supposed to measure behavioral aspects of the role, but many of the remarks listed the technical mistakes in my outputs.
Those mistakes existed precisely because I was still learning the skills the role required.
It made me pause and think about alignment -- between expectations, support, and evaluation. At times, the level of documentation made me feel like every movement had been closely observed. As if someone had been quietly building a record. Not to guide improvement, but to confirm a conclusion.
Doubt is strange that way. When someone repeats your mistakes often enough, you start to believe the mistakes are the most accurate version of you.
But sometimes distance reveals something else entirely. The mistakes were real. But they were never the whole story.
I’m not writing this to assign blame. Not every workplace is the right fit for every person. Sometimes the alignment simply isn’t there. But experiences like this leave you with questions, not just about the organization, but about yourself.
Was I really struggling because I lacked the capability? Or because I was trying to learn something in an environment where learning itself felt like a mistake?
I still don’t know the full answer. But clarity has a quiet way of arriving after you step away from the environment that made you question yourself in the first place.
Maybe that’s the quiet lesson I’m taking with me. Not every environment is meant to shape you. Some environments simply reveal where you were never meant to stay. Sometimes growth isn’t about becoming someone new.
Sometimes it’s simply about remembering who you were before someone made you question it.
