Why Your Career “Moments” Are So Important

As you emerge from career chaos and establish your non-negotiables, your professional confidence should grow. Keep in mind that this is a process of evolution, not a revolution, and your next logical step is to build career confidence. Taking the form of career moments, these reminders act as your daily confidence boost. Your career moments typically go unnoticed, are quickly forgotten or you fail to take credit for them. Yet they are vital to building confidence.

What Are Your Key Career Moments?

Broken into three different categories, your key career moments are defined by your daily micro moments, career momentous moments and future DIY moments. They could be events, interactions, projects, meetings, etc., that you have taken part in, do regularly or daily that are often taken for granted both by you and by others.

By considering and breaking them down, you put yourself in control of your career. Familiarity with your career moments not alone grows your confidence but also prepares you for interviews, keeps your CV up-to-date and most importantly refamiliarises you with your career story.

60-Second Rule

As you know, here at A Career to Love HQ, we are big fans of writing and recording things in your favourite notebook. Once you have your non-negotiables established, change the focus of your 60 seconds per day to working on your momentous moments.

3 Key Questions

Keep these three key questions in mind as you record your key career moments.

What was the most notable part of your moment?

What was the worst part of it?

And perhaps most significantly – What did you learn from it?

Bear in mind that not every moment has to be successful, it might be a learning experience or something that you considered (dare I say it) a failure but was nonetheless a formative part of your journey to date.?

Career Momentous Moments

Momentous Moments are the big ones. Often archived to the annals of career history it’s time to dig deep to rebuild your confidence.

No matter how chaotic your career may feel now at one point, or some point, you have had success. Think about some of these scenarios-

1. Interview success for your first role, your current role or for a promotion
2. Your graduation
3. Negotiating a raise or flexible work hours,
4. Getting laid off or made redundant,
5. Headhunted for a role,
6. Landing a big deal at work or a new client,
7. Strong or negative performance review,
8. Managed a crisis well,
9. Took proactive steps to manage your own career,
10. Made a presentation on a project you worked on,

You get the idea. Your momentous moments are made up of the major events that mark your career path to date.

Daily Micro-Moments

Your micro-moments are the small parts of your daily routine. They are the things that you take for granted or don’t even notice anymore. The devil is in the detail so record what you did well today, what you didn’t do so well and what you learned. This creates self-awareness that ultimately builds confidence. Some of your micro moments might include-

1. Getting to the end of the daily to-do-list,
2. Organising the work flow for next week,
3. Returning calls to key clients to cover off questions,
4. Supporting a work colleague under pressure,
5. Managing a difficult situation with a customer
6. Encouraging your team to work together to keep momentum going,
7. Chairing a meeting,
8. Hitting your KPI or reaching 100% billing hours.

Again, the small things that you do every day are recorded here.

Future DIY Moments

Your DIY moments are the things you keep meaning to do to but never seem to get done. No more thinking or talking, its time to take control, one small step at a time. Start by naming a task you want to master and tackle it. Pick one single item per week, or a slightly more challenging one per month or choose tiny things daily – whatever works for you.

But the important thing – do something. It might be going to a networking event, starting a course to fill a skill lacuna, updating your CV, catching a coffee with a work colleague or inviting a client to lunch. Whatever you choose, make it personally meaningful and important, commit to it, do it and record it.

Once you think about and record your key career moments you begin to re-engage with your career story you can begin to look with confidence to your future career.

Next week

How to figure out your call to action and move from thinking to doing.

By Sinead Brady

@CareertoLove