I thought that was normal. More than that, I thought it was the only way.
The irony in that is that I was an award winning marketer at the time. I used to develop and expertly position products day in, day out, and yet when it came to me, I didn’t apply any of those skills.
It was easy to choose to believe that changing career to become a Coach and Consultant was a risk. On the surface it looked like my background didn’t have any relevance at all in that new world. And for many years I stuck with this belief. And then I realised. I am the product. Susie the human being, not Susie the line items on my CV. When I think about what made me a high performer, it was my attitude, my persistent consistency, my commercial focus and my honour – I delivered the products and projects that I said I would. In other words, I could be trusted to have clear purpose and commitment to keep going until success was achieved.
Today, you are my product. Marketing yourself is no different from marketing anything else. A winning product has to be highly relevant and aligned with the target market’s needs and desires. If you can be the answer to someone else’s perceived problem, then you are winning.
The chances of you matching these up are impossible. The job that is perfect for you doesn’t exist yet, because you haven’t created an awareness of the need yet.
When I say this to my clients, their minds are blown. Then they realise the power of what I said. The jobs that you are looking at online and considering applying for right now are way too comfortable for you. They have been lived in before, expectations have been set about how they might be done, and there is a concept of what good performance in that role looks like already. But…
There is no competition for the job that you will do and love at some point in the near future. It’s up to you to create the vision for your future, and your roadmap to it.
We all know what we would love to do, or have never done, but are interested in. What is the role you would love to do? The sooner you are clear on what it is that you want to do at work, and where you want to spend your time, the better. Whatever it is, write a list of all the things you are excited about. What are all the things you would love to work on next, or in the future?
Here are five easy steps to fast-track your positioning for this using LinkedIn. This is an extract from my book Be The Leader You Want To See. If you want to do the whole preparation for these steps you can get your copy here.
Have a look at your LinkedIn profile and compare it with your wish list. Chances are, it mirrors your CV and shows all the things you were responsible for or have delivered in the past. But remember, what got you here won’t get you to the new place that you have envisaged. Reframe all the things you have written on your CV so people can see how they lay the ground for the vision you have created. Delete stuff that doesn’t contribute – that means things you didn’t enjoy, things that have no relevance to the job you want to do. You don’t want to be hired for something you never want to do again.
You have cleaned up the past to fit your vision for the future. Now you have to focus on your present contribution. Communicate where you are now by making sure your daily activity on LinkedIn aligns with your goals.
Rob McCargow is a great example of this – once an executive recruiter, he is now a leading voice on AI, and there is rarely a tech or AI conference that he doesn’t speak at. This is because he mined his experience for what made the greatest impact – networking, communication, and commercial awareness – and he used these to remarket himself. It took time for Rob to find his purpose and decide what he was going to become well known for. It is possible, though, to go from no one to expert in as little as six weeks on LinkedIn. I achieved that as a telepresence managed service specialist long before LinkedIn was even a thing, purely because of focus. How? Because I talked about nothing else. I was prolific, so people would put me and telepresence together in most sentences. That’s what you are doing here – becoming the obvious choice from your focus on one thing.
Create articles on your thoughts about your single vision. If you are stuck, writing a discussion piece is a great approach. Raise a question in the title that you are interested in, and share your views, experience and questions on it. Inviting comment will attract all the people with an opinion in your area whose posts you can then focus on.
Define the top ten skills that fit the role you want and ask five people a week to endorse you for them. Delete all the other ones that conflict. I had to do this when I wanted to shift from being a product specialist to a leadership one. People still endorse me for my product skills, but this chapter will show you how I have spun that to be relevant to leadership and positioning people for top jobs. What is coaching, really? It is helping people to match themselves to the environment they want. That’s just top-class marketing as far as I am concerned! See how I have mined my past to make it relevant to my future? Not only that – it makes me trusted as a coach who has the ability to do that well.
As you do more and more relevant work, and you get recognition for it, ask people in real time to send you a recommendation. Don’t give them a week to do it because they will forget. Ask them if they have five minutes to do it now. It is important to get energetic words into your profile so that when recruiters and people in your organisation are looking (because believe me, they are), you stand out for all the right reasons. Social proof is more powerful than anything else when it comes to getting introductions into new areas. If you make clear what you care about, what you’d love to learn and where you want to be next, people will hire you because you stand out – they can teach you the knowledge that you don’t have yet. Remember, it only took me six weeks to be the expert in telepresence. That’s only the equivalent of the school summer holidays.
I can’t wait to see your thought leadership on Linked‑In! Connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/susie-ramroop-mindset-coach – oh, and if this has been helpful, I’d be grateful for your review on Amazon. Thank you!
Susie qualified as a Performance Coach in 2006, to enhance her skills as an award-winning leader of global product development; connecting her natural style in energising people to take action, with her empathy. Realising it was OK to be herself in leadership, she set about helping other high performers to get clarity and engage support such that their personal fulfilment fuels their careers.
Nothing gets past Susie – she sees all your brilliance and will call out limiting behaviour so you surrender chuckling. Susie is an articulate, empowering, and occasionally hilarious speaker, who brings laser focus and an enormous heart to sustainable growth. She is the author of Be The Leader You Want To See and leads the utterly transformational Reset Retreat.
She loves to connect with readers – you can find her here:
