It’s so HARD for me to talk about myself! 

I hear this a lot. And I get it. 

You don’t feel the need to shout your achievements from the rooftops. You’re a high achiever, and there’s a reason you got where you are: you spend more time showing what you can do, so you haven’t needed to talk about it. 

And to be clear, showing vs. telling is the first rule of creating a standout career profile.

But you have to promote yourself to rise above the competition. 

So, where’s the balance between obnoxious self praise and underselling yourself?

While all elements in your career profile should complement each other in promoting you as the best candidate, each plays a slightly different role in the process, and therefore works best with a nuanced tone. 

Let’s look at  the 3 main elements of your career profile—your resume, LinkedIn page, and cover letter—and how using those subtle changes in tone for each will create a compelling package that’s irresistible for the reader.

Continue reading “Is it OK to Brag?”

I don’t know about you, but my favorite Winter Olympic sport is snowboarding. Besides the fact that they seem to be free of controversy, it’s one sport where the competitors seriously look like they’re having FUN! 

Here are 5 things I learned from their performances and culture:

1. Experience still matters. Man, it was fun to watch Lindsay Jacobellis and Nick Baumgartner. They’ve both struggled in the past, as one would with that kind of longevity—but they pushed hard to the very end to win the mixed team snowboard cross, adding to Jacobellis’ gold for the individual snowboard cross the night before. One of the announcers joked that they had 76 years of experience between them. Yep.

2. Life isn’t fair, and we may not always be adequately recognized, but that’s not a reason to give up. Ayumu Hirano showed us—even with a WTF gasp-inducing score after his first completion of a triple cork, which had never been landed in Olympic competition—we don’t go off and sulk. We get back up and do it again, if for no other reason than to give the judges another chance to get it right. Thankfully, they did.

3. We can step away from our career and not lose our edge. We all know Chloe Kim is a superstar, but I didn’t realize she’d taken time off to “discover who Chloe is outside of snowboarding and then come back and be in a better mental state.” Did this sabbatical give her the refresh she needed to win her second gold? Who knows. It certainly didn’t hurt. In any case, she reminded me that doing so doesn’t mean we have to forfeit our chances for continued success. 

4. Even if we compete in an individual sport, we can be part of a team. Nothing says community like a bunch of snowboarders. Watching the other snowboarders pile on top of Anna Gasser after she became the first female snowboarder to land the triple cork, or Baumgartner’s rival wrap his arms around him as Jacobellis rushed to the finish line was so darned refreshing, and another reminder that there’s always room to celebrate others—even if they’re our direct competition.

5. We can fall. We can fall in a messy way. It’s OK. It’s what we do afterward (and before!) that matters. That’s what legacies are made of. Thanks for a great run, Shaun White!

In 2020, I finally admitted to myself that my days of running were over, and with my gym closing and my devoted canine companion Clover staring up at me with her beseeching brown eyes, I committed to walking every day. Mind you, although this was something I enjoyed doing periodically with friends, walking was never an activity I relished doing solo.

So, how was I going to get myself out on the trail? I’m a big fan of pairing fun activities with what seem to be mundane (albeit necessary) ones to make the latter a little easier. I’m one of those who like a little sugar to help the medicine go down.

The first step was to distract myself by listening to the Godmother of podcasters, Terry Gross. And lo and behold, I soon found that I could actually forget the task at hand. Since then, I’ve built a library that includes all kinds of topics, from the writing craft to meditation to comedy. I got so into podcasts over the past year that I even launched my own.

Continue reading “My Gift to You: A Career Podcast Playlist”