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Beyond “Fake it Till You Make it”: A More Authentic Approach To Building Confidence
During the early days of my coaching career, when I said, “I am a coach,” my facial expression didn’t match it. The truth was, I didn’t feel confident about my new identity. Internally, I still saw myself as a software professional who was transitioning into coaching. And, as you can probably guess, the advice I received at the time was to “just believe it.” However, after 13 years, I’m here to tell you that I recommend a different approach. Recently, I had the pleasure of working with a woman in her mid-30s, a software development manager at a startup. Let’s call her Jessica. She struggled to talk about her strengths…
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Self-Promotion Doesn’t Have to Be Selfish
A couple of years ago, I ran a survey among tech professionals, and it came out that “Managing up/Self-promotion” was the top concern. I was not too surprised. Talking about ourselves seems opposite to humility – it contradicts our values, yet managing up is essential for reward and recognition. Over the years, I learned that it might feel more altruistic if we see it as helping our managers and others do their job better. When I became a manager for the first time at a large corporation, I got a new team from another division. Since it was close to the annual review time, their previous manager prepared their performance data for me to submit…
