As you know, I see the path from feeling “meh” or bad about work to feeling optimistic and energized as a 5 step process.
The steps are:
- Define Your Criteria
- Identify Opportunities
- Research & Prepare
- Persuade the Decision-Maker
- Negotiate & Decide
The image above has an additional step — an action plan for starting strong — but that’s less “career coaching” and more “executive coaching” or “leadership coaching.” I do some of that by request for continuing clients, but most of my focus is on helping people who aren’t sure if they’re in the right place or not.
Anyway, the bulk of career information out there focuses on #4: Persuade the Decision-Maker. You can spend hours reading about applicant tracking systems, different ways of finding the best bullet points to use on a resume, how to tweak the LinkedIn algorithm to make the kind of impression you hope to make on others.
I know this is out there because I read all of this stuff. Some of it is insipid and stupid. Some of it is tactical and very helpful.
But it’s the wrong focus for my clients.
Instead of thinking about how to convince others, my approach is to help clients build their own conviction. I believe that being persuasive is a by-product of having strong convictions. (And, persuasion without conviction only works on people who are not discerning. You don’t want to work with someone who you can trick. It’s bad for them, and bad for you if you succeed.)
So we focus on the first three steps. What do you want? What paths do you see to getting there? What hesitations, tradeoffs, and obstacles do you see between you and the good outcome? What approaches are there to overcoming those challenges? We greet each of these questions with intelligent curiosity, and push on them through research, conversation, and exploration until a client feels rooted in self-knowledge, clear priorities, and a high degree of confidence that they understand the landscape.
As it turns out, clients like that don’t need a ton of help identifying bullet points, or dreaming up questions to ask strangers at conferences. Self-acceptance, informed enthusiasm about tackling certain kinds of problems, and authenticity builds a lot of advocates. The natural consequence of the road clients travel to build their own convictions yields opportunities, relationships, and access to the language and norms of the world you’re trying to enter.
So my best advice to everyone is to stop thinking about what “they” are looking for. Get really curious about what you’re interested in, and start talking to “them” about what it’s like. When you have found your conviction, other people will see it, too.
