54 | Struggling with Visibility? Try these 5 steps first.

In this episode, we're tackling one of the trickiest aspects of career growth: visibility.

We all know that being visible in the workplace is key to advancing and reaching new levels of success. However, many of us struggle with actually putting ourselves out there and making ourselves known.

I'm going to share five simple steps to get you started.

1. Brainstorm
2. Focus
3. Identify blocks
4. Problem-solve
5. Commit

And remember, you don't have to do everything at once - simple steps can lead to progress.

xo

Liz

Well, Hey there, I'm Liz St. Jean, and this is the Rise in your Nine to Five podcast. Where I help quietly ambitious leaders who want to have meaningful and fulfilling careers, making an impact in the world. It's where strategy meets intuition to become a better leader with more joy, less stress and endless impact.

So let's break free from perfectionism, imposter thoughts. And that inner rule keeper that keeps you in a career comfort zone. It's time to become unapologetically you. And step into the life you were meant to live. We're going to talk presence, productivity, and having it all. Or as my four-year-old would say, we're going to take over the world. So let's get to it.

Hi, I'm Lou Stine. I'm with the Minta Ambition. As you likely know, you're here in the Facebook group and I help quietly [00:01:00] ambitious professionals. I. Get promoted and do it with integrity. So without feeling too gross about it, right? Cause that sometimes comes up for people.

Okay. So what I'm doing again is Saturday morning again and I wanted to try it I, which was to do a live training for the podcast. So I you, as you know, hopefully you know that I have a podcast rise in your nine to five, and I just thought it'd be fun to try this out for a few weeks, where I will give a live training on Saturday mornings that will then go onto the podcast.

So on today's training, if you saw the title already, it's about increased visibility. And the reason that I wanted to do this training was because on last episode , what we talked about was what I call the three by three framework for getting tapped for a promotion.

And I asked people to reach out and let me know. Which elements of that framework were the most challenging or people felt like they struggled with the most? And by far, the one that came up the most often was visibility. Getting [00:02:00] more visibility and how, you know, how the feelings that come up around it.

All the things around increased visibility. So I thought I'd do a little mini training on this. I, this is a topic that, I mean, you could probably go through a whole coaching program on, but yeah, in this case, what I'm gonna do is give you a couple of steps to at least get started take you from start to finish on a little self-coaching journey.

So I'm gonna take you through that. So if you see, for those of you who are watching, you can see behind me, I've got some materials up here in including a little diagram here of the, someone feeling maybe a little bit more invisible, moving to being more visible. And number one, the first thing I'm gonna do is a very short, shameless plug for my programs.

So I do a couple different programs, but the main one is my bootcamp. It's called Rise Leadership Bootcamp. And it's all about increasing to the next leadership level, doing it with integrity, with authenticity, with impact, having, having meaningful impact. And I run it twice a year. So the next cohort starts in September.

If you wanna learn more, head over to [00:03:00] my website, the mint ambition.com. Head to the Work with Me section, and you'll see the link there that you can learn more about the program. Okay, shameless promotion aside, let's get into these five steps. So, there's a lot of different ways we could approach this topic.

Right? And, uh, you know, what I'll probably do is I'll probably will do even more episodes on this. So as an aside, let me know in the comments or reach out to me if this is a topic that you want me to explore in different ways, different lenses, or go into in more detail. But for right now, just to keep this really tight and impactful and short, what I'm gonna do is share five steps that I think could be really helpful for you.

To increase your own visibility and to really start understanding what it is that's standing in the way for you for increased visibility. Okay, so number one I'm gonna start with is, what I want you to do is some brainstorming. I want you to start by listing out and thinking out all of the different ways and [00:04:00] places and means by which you could be more visible.

Okay? So number one here behind me, I'm gonna write where.

Okay. Where could you be more visible? You know, is it you are in meetings already and you could be more visible by speaking up, so in those meetings you could be more visible. I. Is it, you know, your return to office now and you could be more visible in the hallways or going to see people.

