How to survive public facing roles

Hello and welcome to the not so the travelling introvert. Today, I want to talk about people or client facing jobs. A lot of the time, the assumption is as introverts, we can't do client facing or public facing or high touch jobs. And that is not the case. I know I've spoken about how I used to work in casinos, and that is very much a people skills job, but I want to just talk about some ways that could help you through when you're thinking about jobs or you're in a job that is a people facing job.

 

So one of the things that I talked about was the fact that even though the casino job was very people facing, we got brakes on a regular basis. So that was one of the reasons why that job was a really good fit for me was because I got a lot of downtime in between the people facing time. And most jobs have that cadence. There are very few jobs where you are facing and dealing with people all the time. And even if that is the case, there are ways of finding those moments of solitude within that that help you recharge.

 

For example, if you have a job where you're on the road a lot and you're going to sales meetings or client meetings and going to different offices, that time in between when you're not at the client's site where you are planning the trip, sending emails or just travelling to said site is your gift of downtime. That's when you can go ahead and recharge and think things through and gain second wind or third wind. So you might have five meetings a day, but in between and that might just be like a busy period of the month. A lot of people have a cadence with their jobs where the start of the month is really busy or the end of the month is really busy. But the middle two weeks are not as busy.

 

Use those middle weeks as and block out time to do focused work and recharge work. Every type of job has a cadence, and it is for you to find that cadence and make it work for you.

 

And that's like one of the things that you need to think about when you're thinking, oh, no, it's a people facing job. I can't do that. That's not necessarily true. It's just finding a way that works for you. Now, say you're in a sales role, and a lot of people, when they think about sales roles, are like, you have to talk all the time and you have to go ahead and smooth.

 

And that's not necessarily the case. A lot of the times, it's a lot of emails, a lot of the time, it's just listening to the other person, figuring out what their specific wants are, what their pain points are, because they could be talking about one thing, but really what they need help with is something else. So one thing that you can do to help you get through that or figure out what works for you is to role play do it on a regular basis in different ways that people could react to you and figure out what you would say and what you would do just like you would practice for an interview to make sure that you feel comfortable do the same thing for that role and you know, if you're more of a phone person then use the phone more. If you're more of a text person, you know, use asynchronous messaging like figure out a way that works for you and even if you still end up not liking phone calls, you'll figure out a way that works for you to have these phone calls. Whether it's making sure that there is an agenda before the phone call or whether it's making sure that phone calls are done on a certain week or a certain time that works for you, begin thinking about what you want from that phone call and even in meetings it's really interesting how many times people will set up a meeting on a calendar but don't explain what they want from that meeting.

 

When you think about is it you want to sell a service, you want to request feedback, what is it you want from that call and then work backwards to the steps that you need to take to make that happen and some of that stuff might be have to do before the call.

 

Another thing is thinking about like icebreakers and that sort of a thing have some topics that you're quite happy to talk about whether traffic, art, restaurants, whatever it might be, have those as handy things that you are happy to talk books that you are happy to talk about when you have to talk about something unexpected and don't forget you can't control everything and that's okay because you learn along the way. Thank you for listening. This is Janice@thecareerintovert.com helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.