An exercise to build confidence in your self and your work
Look, no-one feels seriously punchy all the time. But there are occasions when we need to truly feel like our most confident selves, able to articulate what we offer.
Yet, many brilliant people - often women - are terrible at saying in plain speak, shoulders back, what they're great at. We - many of us – regularly underplay our skills and strengths: we fudge and obfuscate, dodging compliments and feedback.
And yet, you will have accumulated huge numbers of skills and strengths from every part of your life: work (whether a serious role in a big organisation, or when you waitressed as an undergrad), studying, mothering, volunteering – every situation we’re in teaches us something new to keep in our arsenal. But we just don’t talk about these assets, often overlooking in a fug of insecurity and comparison.
Once we collect them though, listing and crucially evidencing them, it has a huge impact on our sense of what is possible, on our confidence. We can build our best CV, and walk into interviews, performance appraisals, even the meetings we have every day, sure of what we offer.
And when you are planning and setting out your future goals, then you’ll know which skills you have in the bag, and which you may want to acquire to help you get exactly where you want to be.
The first stage of our approach takes you through a thorough (and painless) process of mapping and evidencing your skills.
Ready?
Then let’s begin...
At their simplest, skills can be divided into three groups:
1.
Personal traits
Gained throughout life
Expressed using adjectives
e.g. “I am calm”
2.
Transferrable skills
Applicable in other roles/ industries/ areas of life
Expressed using verbs
e.g. Presenting to large audiences
3.
Knowledge
Developed through education/training/ on-the-job
Expressed using nouns
e.g. Project management
Your skills
Stage 1: Self-assessment
The first stage is for you to brainstorm all of the skills you believe you have. No-one else is going to look at this now, so try as hard as you can not to be bashful or to underplay your strengths. If anything, channel the most confident, self-promoting person you know.
Start by listing all of the parts of your life which may offer up a skill – you may want to look at:
work(serious ‘career’ type roles and every other job you ever did too – waitressing, nannying, you’ll have learned something from them all!)
studying
relationships–with your partner or spouse, friends, your children, your family
hobbies
Then use the framework to capture and organise your skills in the three categories: personal traits, transferrable skills, knowledge.
For each category, try to think of at least one example a skill you have developed (or augmented) from each of the parts of your life. And for each skill, set out an example which teases it out and note how it was corroborated (maybe someone commented on it, or it was recognised in a performance review).
We do this, partially because we may draw on the examples later when writing our CVs, but mostly because if we evidence our skills, it is harder to deny them when we are feeling insecure.
For example:
Stage 2: Crowdsourcing
Your list will be interesting – they always are. But I’ll wager that it’s also much shorter than it should be. Partly because we tend to underplay our own skills, and partly because others see strengths in us that we struggle to see in ourselves.
So now you’re going to crowdsource your skills from the people in your network who know you best.
You’re going to contact at least five people, from different parts of your life (different workplaces, different levels of seniority, clients, friends, family, PTA colleagues, hobby comrades etc). And you are going to ask each to describe five of your skills. Ideally they would describe:
The skill
An occasion when they saw you display these skills
The positive outcome they noted
How they felt/ what it meant to them
Don’t worry about explaining the skills framework to them. And it’s usually best to give them a deadline so you get something useful back.
You’ll almost certainly find this awkward and embarrassing – but you have to do it. (And don’t do what I did and ask for a critique at the same time. This isn’t about areas of development – this is about what you are great at.) Yes, you’ll feel like you’re burdening people, and you’ll find it uncomfortable. But you’ll get over it. Think about how you’d feel if someone asked you for the same – you’d do it in a heartbeat, delighted to help a friend/colleague’s personal development.
You’ll also find it incredibly moving and insightful – you’ll learn more about how others see you, and about how to frame your skills. And, as you have written evidence, it’s (almost) impossible to pretend they aren’t true.
When you’ve done this exercise, you’ll be really well placed to negotiate a better salary, find a great new job, or deepen your career thinking.
Cover photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash