Managing Oneself

Managing Oneself is a guide to developing a skillful persona and learning more about your strengths, weaknesses, inclinations, and how you collaborate with others, all while making yourself more knowledgeable about how to thrive in your career.

Much like everything that holds a true, intrinsic value in life, your future success needs a foundation to lie upon. Starting from a feedback analysis, you’ll have to discover what are your strengths and weaknesses and how to work with them in any endeavor you engage with.

You can start by carrying out a feedback analysis of your key actions. Whenever you make an important decision, make a note about what your expected outcome is. One year later compare the expectation with the reality. Ask yourself what your strength and weaknesses were in the process and how they affected the outcome.

This process is highly important in your feedback analysis. In time, it’s crucial to know what your areas of strength are, and implicitly, what you should be bringing forth, and what you should be working on. Consequently, knowing your gifted areas allows you to look for skills to sustain them and enhance them.

Nevertheless, a feedback analysis also implies knowing your core values and also checking up on yourself to see if your work reflects them. Don’t work for a mission or a place that goes against your belief system, because it’ll affect your performance and moral compass.

Understanding what your collaboration style is, if you’re a reader or a listener, if you prefer to rule or listen to a leader, communicate with your team, or work solo, are all crucially defining factors of your professional persona.

Communication is a key element of anyone’s life and the network we form plays a huge role in our success story. Therefore, mastering and tailoring it to our persona is essential. The enhance your relationships, you must first acknowledge that everyone else is an individual just like you.

They have dreams, hopes, aspirations, fears, and pain points. To get things done together, you must know the strength and weaknesses of each other. Your part is to learn about your interlocutor and take responsibility for the communication. You have to let them know what you’re good at and what you want.

Stating what your expectations are, what are your values, boundaries, and work style is only going to enhance communication. However, to know what those are, you’ll have to carry on a feedback analysis, which sets the pace for all your endeavors.

Talking about a second career while you might not have the first one figured out yet doesn’t sound like something you’d want to jump straight into, but hear me out! Many people focus their…