My 'work husband' had asked me to go for brunch during our holiday break. He and I had worked together for five years before both of us were promoted to work on a very prestigious team. It was full of high performers who seemed to work all hours of the day and consistently exceeding their performance numbers.
I got to cover one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
And I felt the pressure.
Six months had flown by and I thought my work husband and I were going out to celebrate the fact we were ahead of our numbers. We went to my favorite brunch spot in DC.
“Hey, I need to be honest with you.” With those words, my stomach sank just as I was about to cut into my egg benedict.
“Oh… okay,” I said as I turned on my swivel stool to face him. I rested my elbow on the counter of the bar.
“I’m not sure how to say this the best way, but here goes. I’m having a hard time doing my job because you’ve changed. Ever since you took this job, you’ve been multitasking, You’re working on emails during meetings instead of paying attention to what’s going on, you’re not noticing how customers are reacting and sending out the correct follow ups.”
Whoa.
Instead of egg benedict, I was eating humble pie.
He went on, “And worst of all, you’re emailing on Friday nights and the weekends without even taking the time to understand my new role and how to best set me up for success. So you send me tons of emails not realizing that it takes you only 2 seconds to send me a request but it requires me to spend twenty minutes to over an hour to get you the answer.”
Oh shit, there was more.
“You are aggressive and all you care about is the number and not the customers. It’s not fun to work with you anymore. This goes against everything you ever wanted to be so I felt like we needed to talk about it.”
And with that, I was forever positively impacted. I was grateful he had the courage to give me honest feedback and invest in a difficult conversation
Though I thought of myself as being self-aware, my stress had me on autopilot, distracted and anywhere but in the present moment.
The bottom line: I wasn't mindful of my actions, nor the impact the stress had on me.
That year I developed a proven process that lead me to exceed my goals.
Most of us are currently in the process of building out our goals for 2020, but how can we expect to crush our goals without truly understanding our blind spots (the difference between how we think we act and how we actually show up)?
If you want to get that promotion, you need to banish blind spots through becoming more self-aware.
You can learn more about how developing self-awareness helped me reach my health goals and my tips for avoiding becoming “that person in the office”.
But I want to go a bit deeper with you and provide you a whole step by step process to ensure by this time next year you have identified your blind spots and exceeded your goals.
In the Membership, you can access content like this every month.
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