Your Professional Reputation™

By Katy Caroan:

When returning from a conference or a seminar, how often do you recall the passion from the presenters? What do you remember afterwards, and why?

First impressions are key to maintain the attendees’ focus and engagement with the presenter. Sometimes, templates are provided to the presenters to share a few personal things before kicking off the main topic, such as “My strengths are….”, “My biggest challenge is…” and “In my leisure time, I like to …” How effective are such introductions, and how good are we at triggering the interest of the audience? It doesn’t really matter whether you are facing a large group of people or your potential employer, when you are given the opportunity to make a lasting first impression, the ambition should be to position yourself for new business opportunities or a new job.

I often see people stumble and blow a great opportunity: “I’m pretty good at…”, “In my leisure time, do x, y, z” and “My biggest challenge is improve on my weaknesses”.

What’s missing? The PASSION and the CONFIDENCE!

I would love to hear people say: “I’m good at x and y”, “My biggest challenge is to stop a and do more of b” and “I love what I do because…”. It takes knowledge and skills to introduce yourself confidently in this way. In my experience, having a profound understanding of your professional reputation – how others perceive you – is key to master the art of introducing yourself to an audience of strangers.

It takes practice, though – I practice all the time.

By Katy Caroan:

Are you telling yourself it’s too late …..too late to make big changes in your career? Or, are you in a position where you find it hard to know if you are making the right decisions to move in your career and put them on hold …just a little bit longer? What do you need in order to feel comfortable in making the first step towards a career move?

There is no simple answer to these questions, but they seem to trigger a need to understand how others perceive you professionally. So, what do other people say about you professionally when you are not present? Key indicators, such as your perceived ambition, dedication, drive and entrepreneurial mindset will give you the courage you need to make the first step. In fact, the very first step should be to read our special report to get more inspiration. We’d like to get your comments. But more importantly, we’d love you to start thinking about the window of opportunities ahead of you after making the first step.

By Katy Caroan

When asked, some of my clients tell me they’ve made previous career moves by coincidence. This is a GREAT starting point for any coach who wants to help clients become more conscious about values, limiting beliefs, automatically generated thoughts as well as comfort zones related to their professional lives.

“Why were you recommended for that specific job?”

“Why did you decide to accept or decline that specific job opportunity?”

“Why did others get the opportunities you REALLY wanted?”

The process of becoming more conscious about career decisions is strongly supported by insights of your professional reputation. But this is not enough, you need to take action, challenge your comfort zones and communicate with the stakeholders of your career and make it easy for them to support you in the process. It starts with YOU and is vitally import to your current and future employers for retention purposes.

Imagine what you could do if you became more conscious about your own career moves.