What results is the classic recipe for career unrest: in an effort to please parents, spouses and peers, to live up to socioeconomic expectations and myths, to try to copy the successes of others, or to generally remain "above reproach," people choose careers that are strikingly at odds with their essential nature, often without knowing they're doing it. Unless we're gifted with world-class objectivity, we find it hard to distinguish what we really want from what we think we ought to want, from what others tell us we should want, and from what's realistic to want. Is it any wonder that, when trying to figure ourselves out and set career objectives and priorities, we can't tell whether we're driving or being driven?
It is of the utmost importance that you define your most marketable skills, experiences, personal qualities, temperamental traits and other positive factors to attract employer interest. When both networking and interviewing, you must be focused, succinct and better than your competitors in highlighting your positive features. A good self-assessment will clarify what you have to sell.
However, as long as you're completing this self-scrutiny, it behooves you to have an honest, objective look at the "dark side of the moon," that is, to confront your vulnerable soft spots, aversions, deficits and areas of rigidity or inflexibility. It's unpleasant to catalog things or situations that make you uncomfortable; it's tough to confess that you're an imperfect creature. Nonetheless, these factors are an integral part of your vocational profile, and you don't make them disappear by ignoring them.
In figuring out "what to buy" in your career—as opposed to looking solely at what you can sell, understand the difference between motivations and compensations. Motivation is positive, active energy composed of raw, primary enthusiasm. It's gasoline thrown on the fire. It's up, forward, wanting more; it's fun.
Compensations represent the flip side. They're the accommodations you make to stay away from pain and vulnerability, to circumvent your demons and shortcomings, and to incorporate your glitches and blips into a life- and work-style that don't make you miserable. When psychologists speak of someone being "well compensated," they're not talking about making the big bucks; they're describing someone who's able to integrate his strengths and weaknesses into an operative style and a set of life choices that free him up to pursue his motivations.
A fundamental principle here is worth emphasizing: You cannot consistently tap into the energy provided by your sources of motivation until you've first addressed those areas and issues that require compensation.
Indeed, we have a label for people who display enormous energy directed primarily at compensation. We call them driven, and behind their backs we agree that they aren't having much fun.
Understanding your soft spots and incorporating them into the product you want to sell to employers doesn't mean that you must don a hair shirt, stake yourself out in the noonday sun and proclaim to the world, "I'm defective, unworthy and weak." Make that approach the basis of your networking and no one in his right mind will refer you to any further contacts.
Personal qualities are neither bad nor good per se. They're simply functional or dysfunctional, depending on the context in which they emerge. A strength in one setting often is a deficit in another. A person might be labeled by a critic as unassertive, disorganized, not detail-oriented, vague, abstract and impulsive and by a fan as consensus-building, flexible, not hung up on trivia, visionary, creative and spontaneous. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Instead of worrying about labels, think instead about what your temperamental qualities imply in terms of the kind of role you want and could work in comfortably. When you hold a mirror of truth up to yourself, you may want to do some relabeling to make the glass half full rather than half empty. That's okay.
The idea isn't to kid yourself or paint everything with a rose-colored brush. Describe your attributes neutrally and objectively so that you can use them to determine whether a particular job is a good fit. Shy away from yourself (its called denial) at this crucial point, and you'll get what you deserve: a job or career where you're always striving to compensate and where your motivations seem to go forever unsatisfied.
Let's say you've worked through a diligent, realistic self-assessment. You've cataloged your skills, abilities, hot buttons and blind spots and written then down. Now, when you hear the request, "Tell me about yourself," you're armed and ready.
But all this assessment has taken place behind closed doors. You're now filled with insight and self-awareness; it's time to face the final challenge, open up the hangar doors, wheel your product profile out into the sunlight, and see whether you can articulate it succinctly and confidently to someone else. Your final step is to pull all this information together into a short, coherent, interesting and memorable narrative, and practice delivering it calmly and confidently on demand.
A crucial step at the outset of any networking meeting is for you to give the contact enough information about you, without blathering on interminably or burying him in detail, so that he can put you in perspective. You should outline and practice what many career-counselors call "the two-minute drill", which is a brief introductory summary that covers level roles and functions and setting, as well as your technical skills, transferable abilities and personal qualities. Your summary doesn't have to be confined to two minutes, but if it stretches out past five minutes, you're probably going into too much detail or sliding into a sales pitch.
In today's real world, you have to add two additional bits of information: (1) The Tale ("Why are you in the job market? Why are you making a career shift?") and (2) The Objective Statement ("What do you want to do next?"). Understand that the job market is a skeptical, defensive and overcrowded place and that projecting a clear focus to a networking contact will involve addressing the issue of why this, why now?
Even though it adds to the stress, let's reemphasize that your two-minute drill has to be interesting as well as succinct. This is your sound track; if you can't communicate interest in what you're presenting, no one else will be interested either. There's a common tendency among networkers to rattle off a sequential list of past jobs and hope the contact will draw all the proper inferences.
That approach is not good enough. Your summary statement should cover why you made the career decisions you did, what parts of your work you really enjoyed, and what aspects you can do without in the future. Feel free to comment on your prior decisions and explain where you were well-focused and where you should have given more weight.
But remember, if you can help it, no negatives. Any kind of negative sticks in the mind of the listener and dilutes the other messages being received. Keep the glass half full by avoiding negative droplets: "I flunked out." "I couldn't hack it." "I hated the place and everyone in it." "I had a problem." "They fired me." "I was asked to leave."
Almost anything can be expressed in a value-neutral way: "I took a semester off." "We had different ways of doing things." "It seemed like the thing to do at the time." "I learned that I work more comfortably in less-structured settings." "It was clear to me that my long-term career prospects would be better served in another setting."
