Welcome to the Progression Series: 4 podcasts in which I challenge the myth that career progression is only about promotions and pay rises. I introduce you to the 4 pillars of career progression that provide the best motivation for solving your Imposter Syndrome and are the key to making your experience as a lawyer so much easier and more fulfilling.
In this episode:
The 4 Pillars of Career Progression
Progressing your career is about more than a new position, a new job title and the accompanying pay rise. These have their value. But unless they are accompanied by progression in other areas, their impact on your day-to-day experience and performance as a lawyer will be limited. You just find yourself facing the same challenges and problems you did before, only now at a level where the stakes are higher and you have less support.
How is this progress?
Real career progression goes deeper and it lasts SO much longer. It’s not just about your career. It’s about progressing who you are in a way that improves your day-to-day experience of life as a lawyer.
Enter the 4 Pillars of Career Progression.
The 4 pillars of Career Progression are the 4 principal areas of lawyer life that determine how happy and successful you are in your work. They are:
- Recognition
- Confidence
- Balance
- Ease
These pillars are an essential feature of career progression. It only counts as progress if one or more of these areas is in a more advanced state than it was previously. Specifically, if you achieve one or more of the following:
- More recognition
- More confidence
- Better balance
- More ease
You don’t have to advance all 4 pillars for it to count as career progression. But the more pillars you progress, the more impactful and sustainable your career progression is. In the last 3 episodes we looked at more recognition, better balance and more confidence. The pillar we are focusing on this week is more ease.
More Ease
No-one signs up to be a lawyer because they think it’s going to be easy. Getting into, practising, and progressing in the industry seems the very definition of hard work: the long hours, the extreme pressure, the intellectual challenges, the high expectations and the huge responsibility.
There’s nothing easy about working in an industry that requires you to work this hard.
BUT having Imposter Syndrome, means the WAY you do that ‘Hard Work’ is harder than it needs to be.
When a high-pressure situation occurs, your Imposter Syndrome is triggered. Your resulting fear and anxiety make you:
- Overthink
- Overwork
- Self-sabotage, and
- Play small.
(These are the ‘4 Horsemen’, the workplace behaviours you default to when your Imposter Syndrome is triggered.)
Behaving in these ways makes an already hard situation so much harder because you are literally getting in your own way. When you overwork, overthink, play small and sabotage yourself, how can you expect to progress?
In this episode, I explain:
- Why more ease is one of the 4 pillars of career progression
- The consequences for your career progression when you get in your own way
- How to solve your Imposter Syndrome to overcome the behaviours that make your work harder
- How to measure your progress towards working with more ease
- The importance of who you become along the way.
Like the idea of working with more ease? In Imposter Syndrome Coaching you pick one of the 4 pillars of career progression as your main goal and we work through the 4-step process for solving your Imposter Syndrome to help you achieve it. Enrolment for the next class is open NOW. Join today, by clicking here.