Now What? Facilitator Grads

By Ginny Kravitz, Now What?® Facilitator

Tell Me About Yourself

So what do you do for work? Tell me about yourself. You will encounter some version of this familiar icebreaker on job interviews, airplanes, at networking events and cocktail parties. A variety of factors will affect your answer including how you feel that day and whether you’re in the mood for a real conversation.

You can try throwing out a job title or company name. That often does the trick in terms of responding with what’s expected, but if a polite nod is the only reaction, is anything much actually being communicated?

Beyond the Title

Your job title provides a certain amount of information only. The conversation expands when you are able to articulate:

• the part of your work that most interests you, what you care about;
• how others would describe the experience of working with you;
• your particular specialty, what you’re good at, and your distinct approach.

When you touch on these items and to put it in marketing terms, you’re communicating something about your core purpose and your personal brand.

Of course not every tell-me-about-yourself interaction calls for a comprehensive answer and you don’t need to become a self-promoting sound bite machine. Just realize that words have power and they help you connect with people, ideas, and opportunities.

It’s important to understand the impact you have and the difference you make –- to value it yourself and to be able to communicate it. Whether you are aiming for a promotion, marketing yourself to a prospective client, are in the midst of a job hunt, or are casually networking, it’s worth the effort to clarify this for yourself.

Take Christine, an emerging leader in her organization. She received direct feedback from senior management that they want to hear more about where she sees herself making the biggest impact in the organization long term – ideas that go beyond Christine’s stated goal to attain the VP title.

In the coaching that transpired, Christine and I collected observations (her own and those of others) that clarified her top strengths, interests, and values. Prominent themes emerged such as the fact that she cares about and has a knack for creating environments that encourage creativity, collaboration, and growth. This is one of several insights Christine is now bringing into her conversations.

The Way You Do The Things You Do

Once these themes are clear, you’ll use them in your performance review conversations, your resume, Linked In profile, and when introducing yourself in social or professional settings. You’ll ask more thoughtful questions of others in those situations as well.

This Week’s Call To Action:

• For your own purposes, try answering the question, “What do you do for work?” without using your job title.
• Pretend you are describing what you do to a second grader. Now imagine the same conversation but with an elderly friend.
• Describe how the project, person, or end result is different because of you.

Maybe “tell me about yourself” actually means: How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What do you care about? At least, that’s if someone is asking genuinely. Otherwise it might just mean: Nice to meet you. Have you seen the buffet? Either way, it’s good to have a handle on the real answer.

Originally published for In the Current blog.

by Ginny Kravitz, Deputy Editor

Barely Getting By

Remember your first job, first apartment, and living paycheck to paycheck? In the beginning, just being able to make rent and survive in the real world feels like enough — and it is, until you learn that there is something more beyond merely surviving.

Even as a career matures and a certain level of financial success is attained, there are events, crises, and circumstances in life that can put you back in survival mode at any given time. Sometimes it’s necessary to be in that mode temporarily because anything more is just too much to conceive of or work toward until certain things are addressed and stabilized.

The danger over time, however, is to allow getting by to become a way of life.

Years ago, a career counselor had me develop her version of a zero-based budget. The purpose was to identify the amount you need to earn in order to cover expenses and be “at zero” vs. in the red. That’s not the target, though, just your minimal requirement. It’s the place you start from, to have a handle on what’s necessary. Next, you increase that minimum requirement by at least 10% to arrive at your target salary level. A great rule of thumb, but do most people round up or round down when calculating what’s possible?

Perhaps money isn’t your particular challenge. You might be rounding down and settling for just enough by:

• Working at a job that kills your spirit;
• Feeling fatigued too often with low energy as your norm;
• Accepting dullness or decline in your relationships;
• Delaying the pursuit of what you want out of life

Settling Isn’t Gratitude

Why would anyone plan to just get by? A few reasons, yet I can think of a rebuttal for each:

Who am I to want more? There are so many people worse off in the world.
Yes, all the more reason to become all you can and contribute all you can.

Fear of failure, avoiding disappointment.
Risk is scary and failure is humbling. Regret over what might have been is worse.

I should just be grateful for what I have.
Yes, you should be! But raising the bar doesn’t cancel gratitude.
In a culture of excess, it’s good to realize what is enough. The bigger house, the bigger job, and the flashier car aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. Making conscious choices and having your priorities straight is a good thing. Settling without even thinking about it is not. Settling by default is a spirit-crushing, self-defeating, potential-robbing bad habit. How’s that for a description?

Plan For More

Get into the habit of aiming for 10% more. You might even find you’re ready to add twenty-five or fifty percent to that minimum requirement. Expect more, ask for more, picture more, and prepare for more. Do more to make it happen. The declaring and the acting go hand in hand.

This Week’s Call To Action: Notice where you’re settling and make the decision to go for more. When you name it for yourself, even before anything changes, it’s a defining moment.

“The biggest human temptation in life is to settle for too little.”

–Thomas Merton

by Ginny Kravitz, Deputy Editor

Watch Your Language

The other day I was helping my client Debbie update her resume. The financial services company she works for is going through layoffs, and Debbie is in job search mode. Her long-term goal is to get into healthcare technology, and she is enrolled in a certification program. As we considered her audience and how to gear her resume, we discussed that one logical route to an immediate job is to look for something similar to what she’s doing now: customer service with a financial company. Then Debbie slipped in the comment, “Well, I wouldn’t mind finding a healthcare position now.”