Advocating for yourself

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Advocating for yourself is a skill. It is something that you can learn and practice. Advocating for yourself creates confidence, motivation and helps you have effective conversations with your boss. In today’s episode, I am sharing 4 tips to effectively advocate for yourself and I will share the most common reasons women find it challenging.

Topics in this episode:

  • Advocating is something that can be learned

  • 4 tips to effectively advocate for yourself

  • Focus on HOW you do things uniquely

  • Connect what you do to a greater purpose

  • Who’s job is it to advocate for you?

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Advocating for yourself is a skill. It's something that you need to learn and practice doing in order to get better at learning how to advocate for yourself creates confidence and motivation in what you do, and it helps you have effective conversations with your boss. And more than anything, it just feels really good. In today's episode, I am sharing four tips to effectively advocate for yourself, and I'll share some of the reasons why advocating for yourself can feel difficult. You ready? Let's get to it. 


Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 


Hello working moms. I hope you are having a wonderful day. It was so fun to hear from so many of you about this podcast and the impact that it is having on you and your life. 


If you didn't catch last week's episode. We celebrated episode 100 of this podcast, and I talked about the importance of celebration and what celebration does for our brain, and why it's such an important tool in creating motivation and habits. And I also invited you to email me your celebrations from this podcast. I want to hear about how this podcast has impacted your life, what's been some of your favorite episodes.


And last week, we celebrated the milestones of this podcast. But I also want to be celebrating you. So if you haven't had a chance to email me and share with me your breakthroughs, your celebrations, and the things that you're learning from this podcast, I invite you to still do that by going to rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com.


One of the things I find so fascinating is how, when one client is struggling with something, I often see it pop up with several other clients. And one of the things that has come up recently is a lot of my clients are going through annual reviews, and we are having conversations around advocating for themselves. 


So today on the podcast, I want to talk about the most effective way to do that, and I have four specific tips for you. Four tips on how to effectively advocate for yourself. And, of course, learning the skill of advocating for yourself isn't just something you do around your annual reviews, but ideally, it's something that you're doing with your boss every time you meet with them. 


And then, of course, for my clients that are looking for new jobs or looking to change careers altogether, the skill set of advocating for yourself is really important because it shows up both in interviews and on your resume and all of your correspondence. And I find that many people approach this in the wrong way or really, it's not the wrong way - It's just an ineffective way. 


The problem when people think about advocating for themselves.

The problem that I see is that when people think about advocating for themselves, they tend to focus more on what they have accomplished instead of how they accomplish it. They focus on the what instead of the how they focus on what you do or should have done. That can literally be found in your job description. It's sort of what is expected of anyone that has your job. What's more important than what you did is how you did it and why that was special. 


Here's the difference - you could say I answered all potential client inquiries in a timely fashion and sent prompt proposals. Or you could say I listened intently to potential clients and their needs, drawing connections to the work that we do and how it is an effective solution for them. Can you hear the difference between those two things? One is very focused on the nuts and bolts of what you did. One tells what you did, but also explains a bit about how you went about doing it and why it was effective. 


Here's another example: create meeting agendas and lead meetings ensuring the team stays on track and focused. Ensuring time gets used wisely versus synthesizing the needs of the team and filtering them through current company goals and providing support for the team. Ensuring that both they have a voice and feel equipped to effectively do their job. You can just feel the difference between these two. 


One sort of feels like your job duties, what you're supposed to be doing, reaching out to potential clients, sending agendas, leading meetings, and so forth. 


And one tells a bit more about how you uniquely go about doing that. Listening intently, drawing connections, creating effective solutions. Giving people a voice, equipping people to effectively do their job. 


Ask yourself, ‘what makes me special at that?’

One of the ways to get your brain focused on the how is to simply ask the question, what makes me special at that? Or how do I do that? In a unique way, literally, you can just go line item for line item on the things that you've accomplished over this past year. If we're talking about a review, and then take it one or two or even three steps deeper by asking, well, what's special about the way that I did that? 


I love answering this question, even as it relates to just simply being a mom. As moms, we all love our kids. We all make sure they are fed and they are clothed and that they are happy. We try to be present with them. We pay attention to their needs, their likes. On some level, this is our job description as a mom. But what makes you special at being a mom? What makes you stand apart from the other moms around you? 


Being an intentional mom.

I could tell you, for me, one of the things that makes me really special as a mom is how intentional I am. I'm always sparking intentional conversations at meals or while we're driving sort of in the in between moments. Every day as I walk my kids to school, I ask them, so what kind of day do you want to have today? Are you going to have a happy day? Do you want to have a fun day, a shy day? I remind them every day they have a choice on how their day plays out. 


My intentionality shows up at bedtime when I try to drop my agenda of getting out the door so that I can finally have an evening to myself. And instead, I take the time to intentionally listen to my kids' questions. I try to answer them deeply to find one thing that I can affirm them in that day. Because I know that as my kids get older, they're going to have less and less of a desire to connect with me in this way. And I want to make sure we have a foundation of openness, a habit of connection, and deep conversation. 


