Highlighting Your Achievements with Confidence

Hello, and welcome to the travelling introvert. Today, I want to talk about communicating strengths and your strengths, specifically in performance reviews. Generally speaking, introverts might struggle to speak up about their strengths, but a performance review is the key time that you really need to step into your value, show your worth. So do you want to talk about ways to frame your contributions authentically so you don't feel like you're bragging? Maybe by using stories and insights rather than oh, I did this and I'm so wonderful' while still communicating your value effectively. So you're still being authentic in the way that you're doing it, but you are showing up, you are being visible, and this will help you moving forward in your career. So the first thing really important is your mindset. Discussing your strengths and what you've brought to the team, the project, the organization isn't about bragging. What we kind of forget as individual contributors is our managers are managing not just their team, but their managers above them and have a bunch of things going on.

They might not recognize, remember, know about every single thing you've done over the past review period. So part of this is reminding them, Oh, hey, I did this thing, and part of this is making sure that they are aware of what you have done and what it has brought to the organization. It's also sharing what you've learnt and how you've learnt and what you've done. Another key thing is sort of making it storytelling, storytelling for success. We can really excel at storytelling because we think about key parts of projects, describe them in a narrative form, how did the project start, what were the challenges, what were the outcomes? Think of the things that you had to come up with to interview for this job, you had the STAR method, right? Use that in your performance review, It's the same kind of frameworks, and that's what people are looking for because it's key highlights. It's not the whole thing, but very key highlights. And the one thing that is really, really important is not necessarily focusing on the effort, but focusing on the impact of your work. So instead of thinking about listing a bunch of tasks, highlight the results that you helped achieve and how they contributed to the organization's goals.

So it's not just a laundry list of here's all the projects I worked on throughout the year, and here's all the customers I worked with blah blah blah. It's exactly when you think about writing your resume. You normally have to write down sort of very numerical related things, like, I raised the this amount of money per quarter, whatever it is. Same thing. You want to focus on the impact, the impact your work played on the bottom line, the impact your work played on the team, the impact your work played on insert thing here. It's about the impact of your work and what that brings, because the greater your impact, the better your role is. And highlighting these are really important, as well as how they link to the organization's goals. To your boss's goals is really important because if you're helping your boss achieve their goals, they look good.

And so when thinking about these things, and it can be hard to sort of shift that mindset from 'I feel like I'm bragging, I don't deserve etcetera, etcetera', try practicing. Practicing specific phrases or sentences that articulate your accomplishments and your achievements so that it's done clearly but comfortably. For example, I let a project, or insert the name of the project here, that increased efficiency by 20%, which allowed our team to meet its deadline 2 weeks early. Things like that, and the more you practice saying it, the easier it will become. You might tweak it. Even if you don't say it correct word for word when you're in your performance review, at least, even if you're nervous, you'll still get the key points. Whatever the project is, whatever the impact was, and what was the outcome, these are the really, really important things. So think about how you would prepare for an interview with that STAR method and use that for your performance reviews moving forward.

Thank you for listening, this is Janice at the Courier Introvert, helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your wee