How to amplify your confidence
Many people describe their careers as just ‘happening’ to them (‘well I kind of fell into it, ‘I never planned to be a …’, ‘this area wasn’t something I was seriously looking at, but I just seemed to find myself here’).
Our advice is to explore various alternatives (roles, organisations, etc.) and then pick your career path and OWN IT. People who decide to follow a particular career direction or a specific type of organisation (size, culture, structure) report greater confidence, happiness, and engagement with their work. Mainly because it was their decision.
To help you decide, you could use Edgar Schein’s career anchors questionnaire to find the type of career that might work best for you.
Listen to The Strengths Guy podcast, How to get the career you want – ikigai x strengths = your killer career, check this out if you are still at this stage.
Put your strengths to work
As well as owning your path, getting to know your strengths is vital. By becoming in tune with what makes you, potential employers will instantly be drawn to you. With this knowledge, you can truly be yourself, which is your most significant contribution.
So, we recommend you gain a good understanding of your strengths. What you enjoy, do well naturally, and where you have the greatest potential. We also believe it’s worth developing confidence in presenting these strengths and differences in ‘employer-friendly’ language before applying for target job roles.
Keep working on these strengths – developing and investing in their value so that you believe. Employers will see that you have the potential to become even more effective in your favoured areas of strength.
When you use your strengths, you’re showing an employer or future employer:
- Who you are at your best – your strengths describe the unique contributions you offer
- How you’ve worked on your self-development – showing you have the knowledge to achieve your personal goals and those of the business.
- You are in control of your career and know what you enjoy/don’t enjoy – with knowing your strengths and how to use them you are able to direct your career on a successful path.
All this strengths development and learning makes you feel more confident that you can do the job and create value. This is what your leader will see and will ultimately trust you and your judgment when it comes to your career development.
Tips to staying positive between or transitioning roles
Understanding how to use resilience can be effective.
- Think of the job search process as an opportunity to stretch yourself
- Consider roles that have larger or that is new to you
- Use rejections as sources of energy and inspiration
Develop career-resilience
Getting good at dealing with change (in a role, structure of work, organisation, or career) has become an essential skill in today’s job market.
An effective way to develop career resilience is understanding how to use your strengths to navigate change. Knowing how to navigate change, you need to become clear on any risk areas that may get in the way of your performance with that extra pressure and stress of a transition.
Here are some basic steps on how to build resilience:
- Taking charge and controlling the situation that is causing stress
- Mastering your mindset and making a choice about how you perceive uncertain, unwanted, or stressful situations
- Optimise your strengths and energy to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome
- Building strong social support to act as a protective factor during stressful times
- Embrace the challenge and keep growing and developing
Listen to Dr. Paul Brewerton in this podcast, Building resilience in 5 steps to get a better in-depth look at developing resilience.
A quick and practical example with strengths:
If you know that you can use your strengths to understand new colleagues and build rapport with them quickly, this will give you more confidence to move from team to team, role to role, or even organisation to organisation.
And if you know that your Relationship-building strength can sometimes mean that you say ‘yes’ too often and too quickly, particularly in the early stages of building relationships, as well as having fewer Execution strengths to get things done, then this should help you keep your strengths in check and in balance when experiencing the increased pressure of a new job.
Get more with strengths and read, Overcoming early-career challenges, a strengths story.
Use the Strengthscope® Handbook for your career development
The Strengthscope® Handbook showcases all 24 strengths and describes how they can be developed and stretched to become even more powerful tools to help drive your career forward.
We also provide clear advice on using your unique strengths to maximize your effectiveness when finding and changing job roles. This book will prepare you to demonstrate your value through your strengths. Use them to stay motivated as you transition jobs.
So, using our Strengthscope® Handbook can help you develop each of your individual strength ‘muscles’ and put them to the service of your career.
Dr Paul Brewerton, co-creator of the Strengthscope® Profiling System
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