by Caroline Leach | Nov 26, 2019 | Careers, Leadership, Learning, Social Media
The end of the year can bring a lot of “shoulds” into our professional and personal lives.
We should do whatever it takes to hit those fourth-quarter operating goals. We should get every last item on our endless lists completed. We should count our abundant blessings on Thanksgiving and on every day of the year. We should enjoy the many holiday celebrations with our colleagues, friends and family.
Except, what if you’re not feeling it?
What if you’re not enjoying — or at least making it through, with a smile on your face — everything on your calendar? What if you feel overwhelmed? What if you feel tired, or lonely, or longing for some quiet time where you can just be? What if you feel angry, or afraid, or just plain sad about something (or many somethings)?
For my Thanksgiving week blog post, I was eager to share something inspiring and uplifting. A few drafts are still languishing in my files, unfinished. They felt forced. Inauthentic. And unlikely to inspire anyone.
So I eased up on my self-imposed deadline. I let myself play around with ideas. I let my mind simply be for a while.
And it came to me while I was driving today.
What do you do when you’re not feeling it?
At lunch with a group of people I met recently, one person said with a sigh that she just wasn’t feeling it that day.
Support immediately came from the people around the table, in the form of questions. “What are you experiencing?” one person asked. “What seems to be the trouble?” another asked. “What do you want?” yet another asked.
Bit by bit, the story flowed. Speaking it aloud began to neutralize its grip. The space opened up to just be with it.
You may find yourself in spots where you’re not feeling it. Yet you may not feel it’s acceptable to share those feelings with others. You may not even to acknowledge them to yourself. If you’re in a leadership role, you may feel pressure to maintain a positive demeanor, even if you feel miserable inside.
Being positive and uplifting others has been my north star as a leader. Emotions are contagious. It’s important for leaders to bring a realistic optimism, a can-do mindset, and an energetic environment to a team. That’s how I believe people do great work, enjoy the experience, and fulfill their deepest longings for purpose and meaning in their lives.
Yet, the leader has to feel it too. Authenticity has an important place in the mix. That can mean many things. It could be a willingness to experience discomfort and be okay with it. It might be a curiosity about what’s causing it. Or it could be reflecting on what’s important.
These are just a few things I learned from two intense November weekends with the Co-Active Training Institute. The co-active model focuses on “being in action … together.” With this series of coaching courses, I’m adding a fresh foundation to my business and leadership coaching business.
In addition to (hopefully) making me a more effective coach, there are some welcome side effects. It’s brought new perspectives to my social media consulting, my community involvement, and my family.
It also helped me identify three important questions for when you’re not feeling it.
What are you experiencing?
What’s happening with you right now? What else is going on? This is about creating space to simply be with the experience and acknowledge its presence in your life.
What’s important to you?
Not feeling it is an opportunity to step back and reflect on what’s important to you. What do you want? If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?
What do you want to be doing instead?
Maybe there’s a hunger in your soul to be doing something completely different. Perhaps you miss doing something you enjoyed earlier in your life, or there’s something new you want to try. What are they?
The same goes for your social media
Much of my writing focuses on how to build your career through social media. One of my first consulting clients said how excited he was to be getting consulting and coaching all in one from me. Consulting was expressly part of our work, but coaching was not explicitly in the mix. That experience was one of several catalysts for becoming a coach in an “official” sense. Thank you, and you know who you are. 😉
The co-active coaching model also helped me tap into some new wisdom about social media. If you’re not feeling it about a specific event or a certain post, don’t feel obligated to share it. It’s ideal to help your network by sharing the best of your perspective and expertise on social media. If that means skipping a post or not sticking to a schedule because they don’t feel right, that’s fine.
It’s okay — and even desirable — to post selectively, take a break for a while, or set aside a posting schedule. Yes, consistency is important on social media. And so is the quality of your content and the way you feel about sharing it. Like most things in life, it’s a balance.
And more importantly, what do you do when you’re not feeling it?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 30, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
It’s almost the end of the year. Do you want an easy way to gather your accomplishments for a year-end performance review?
You may be preparing for a performance discussion with your manager in the corporate world. Or maybe you run your own company and want to identify how you did this year.
In either scenario, reflecting on this year’s highlights helps you clearly see what you did well and where you can improve. It’s an opportunity to pause and celebrate the accomplishments of you and year team. It’s a chance to elevate what’s working well and make changes to what’s not working well.
But in the rush of meeting year-end goals, how can you simplify the process?