There are a lot of different ways to be visible and I really want you to challenge yourself here. What I'd really recommend actually, is taking a blank page of paper. And there's a reason I recommend, uh, doing it with actual physical paper is there's some really interesting research out there about mind body connection.

And when you explore cognitive things like this, like we're exploring our thoughts around something and you do it physically through paper, it can trigger more creativity and it triggers you to [00:05:00] remember more. So I really do recommend if you're, if you, if you're open to it, is taking a blank piece of paper and actually writing it down.

Um, personally, I often actually take, uh, printer paper. I just find the, the feel of printer print up of blank printer paper page. Oh, say that 10 times fast. I just find it really conducive, that's the word I'm looking for. It's really conducive to being creative. And the reason I start with this is because you likely already know somewhere inside of you, you already know where you could be more visible.

Okay? And I'm using the word where here, but that really kind of also stands for how could you be more visible? Like I said, the meetings, right? Like maybe you're already in meetings, but it's, you need to speak up. So, but I want you to come up with all the different places and ways where you could be more visible.

And if your mind really goes blank on this, there's always Google. You could always do Google search. Or if you have access to any of the new AI tools that are out there, like chat G P T, you could go in and have a little chat session with chat G P [00:06:00] T and start coming up and brainstorming all of the different places and ways that you could be more visible.

Okay. And of course, you can always reach out to me if you were here in this Facebook group. If you're watching this, you can comment underneath and we can brainstorm. If you're listening on the podcast, just follow the links below and you'll find ways to reach out to me. Happy to have a conversation about this if you're really getting stuck on the, on the ideas here.

But that's it. So first, first step is to ideate. Where are all the ways or places, ways that you can be more visible? Hmm. Then I want you to kind of take a step back. It me physically or mentally take a step back and I want you to look over those places and I want you to consider of all these different places or ways that you could be more visible, which one would be most impactful for your career goals?

Okay? Which one would be most impactful for your career goals? Now as a little [00:07:00] asterisk for this, for this to work, you do wanna have a sense of your career goals. You know, you don't need to have had it all sketched out, you know, exactly step by step, what you're doing for the next 10 years. But you do wanna have some sense of what we are trying to get to in the next, say, one to three years.

That's a nice little timeframe, right? Um, so you do wanna have that. So you might need to take a little detour and make sure that you, that you have a good sense of what your career goals are for the next three years, maybe even five years, sometimes three years is a little bit more of a workable timeframe.

Okay. And then you, so you wanna also consider your career goals, because what I find for the people that I work with is that, You're so often thinking about others and you're so often thinking about your programs that you're running, your teams that you're running, the projects that you're on, that your career goals sometimes take a backseat.

So I'm inviting you to bring your career goals right up into the passenger seat. You know, let those other programs that, that you dedicate. All of your time to let them hang out in the backseat for just a little bit, [00:08:00] and let's consider your you and your career goals. Okay? So again, it's which of those ways that you identified would be most impactful for your career goals?

So I'm gonna write, which here?

Hang. So where And then which, oh, I should have a question mark. There we go. I had a question mark. Okay. Now we come to the interesting one. So step number three. This is where we want to be really kind to ourselves. We're gonna wanna have a lot of self-compassion, and as much as you can, you want to have neutral curiosity.

This is the phrase that my coaching clients know that I I like to use, is you want to have neutral curiosity, meaning you're not judging yourself, you're just being curious. Sometimes I like to think of it as like being a scientist, so put on your lab coat and, but from a very interested way, a very compassionate way.

I want you to ask yourself [00:09:00] this question, and it is, what is stopping you? Okay? What is stopping you from being more visible in that place that you identified? Okay, so I'm gonna write down stopping you here.

