The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 5 minutes

The Nature of Leadership and Career, is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a more natural way.

Today at a glance

• Illustration of the week

  - The key to starting

• Announcement

  -Let’s get bookish!

• The Nature of Career

  - Why do we want to start new things in the new year?

  - What’s stopping you from getting started

  - 3 risks of not getting started

  - How to squash your limiting beliefs

• Gem of the week

  - Interviews by ai

Illustration of the Week

Follow on Instagram and Linkedin.

Book it in!

From February I am launching a book club focussing on books written by female authors.

Why? Check out this post.

Interested? - sign up here.

This will occur once every 2 months and is part of the regular Career Soul Sessions group.

Why do we want to start new things in the new year?

Just as Mondays, birthdays, and significant holidays mark points in time, a new year serves as another temporal milestone.

The commencement of a new year offers an excellent opportunity for self-reflection and a fresh start in our professional and personal aspirations.

If you haven’t done so, all of January is still time to reflect on 2023 and set yourself up for 2024. 🎁 Here’s a free beautifully illustrated booklet that can help you.

Interestingly, despite the motivation derived from such temporal landmarks like the New Year, birthdays, and the like, there's also the potential to experience a "failure to launch" sensation.

Currently, some of the women I work with have the aspirations to:

• Learn a new career skill

• Work toward a promotion

• Transition to a new department

• Searching for a new job after redundancy

• Share thought leadership in the field of expertise

In some or all of these goals, these women initially show a mix of excitement and fear. 

Then comes the gap between the goal / intention setting and the execution. 

What’s stopping you from getting started? 

The usual suspect: limiting beliefs, such as:

“What if I suck?”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“What if people think I suck?”

“What if I start and get bored?”

“Who am I to do / start ______X____”?

“I’ve started but I’m not that great, I feel like a fraud.”

“There are already tons of people who are better than me at ____X______. It’s no point getting started.” 

Annoyingly these limiting assumptions stop you from getting started, or starting but not continuing your journey.

Here’s the inconvenient yet soothing truth

3 risks of not getting started

1. Boldness Regret. According to Dan Pink’s research in the Power of Regret, we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did, especially as we age. 

2. You lose the effect of compounding. Just as money multiplies with interest, skills grow exponentially over time, and the earlier you begin, the more you benefit from the compounding effect.

3. You deprive others of your ideas and knowledge. This is important especially if you identify as someone from a diverse group, you stop your voice and presence shaping inclusive environments for others.

So what can you do about it?

Squash your limiting beliefs!

Flip your pesky limiting assumptions into liberating assumptions as suggested by author and coach Nancy Kline. 

Here are Kline’s 5 incisive questions to liberate your thinking and hence your actions:

Have a go and let me know how you get on!

If you found this useful please share it with you’re colleagues, friends, and family.

Whenever you’re ready here are 3 ways I can help

#1 Gain clarity and confidence in your career transition

#2 Join the free weekly Career Soul Sessions for women in tech and sustainability. A safe space to share your thoughts, and feelings on all things career.

#3 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram for more Career + Leadership tips to help you thrive.

Gem of the week

For those of you going through job or promtion interview process, or even if you want to just brush up on your interivew skills I highly recommend Interviewsby.ai 

It’s free and it enables you to practice for your specific job situation through 3 steps:

1. Paste a job description to receive realistic interview questions tailored to the role.

2. You record your answer with audio, simulating the interview experience.

3. You Get instant AI feedback and an improved sample response.

Give it a go!

*I only recommend people, products, and processes I know or have experience with and I do not receive any monetary or affiliate benefit.