Fighting your career doubts? Embrace them instead.

When it comes to a job search, we all have doubts about not being good enough or not having the right set of skills, accomplishments, or degrees. We fear questions that may point at weaknesses or gaps in our experiences. I know it first hand, since I’m looking for opportunities to join corporate world again. And I found a great way to deal with the doubts I’d like to share with you.

You know what you are good at, it’s all over your resume, but you can still hear some negative voices in your head. The first step is to listen to those critical voices instead of pushing them away. Here is some of what I hear:

• Your experience is all in engineering and customer support, which won’t help you at all to get to HR. What are you thinking?!
• Other people have all sorts of certificates and you only have one degree from a strange country. Why should they care?
• You took a year off, which looks like you bailed out. That doesn’t look good!
• Yes, you believe you can manage people, but you haven’t done it before. Where is the proof?
  

As I’m writing these sentences, I feel my self-confidence shrinking. But I am who I am with all my experiences, so the next step is to embrace the reality.

How can I reframe these doubts in a way that wouldn’t deny the truth and would actually make me feel empowered?

Let’s try:

• I have a wide range of business experience from product development to customer support. That is definitely valuable to any person in HR working with various roles across organization.
• My master’s degree in education is a strong foundation. It allowed me to grow from teaching to training and it is very much related to my life long passion around employee development. Over time I’ve added experience and coursework related to communication, coaching, conflict resolution, collaboration… to build on that foundation.
• When I do something, I do it all the way. Therefore, when I got interested in gaining expertise in my coaching skills, I decided to focus on it 100%. I knew that if I tried to do both – my job and coaching – I wouldn’t be able to do the job to my standards and the team would suffer. My managers supported this step as it aligned with my long-term career vision around empowering individuals and teams.
• Even if I didn’t have a specific manager position, I’ve demonstrated managerial and leadership skills in each of my roles – aligning my goals with the broader strategy, helping people grow as a mentor, trainer, or a coach, or delegating work to leverage people’s strengths. I believe I was intentionally building my leadership skills over last 15 years and am now ready to put them into practice.
  

By reframing the critical messages, I feel the doubtful voices in my head losing their strengths. I’m having a dialogue with them, acknowledging what they are saying and looking at the messages from the point of advantage.

Your career journey is different from the journeys of other people. And for any company to see the benefits of your unique journey, you have to be able to first believe in it yourself.