Try looking to your social media feeds. If you’ve been sharing consistently what you, your team, and your company have been doing, you have a ready-made record. (Of course, this presumes you follow your organization’s social media policy and haven’t shared any confidential, private, or sensitive information.)
A former colleague (and now an author!), Angelica Kelly, has a year-end ritual that relies on LinkedIn. “At the end of every year, I take stock of the personal and professional. I consider what I’m grateful for and what I want to improve,” Kelly says.
“After this reflection process, I use LinkedIn like a notepad and do an annual update,” she says. “Everything professionally relevant goes into my LinkedIn profile. This includes accomplishments, interests, volunteering, and big projects that highlight transferable skills and new knowledge I’ve gained.”
In addition to Angelica’s approach, if you posted content to LinkedIn or other social networks throughout the year, you can scroll through your posts to identify the highlights. You can capture instances where you and your team:
- Launched a successful new product
- Completed an important project
- Won an award for your accomplishments
- Spoke at a company or industry event
- Attended a conference and applied new knowledge
- Championed company news as a brand ambassador
After that, here are a few things to consider …
1. Link your achievements to the goals you set at the beginning of the year, as well as your bigger department and company goals. Does your social media content show how you made a difference for your company? Did you contribute to some of your company’s key goals and share about those (to the extent you could) on social media?
2. Quantify how others responded to your accomplishments. See what data you can cite from your social media posts. Did your content reach a large number of people? Generate multiple comments and a dialogue on an important work topic? Get shared in a way that helped build your organization’s reputation as an industry leader or a great place to work? Use numbers to quantify the impact of your social sharing.
3. Identify where you got feedback. Perhaps some of your posts served as mini feedback moments on some of your work. Did people make suggestions for improvements that you ended up using? Did people ask for more information so they could apply your learning to their own work? Social media can serve as an online focus group. See if that was the case for you this year.
As you reflect on this year, it’s also a great time to lay the foundation for the coming year. Are there new and different ways you could share successes and learnings on social media? Would you use social media activity to seek feedback and help solve problems? How could you hit what I call the social media trifecta — sharing equally about you, your team, and your organization?
With the year — and the decade! — coming to a close, I hope you reflect on and celebrate the accomplishments you and your team achieved this year. And if you have rituals you use to make the most of your performance review preparation, please share!
by Caroline Leach | Oct 16, 2019 | Careers, Learning, Social Media
photo by istock.com/akinbostanci
What question do people ask the most about social media?
This is a busy speaking month for me, and I’ve been reflecting on themes in questions. I’ve been talking about personal brands and building careers and companies through social media.
What am I hearing across a diverse group of audiences? What do people ask in the Q&A following my talks? What do they want to know in one-on-one chats?
This month includes talks with CEOs affiliated with the Community Associations Institute, and community members at an author’s panel. It includes employees at Ericsson North America, and employees and guests at Otter Media‘s We Gather women’s leadership event. At the end of the month, I’ll speak with students at the USC Rotaract Club.
What people often ask is a form of this question: what’s the best way to share professional updates on social media without sounding too self-promotional?
Said another way: what’s a good approach to being active on social media professionally without coming across as arrogant and turning people off?
We’ve all probably seen people in our social media feeds — whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter — who make it all about themselves. Sometimes it can be tempting to tap the “mute” button and make those posts go away.
Yet, if we don’t share about our professional accomplishments, there are downsides. We run the risk of being underestimated in our abilities. We may be overlooked for future opportunities. We may not be able to make the impact that we want in our work.
The happy medium: a social media trifecta
So what’s the solution? It lies in a formula I call the social media trifecta. In every post you share about your work, strive to balance three elements of your content.
- First, share what you did and why you’re excited about it.
- Second, share how your team and your colleagues contributed.
- And third, share what’s special about your organization that enabled your contribution.
With this approach, you highlight your own accomplishments in an engaging way. You also showcase the work of others — something good leaders do frequently. And you’re a good brand ambassador for your organization, in an authentic way for you.
In addition, offer something of value to your network. What insight or idea could you include that would help them in their work?
Here’s an example. Laura Ramirez and her colleagues at Ericsson created a fabulous Career Learning Day. Workshops, activities, and employee groups engaged colleagues in career development. My keynote speech included 3 questions to help people create a personal brand statement and 4 steps to build a personal brand. Afterwards, I posted pictures about the event and the great people at Ericsson. My post included bullets for the questions and the steps in my post. People who weren’t there could also benefit from the key concepts.
Who does this well? Here are a few …
Who do you know who does this well? Please share and tag people in the comments. And maybe it’s you!
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