Turning Reviews into Positive Experiences

Hello and welcome to the travelling introvert. I want to talk about confidence building and why performance reviews, regular performance reviews, are really key to helping you build your confidence. See, performance reviews are often seen as these big, bad, scary things. Generally in organizations they happen maybe once a year. If you're really lucky, more than that. But they're seen as a way to compare you to somebody else who isn't you, and that's a different problem with performance reviews. It tends to therefore trigger imposter feelings or imposter syndrome, especially when it comes to self promotion. And so I wanna talk about what that can look like in a different way, understanding the signs of those imposter feelings and using things like performance reviews to help build confidence so that your review becomes a positive experience rather than sort of this source of stress and or annoyance.

Now one thing you might find yourself doing when preparing for a performance review might be minimizing your achievements, or worse still, forgetting your achievements, or attributing your success to luck, I was in the right place at the right time, or if such and such hadn't helped me, I wouldn't have been able to do x, y, and z. But you need to go back and look at these things and these achievements and reframe these thoughts by finding the evidence in them. Oh, I did this thing. That's it. I did this thing. End sentence. No. I end this thing.

I did this thing, but blah blah blah blah blah. I did this thing. Done. One thing that might help is finding your inner advocate. Think of your reviews as an opportunity to advocate for yourself, even if you sort of, in your head, give yourself another name. How would you advocate for a friend of yours? What are the things that you would say when you have that friend who's like, oh, I'm done. I just did this thing, but it was okay. And you're like, oh my goodness.

No. It was amazing. You did this and that and the other and blah blah blah blah. Try being your inner advocate. Think of it as sharing useful information with your manager rather than selling yourself. Your manager can only know so much and there's only so much you probably told them throughout the year, and even still that I'm gonna remember because they're human. So think about sharing useful information that can get you where you where you need to be or what you need to do in your career. You can also think about sort of visualising or rehearsing, semi, that successful conversation or what a successful conversation might all look like or sound like.

You can picture yourself speaking confidently, confidently about your achievements or confidently about your inner advocates achievements. Right? And receiving positive feedback in response. Practicing it, visualizing it again and again will help you feel more at home in it, embody it, know that it's true, and using data for that information is key. Because the idea here is to overcome that self doubt that you have, that you didn't do enough, that you are not enough, or other people did better or worse than you. It's not about that. It's about saying all the things that you have achieved, how you helped your team, how you helped the organization, how you helped your boss achieve their goals, because that's what they really care about because that's where their bonus money comes from and their performance review comes from, and what that looks like. I don't know if you, you know, beforehand ask your boss or your manager or whoever it is that you're speaking to, what were your goals for this year?' and then see what you can tie into the things that you have done into their goals. The other thing before this kind of a meeting is just practice some grounding techniques to calm your nerves, like deep breathing or positive affirmations or having a dance party beforehand just to get that nervous energy out so that when you do start that review, you go in there confident and poised, but with the data and the information you need, and no one says you can't have notes, no one says you have to give an 18 minute TED talk.

You can have notes and have all that information written down there for you, that is okay. But go in there and advocate for yourself because to be honest, no one else is going to do it for you. So if you want that promotion, if you want that career change, if you want that extra project, you have to ask for it. Thanks for listening. This is Janice at The Career Introvert, helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.