Okay, I'm gonna put stopping you as a que with a question mark, and this is a place for really to explore what's going on. And if you remember from last week's episode, we talked about the trifecta of mindset, strategy, and tactics. So it's gonna be one of those three. It's either mindset or strategy or tactics.

And with the people I work with quite often, This is why I invite you to bring in compassion for yourself. Quite often it ends up being that mindset piece, right? We have fears or worried, you know, we don't wanna be seen as loud and obnoxious, but we also are worried [00:10:00] about what people might say or what they might think.

So I really invite you to be, um, courageous and also that bring, bringing that compassionate, neutral curiosity towards yourself to answer that question, what is stopping you? Okay. And then once you have that and you've given yourself some time to think, but think about it and reflect and identify what it is that's stopping you, then I want you to consider how can you overcome that?

How can you overcome that? Whatever it was in the mindset, strategy or tactics, how could you overcome it? So I'm gonna write, overcome

with a question mark. Okay. How can you overcome it? I really want you to have creativity here, but again, like the first question, if you're having some trouble, you might want to turn to possibly Google or chat g p t. There might not be as helpful for this one, but you could turn to peers, friends, colleagues, trusted advisors, mentors, and of course you can reach out to me as well.

I'm happy to [00:11:00] brainstorm with you as well. Okay. And then once you have that, once you've identified how to overcome it, you've identified where you want to be more visible and what you need to do, then the final step is, is simple but not easy all the time. It's, it's that I want you to commit to getting started.

You know, I'm not asking you to commit to doing everything that you're coming up with all the ideas, and it's not that you have to jump right in and change everything about how you approach visibility and being more visible. But I do want you to commit to getting started. Okay. Can we do that? Can we have agreement?

Thumbs up with each other? Okay. So I'm gonna write, commit.

Okay, so there you have it. We've got these five steps. We start with identifying where you can be more visible. Then we ask of all those places, which is the most impactful for your career goals? Then we really explore. We get vulnerable with ourselves and we explore what's stopping us from [00:12:00] doing that.

Then we answer the question, okay, how can I overcome that of the thing that's stopping me? And then you finish. By committing, you're committing to yourself, maybe committing to this community. Maybe you can think of it that way, but you're committing to getting started. Just getting started, just taking the first step, you know, one step at a time.

Just take a first step. Cause then you can always re, you can always evaluate, readjust if necessary, right? So, and of course if you have any challenges with these steps, you can reach out to me. The other thing, if this is something that's of interest to you and you really wanna develop your courage and confidence around visibility, I definitely recommend checking out the bootcamp.

You can go over, have a read over it, see if it's interesting to you. Reach out to me with any questions. Never any pressure. Got lots of time until September, uh, that we get started. But if you're interested, do reach out. I only have 15 spots, I believe they're. They are currently all open at the moment.

There might be one spot about to be taken, but they are all open. So right now at the, at the time we're recording, you've got plenty of time. Um, but it will cl it [00:13:00] is in September and I, there are only 15 spots. There is a limited time and a limited number of spots. Um, the other piece too is I do run career pep talks.

That's a, a one-off session that you can also book. If you go to my website and go to work with me, you can see information about that, um, over there. So with that, I hope you have a wonderful day, evening, week, morning, whatever, whatever time of day it is for you when you're listening or watching this, and again, If you're in the, uh, Facebook group, I would love to hear from you.

Give me a little comment down below. Let me know that you watch this, and if you're listening on the podcast, reach out to me as well and let me know that you heard this. It really, it really helps me to know who's listening and that people are getting value and finding that this is helping them on their, you know, path to promotion or building leadership skills and whatever it is that you are working towards to advance your career.

All right. Have a good one.

Thank you [00:14:00] so much for listening to this episode. Now, before you go, make sure you click to follow the show this way you don't have to go looking for the latest episode. I'll come to you. Just click the plus button or the follow, and you'll get the latest episode fresh off the press. Thanks again. And remember that you are amazing. Now, get out there and RISE.