How to Tune-In to the View on You as Part of Your Career Reinvention

Something interesting happens to all of us as we navigate through our careers—we develop a view to ourselves disconnected from how others see us. This difference in perception is problematic in many situations and potentially debilitating when it comes to the process of changing career direction. The process of changing career direction starts with gaining insight (and help) on the view on you.

Getting Beyond: “There’s Nothing Unique About Me”

In my work with career re-inventors (my term for mid or later-career professionals striving for a wholesale shift in their careers), nearly all answer a question about their unique skills with something that sounds like: “I really don’t have any particularly unique talent or abilities.”

What’s fascinating is that for most of these individuals supposedly struggling through life with a dearth of unique skills, following an exercise where they return to people they’ve worked with or for during their careers, almost all are surprised (or shocked) to see how others viewed their abilities and contributions.

The data warehouse administrator who is a remarkable team builder.
The marketing executive who has an other-worldly superpower to translate the most complex technology and business situations into terms and pictures that lead to insights and innovation.
The lawyer who is a servant leader, yet his real superpower is his three-steps ahead of everyone else creativity.

And some of those insights have helped fuel great career reinvention:

The project manager who turned out to be a brilliant operations manager.
The product manager who turned into a successful entrepreneur based on her unique ability to see customer environments from a systems perspective.
The customer support manager who proved to be a remarkable event planner.

While I’m always excited to see the lights turn on when individuals learn how others perceive their skills and abilities,I genuinely love the output from a subsequent question: How did I impact you when we worked together?

Many are shocked to discover how something they did, either continuously, or at a point in time profoundly impacted someone. (Related article: Today’s Interactions are Tomorrow’s Backstories for Others)

You infused self-confidence into our environment in the worst of situations. I don’t think we would have made it without you.

You didn’t know it at the time, but I was navigating a life crisis. Your gentle, firm guidance got me through that difficult patch. I’ve never forgotten what you did for me, and I try and pay it forward.

You saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. With your pushing and prodding, I took a risk, and it changed my life and career for the better.

Humbling.

Bringing The Perceptions on You To Light:

So, let’s see if I have this right:

Most of us do not understand what skills and abilities others see and value in us.
Mostly, we are blind to how we impact those around us.

It’s been my experience that before the exploration and experimentation phases of career reinvention can take place, you must better tune in to your uniqueness and your impact points.

Yes, the process of career reinvention is a journey to discover yourself at your best. And to do this, you need help correcting your view on you.

4 Easy Ideas for Mining for Insights on You:

Ask former friendly colleagues what you did well and how you impacted them. Expect to be surprised.
If you held customer-facing roles, dust off your contact list on LinkedIn and ask a few former customers why they valued your involvement in their business.
If you were in sales, ask your customers why they bought from you. (Push beyond the product to better understand what it was about you and your approach that gave them the confidence to buy from you.)
Review your past performance evaluations and look for emerging themes for your contributions, strengths, and areas for development.

I tend to skip the family and friends audiences for this work simply because they are biased. In some, but not all circumstances, clients will carefully explore the questions on skills and impact with current colleagues. If you do this, develop a comfortable framing for “Why” you are asking.

We All Need Help Interpreting the Feedback:

This may be the most important part of this “view on you” process. Because of your own deeply ingrained views on your skills, abilities, and weaknesses, you are typically the single worst person to interpret feedback on you. Other not so great sources are close friends and family. They are predisposed to feed you sunshine.

The difficulty in this step was summed up by wife, who in reviewing this exercise, asked, “Who am I supposed to ask if I can’t ask friends and family?” I’m confident my answer did not satisfy her, but it is the answer.

I prefer that you find someone who does not have day-to-day contact with you and take a leap of trust and ask for their help. Some examples include:

Individuals from professional associations
Classmates in professional development or degree programs
Religious Leaders
Career Coaches
Executive Coaches
Individuals from shared interests, including boards and community programs

And yes, there’s a certain awkwardness in recruiting help for this exercise. For those outside of your direct working environment, share the truth: you are exploring new career directions and need some help in better understanding feedback on your skills and impact.

You might be surprised how many people will be curious about your personal-professional project. A great many of us share the desire to reinvent.

Three Filters:

Once you gain the support of someone in your universe for this activity, ask them to review the feedback with the following filters in mind:

What are the key themes you perceive in the feedback on me?
If you were to describe my strengths based on reading the feedback, what would they be?
If you were to create a descriptive phrase for me based on this feedback, what would it be?

Some clients have completed this activity with multiple individuals looking for both consistent themes and outliers.

Comparing and contrasting the external views on you is a critical first step in career reinvention. What to do with the output is, of course, another story. (More to come.)

Also, be aware that the work above is just one part of a process I use to help individuals tune-in to their unique skills and abilities. The additional exercises offer valuable input but from different views of the Rubik’s cube that is you.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I believe to my core that every individual has one or more unique, valuable, and marketable abilities or skills. Life’s events and the passage of time tend to dull or warp our views on our superpowers. Putting in the legwork to gain outside perspectives on the person staring at us in the mirror is time and energy well invested and pays dividends in subsequent steps of the career reinvention process.