I’d like to encourage you to focus on 
either what you are proud of about your career to date? What are you proud of about you as a profession? Or both? Take a breath and look at your career and your professional life from a neutral perspective to gain a refreshing insight into what you do well, what you’re proud of in your career, what you’re proud of about how you conduct yourself and the positive aspects of your professional offering and approach.
Self awareness is vital for any professional, the better you know yourself the better career decisions you’ll make on a day to day basis. You’ll also be more confident and comfortable with yourself in your professional life. Self awareness and pressing the pause button to truly reflect from an observer position on your career and how you conduct yourself professionally, your relationships with others and the type of impact you have on colleagues; the impact you make both personally and to the bottom line in your workplace is also massively important to respecting yourself and staying true to who you are.
Taking the time to be clear on what you’re most proud of in your career or yourself as a professional
How often do you pause to observe and identify what you are most proud of about you or yourself as a professional, or both, is up to you. I would recommend every quarter as a regular practice to check in with yourself and make sure you’re on track with who you want to be in your career.
When you do this make sure you are in a place where you have the space to breathe and think clearly and calmly. A quiet space, or maybe outside in nature somewhere, wherever you are most at ease.
Here are some questions to get you started
- What type of work colleague and/or manager are you?
- How would your colleagues and/or staff describe you?
- How have you interacted or supported a colleague or member of staff in the past that has made a difference to them?
- Looking back on your career, 5 to 10 years ago, what do you do now that you wouldn’t have been able to do back then?
- What have you done really well in your career recently?
- What was it about this that made you feel really good?
- What is important to you as a professional? E.g. honesty, results, motivating others, etc.
- Do you, or are you, working towards achieving those factors in the question above?
- Thinking about how you conduct yourself at work – what are your best qualities?
- What have been your biggest achievements in your career so far?
- What are you most proud of in your career, and as a professional?
- Are you happy in your career? Why?
- What is on you list to achieve and develop this year in your career?
- What progress have you made on that list? Or what lessons or new information have you learnt this quarter?
- What do you need to focus on over the next 3 months? Break it down in to small steps.
Looking at your answers to the questions above, and any other questions or thoughts that come to you as you do this exercise, how does it feel seeing your answers? What are you most proud of in your career? Were you aware of what you have written down before you did this exercise? Is there anything you want to change? Or do more of? Are you who you want to be as a person and professional in your career now? How can you be more of who you want to be?
Use this exercise as an opportunity to check in with yourself, a chance to see what you’re great at and what lights you up, what else you want to be for yourself in your career – not for anyone else. Take the time, even if its just a few minutes to be proud and feel good of the great things you have created, impacted on, achieved or contributed to. You must make time to be proud of who you are, and make the space to see where you can be even more of that.
Over to You
What are you most proud of in your career? And what is the biggest revelation you identified through this exercise? Let me know in the comments below.
Need help to working through what you want next and understanding what your definition of success is? Head over to my coaching packages page.
Have friends who would find this article useful? Share it with them using the icons below.