Confidence to go for your future career
Are you feeling stuck, lost or unmotivated? Is the time right for a change of direction?
You may be feeling this way because you don’t know what you’ve got to offer. You might have been doing the same job for a long time, had time away from your career or had a negative experience that’s caused you to feel less confident.
If you can see your strengths clearly your confidence will start to grow.
What are strengths?
Strengths are your natural positive attributes, often things that you use without realising on a daily basis in all areas of your life, not just in work. We use many more strengths than we realise in our daily lives.
An easy way to start to build a picture of your strengths is to think about something in your life that has gone well and made a difference to you or other people, then answer these questions:
- What happened to make it a success?
- What role did you play?
- What was your first step?
- What top three strengths did you use?
- How did the success make a difference to you or to other people?
- What other strengths did you use?
- What would need to happen for you to use these strengths again?
Another idea is to ask a friend or colleague what strengths they see in you and to give examples of how you show each one.
Take a look at my video to see how I use At My Best Strength Cards. The cards are just one of the exercises we might do together, I use a range of methods to suit you.
How to maximise your strengths to go for your future life, job or career.
Acknowledging the contribution you make to successful events will help you to build a success mindset. Here’s some suggestions for building on your strengths:
- Celebrate your successes, for example if you keep a daily reflective diary review it at the end of each week, pick out the highlights and note the strengths you used.
- Think about how you can use those strengths more often and in different situations.
- What strengths would you most like others to recognise in you?
- What will you be doing that show these strengths in action?
- What one small step could you take towards a future where you can make the most of these strengths?
As you work on maximising your strengths, you’ll start to feel more confident and to know your worth.
You could try the Institute of Leadership and Management free self-awareness tool.
You may want to start to update your social media profile or CV with your strengths in readiness for future applications. Take a look at My LinkedIn Profile as an example.