Being a creative marketing professional who actually gets to create is harder than you think, especially when it comes to moving your career forward. Not all of us want to be managers or executives, but we all want to thrive in our chosen field. Throughout this series, “Career Advancement Lessons from Star Trek: Lower Decks,” I want to help writers, designers, developers, and other practitioners learn how to speak up for themselves and their craft. Our goal? To do remarkable work worthy of respect and recognition in the workplace.

The Character:

“Your caution is warranted. Statistically, ensigns serving under recently promoted commanding officers are more likely to experience death and/or dismemberment.” (“In the Cradle of Vexilon” – Season 4, Episode 3)

A Vulcan science officer who joined Lower Decks in Season 4 as part of a cultural exchange program, T’Lyn is a stone-cold doubter. She first appeared as a seeming one-off character in the Season 2 episode, “wej Duj,” saving the Vulcan ship she serves on, only to be reprimanded for not being Vulcan enough. When she appears on the USS Cerritos, she is plagued by frustrations over what she did wrong on her old ship. But she’s also being perpetually bemused by the hijinks that often threaten to overwhelm her new ship.

She is quickly revealed to be a very capable officer who thinks on her feet well and is unflappable. Then again, that’s the modus operandi of most Vulcans who have ever served on Starfleet vessels. Like her forebears – specifically Spock, Tuvok, and T’Pol – T’Lyn eventually comes to enjoy serving with humans, much to the confusion of other Vulcans. In fact, such characters have typically been cast as Mariner-like rebels compared to their own culture.

But, thanks to subtle storytelling, we eventually learn that T’Lyn fights against herself all the time. Not only does she not understand why her superior officers sent her to serve on a Starfleet ship, but they never explained to her how she was a bad Vulcan. In her mind, she was punished for being successful, so she doesn’t know how to fix her mistakes. She doubts her actions and abilities because her best work – which saved her entire ship! – was deemed to be a failure. Her boss rejected her as a person, crushing her self-worth.

Unfortunately, far too many creatives have faced the same situation as T’Lyn. They thought they were doing good work, only for their manager or director excoriate them (often in public). This could happen for a variety of reasons, including poor communication, unclear expectations, shifting parameters, and more. We’ve all been there, and it’s very uncomfortable. Even worse? You don’t get any feedback on what happened, how you can fix the problem, and/or how you can improve in the future. You are left twisting in the wind, frustrated, maybe demoted, or maybe shunted off to a project without any chances for growth or development.

The Challenge:

For all of her Vulcan competence, T’Lyn feels stuck. She doesn’t know what to do in the big picture, so she’s stymied with everyday activities. It would be one thing if her commanding officer gave her a clear list of how she’d messed up followed by well-defined expectations on how she can improve. Instead, she was told that she’s too emotional for a Vulcan, so she’s being sent to a Starfleet vessel.

Her challenge is both simple and difficult. She needs to figure out what happened and learn from those mistakes. But even though we get scenes of her trading communications with her old boss, he only speaks in vagaries, hoping that she will interpret what needs to happen next. To the surprise of no long-term Star Trek fans, Vulcans can be remarkably smug and passive aggressive for a race of humanoids who pride themselves on controlling their emotional reactions.

This baffles T’Lyn – because she is a science officer and a Vulcan. She is subtly being asked to provide an emotional response, even though she’s supposed to operate exclusively on facts and logic. So, all she’s left with is doubt, frustration, and anxiety, all things she finds very uncomfortable and foreign to her entire upbringing as a Vulcan. She can’t test doubt. She can’t experiment with fear. She can’t put anxiety through a series of trials to see how she’ll respond. Until she realizes that she’s been put on the perfect ship for such examinations.

Fighting doubt is tough, especially when it involves a change of perspective. As anyone who has left their family’s belief system can tell you, that process is fraught with peril.

The Choice:

Initially, T’Lyn felt like she had just two choices on the Cerritos. She could either put her head down and keep to herself, or she could learn what she could about how Starfleet work. Both choices entailed waiting patiently for her Vulcan superiors to decide that her punishment was over and she could return to a Vulcan ship. She spent a few episodes attempting both courses of action, including keeping a psychological distance between her and the rest of the crew, but Mariner, Tendi, Boimler, and Rutherford simply wouldn’t let her.

That’s when a third choice emerged: She needed to undergo interior growth. She didn’t need to improve because her Vulcan or Starfleet captain ordered it; she realized she needed to become her own person. The mirror of Boimler and inverse of Mariner, T’Lyn had moved from confidence to doubt and didn’t know how to get back – until she started connecting with people who did appreciate her true worth. Before, she had subsumed herself to the needs of the collective. Now, she understood that she could better serve the greater good by improving herself on her terms. And it really helped that she could surround herself with people who valued her and wanted her to succeed.

But it starts with making the choice to stand up for yourself, to stand up to yourself and your old ways of thinking.

The Chance:

I have been a T’Lyn. It sucks. You do everything you’re asked to do, but you somehow get it wrong, and no one in charge will tell you how to improve. You ask for constructive criticism, and the only reply is, “Do better.” You ask for clarity on a piece of content you’ve developed, and the only feedback they give you is, “I don’t like this. Try again. And get me a new draft by EOD.”

You get in your own head, and you don’t know how to move forward. Asking questions to your manager only gets you in more trouble, and they’ve handed you a seemingly benign assignment so that you don’t cause them more problems. All you want to do is improve and contribute, but you don’t know what to do.

The answer? Surround yourself with people you trust and seek out ways to get better in ways that matter to you. Like T’Lyn, that might include getting a new job with new coworkers who support you. It might also include starting a dream project in your personal life that fills you with creative energy.

What matters is that you actively pursue ways to crush your doubt. You have worth and value, not because of what your employer says or what you bring to the company, but because of who you are. You must take the chance on yourself long before others take the chance on you. This is not about puffing yourself up with false or undeserved confidence. It’s about believing in yourself, your skills, and your talents. It’s about investing in yourself, your career, and your future.