Career Confidence and Soul Searching

Career confidence is that deep-seated feeling that you are an expert. You know you have what it takes to deliver exactly what your executive team and your customers are seeking.

You will never get to a sense of career confidence, however, without some serious soul searching. This sense of expertise matched with well-being can come only from an honest evaluation of yourself and your accomplishments.

Questions you should be asking yourself:

• What benefit do you provide your current / past employers?
• What problems do you typically solve?
• What is your biggest career accomplishment?
• How do you know that you “got it right” with a customer or stakeholder?
• What is your success rate with your career portfolio (executive resume, LinkedIn, cover letter, executive biography, and so on), as your career portfolio ought to be a powerful representation of your overall history.

Now go back and answer these questions again. Leave off the single-phrase answers you might have offered yourself. These are just your starting points; now amplify them. Expand on the problems you face, the specific excellence that you bring to the table, and the powerful outcomes you have delivered. Because you are an executive, these might be page-long expansions of a complex scenario with many moving parts.