Intentionality almost just feels like a superpower to me. It's what sets me apart as a mom, maybe even as a human being, a person. But I know that that's not everybody. There's a very special and unique way that you show up as a mom, and it creates a lot of confidence when you start naming that for yourself. 


And then, of course, you could do the same exercise as you think about your job and the way you go about the various things that you do. If you are preparing for an annual review or you're needing to write your own annual review, there's a written portion of that where you have to share all of the things that you did this past year, or maybe you're just preparing for a regular conversation that you have with your boss. I encourage you to write down the things that you did or have done, things that you've actually accomplished, and then just go one item at a time. 


Focus on the how, not the what.

Considering what you did that contributed to that, that was unique or special, the way you went about doing that, that was really impactful to the company or to its effectiveness. Focusing on the how, not the what. That's tip number one. 


Advocating for yourself comes a lot easier when you're feeling confident.

In a lot of ways, what we're talking about is confidence. Advocating for yourself comes a lot easier when you're feeling confident. And one of the reasons why I see women lack confidence or in many ways feel like an impostor, it's because they focus too much on what they don't do well or what they don't accomplish, instead of redirecting their brain to the things that they do do well and the things that they've actually progressed in. 


The Progress Effect,

I spoke a lot about this last week on the podcast as I talked about celebrating and celebrating progress. It's called The Progress Effect, and people that advocate for themselves well are able to see their progress and feel really good about it and see it or label it as being enough just because you focus your brain on progress made, it doesn't mean that you're ignoring areas of growth or things that you still need to do.


 And I have to stop my clients a lot when we start talking about things that they're doing really well, or the progress they're making, because they often want to add a, ‘yeah, but I got through that presentation and it went really well, but I didn't feel prepared enough. I turned in that proposal, but I was able to stay present and focused while I was playing with my kids, but I had to send a couple of emails first.’ 


Whenever there's a but, it is your brain undermining the progress that you've made. 

And when you're advocating for yourself, there is no but, there is just progress. That is tip number two. Advocating for yourself is always a focus on progress made, and on some level, ignoring the rest. 


When you're advocating for yourself, you're almost shining a flashlight on all of the good things that you have accomplished and done and the unique ways you've done it, the progress that you've made, the things that you're celebrating, and you're not focusing on all of the other things. It doesn't mean that those things aren't there or they don't exist. Just when you're advocating for yourself, you're just pointing the flashlight at one side of the perspective, one side of the story that you want to share. 


Connect what you do to a greater purpose.

The third tip to advocating for yourself is to connect what you do to a greater purpose. Now, when it comes to your annual review, your boss wants to see how your work furthered the company. They want to see how your work connected to the greater goals of the team. The work that you do is not isolated. It's a part of a greater system. And that system exists to further the company's mission or the company's profit. You need to connect the dots for your boss instead of waiting around for them to do it for you. 


I have a client that works for a very large company and supports some of the internal teams of that company, versus supporting some of the outwardly, focused teams, like the sales teams, or people that are bringing in actual money into the company. And at times, she really struggles to see how her work is moving the company forward. And we have spent some time in our sessions really diving into why that internally focused team that she supports, why they matter to the greater whole of the company, and what would happen if they didn't have her support. One thing is 100% clear: 


If you don't know or don't see how your work connects to the bigger goals or vision or mission or bottom line of your company, nobody else will either. 


And I'm calling that tip number four to stop believing that anyone else should know your value. Your boss should not know the value that you bring to your company. Your CEO should not know the value that you bring to your company. Your partner should not know the value that you bring to your family - it would be nice if they had that perspective. It would be useful. It would be honoring. It would probably feel really good. But it's not their job to know it. It is your job to know it and to communicate it. 


It is your job to know your value and to communicate it.

Often the most useful thing for you to believe is that it is your job to know your value and to communicate it. Most people don't sit around and think about the value of other people. In fact, I would call that a very unique person that does that on a regular basis, that considers their teammates or their friends or their partner and considers how deeply valuable they are in this world, in their company or as a friend. 


Take a moment and just think about someone that you really admire. Maybe it's a coworker or a friend or a boss. I just want you to start bringing to mind the things that you admire about them, the things that they're really good at, the things that make them good at what they do, and valuable at their job. When you think about those things, you probably feel really good thinking about them, right? Those thoughts really solicit really good feelings. 


Now imagine soliciting those same good feelings about yourself because you're focusing on all of the things that you do well and the contributions that you make uniquely to your company and to your team and to this world because you see yourself as special. Imagine the confidence that would flow out of you if you took the time to really consider what you do and how important it is. 


In other words, coming back to my last tip, tip number three - if you are connecting what you do to the greater purpose…and I'm not going to lie, this is hard if you are not in a regular habit of directing your brain to the things that you do and why they matter and why you're special and the things that you do and how you do them and how they're special. When you sit down to think about these things and write them down, they're not going to come easily to you. That's not because you're not special or unique or valuable. You're just not practicing and thinking about it. That's okay. It's just time to start practicing. 


Now, I know a lot of the examples that I've talked about in this podcast are about advocating for yourself in your job, like in an annual review. That's really where the idea of this podcast even came from for me. But these same tips apply even if you're just simply advocating for yourself in a meeting. If you're someone that simply has a hard time speaking up for yourself, either to share about your accomplishments and how valuable they are, or just to speak up, or just to share your ideas in a meeting - all of these things, all these tips apply. 


Because, if you know that you have a really good idea and you believe it's valuable, and you know how good you would be at executing it, and you see how it fits into the bigger picture or the greater goals of the company, when your brain sees all of those things, you will have an easier time speaking up and advocating for it. 


It's when you are not so sure about yourself. You're not sold on your own ideas and how they're amazing and how they are relevant. That is when you likely back down. 


Now, it could be that you are in fact very sold on your ideas and on you and your ability to execute. It's just that it feels bad to advocate for yourself and your ideas. And likely it feels bad because it feels like you're gloating or you're bragging about yourself or inevitably, if you and your ideas move forward, it means that someone else and their ideas are not. And that feels bad. 


I remember I had a client that came to me in one of our sessions and told me that she'd gotten promoted. But she said it to me with this sort of sense of disappointment. There wasn't a celebratory element to it, they weren't very excited about it. And it was because she knew that because she got this promotion, it meant that one of her colleagues did not. And that made her feel bad and it made her feel like she could not receive all of the good feelings of being promoted because that would exacerbate the other person's disappointment in her mind. 


People pleasers have a difficult time receiving praise.

People pleasers generally have a difficult time receiving praise and promotion and rewards and advocating for themselves because of the potential effect that that might have on another person. They are very concerned about its effect on other people. And if this is you, I just want you to know, I see you. 


Your love for people is an asset to the work that you do and it's also a hindrance to your self promotion and your confidence. 


I've worked with a lot of people pleasers helping them to learn how to advocate for themselves and to feel confident in what they do and why they do it and why it matters. And I can tell you that for a while, promoting yourself and advocating for yourself and your work, it feels really uncomfortable. Not because it's a bad thing. Not because you're doing something wrong by elevating your thoughts about yourself, but because you have created a habit in downplaying yourself in an effort to elevate other people and learning to advocate for yourself and to see the value in what you do and the way you do things and the specialness of who you are and the things that you accomplish that does not actually take away from other people's uniqueness and specialness. There is in fact, no comparison. 


And you might have to feel selfish or a little bit prideful in order to learn how to advocate for yourself. Being willing to feel those emotions might just be your ticket to feeling more confident and good about yourself in your work and learning how to speak up for yourself. 


The only thing that ever gets in the way of us doing something that we want to do is not wanting to feel the icky feelings that come with it.

I like to tell my clients that really the only thing that ever gets in the way of us doing something that we want to do or taking a step towards a goal. In this case, it would be learning how to advocate for yourself. Like, the only reason someone does not follow through with the thing they want to do is an icky emotion that they don't want to feel. 


And learning how to feel those emotions, to process them in a healthy way, to not hold on to them or carry them around in like a heavy backpack on your back, that is the ticket to being able to follow through with your goals, and in this case, advocate for yourself. Let's recap for a moment. 


Recap.

Tip number one in advocating for yourself is to focus on how you do something uniquely, not what you do really find the specialness or the uniqueness about the way you do things. 


Tip number two is to focus on progress. 


Tip number three, advocating for yourself is to connect what you do to the greater purpose or mission of your company or in your life or in this world. 


And number four is to see it as your responsibility and your responsibility alone when it comes to advocating for yourself, knowing how special and important you are, and then communicating that out. 


Working moms, I would love to help you feel more confident, to believe in yourself and your work and your potential. This is the foundation of what I do in coaching with all of my clients. 


I help them to know themselves and believe in themselves at a higher level so that their goals become easier and their life feels more happy and free. If you're looking for a process to help you feel more confident and believe in yourself at a deeper foundational level, I would love to connect with you. Schedule a free breakthrough call with me to talk about where you're at and exactly how coaching is going to help. 


You can just go to rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to schedule a time to connect with me. I would love to hear from you and help you reach all of your goals this year to feel amazing about yourself and your work and ultimately feel in control of your happiness. 


Working moms - Believe in yourself, advocate for yourself, know your worth, know how it connects to the greater purpose. You are an amazing, remarkable individual that brings so much to your company and to your families and to this world. You are necessary. I believe it, I want you to believe it about yourself. All right, working moms until next week, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson