Prep, Push, Pivot

Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women

Octavia Goredema

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119789093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Réussite personnelle

Advance your career with this insightful playbook for underrepresented women

In Prep, Push, Pivot, award-winning career coach and author Octavia Goredema delivers an indispensable career coaching guide for women looking for a new job, dealing with job loss, pivoting to a new career, or returning to the workforce after an extended absence.

You'll discover practical strategies you can implement at crucial times during your career, ensuring your considerable talents and skills are used to their full potential. In this important book, you'll:

• Discover your true worth, cement your career values, and carve out a realistic and aspirational career plan
• Learn how to position yourself for a promotion, navigate a break in your career, and integrate your role as a mother or caregiver with your professional life
• Deal with monumental career changes, contribute to the development of the women around you, and benefit from an array of professional resources in your journey forward

Perfect for women who are ready to overcome any obstacles that await them, Prep, Push, Pivot is a thoughtful road map to help women chart their professional and personal success.

PART I
PREP

CHAPTER 1
Know Your Worth

Building your career is the most valuable, and the most personal, investment you'll ever make.

Navigating your career as a woman of color in the workplace, however, continues to be an uphill struggle. We are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States,¹ but we are the most underrepresented group in the corporate pipeline. As a career coach, I have one mission—to help you move forward.

Knowing your worth underpins everything. Your worth will be tested by the systemic inequities that women of color face every single day.

I know how important it is to cement your career values because it took me a long time to figure this out for myself. I started my career just over two decades ago. Landing my first job after graduating from my university started a rollercoaster that has included being promoted, leading teams, international relocations, taking a career break, returning to work as a parent, and making a career pivot.

It took me a long time to realize my career values were the foundation for everything. Countless times, I found myself in roles or situations that did not support my values. Despite this, I endeavored to do my best work, and yet even when I delivered results it just didn't feel right. In the past, the only time I considered my worth was when I was asked to prepare for a performance review. Even then, it was a struggle to self-assess my skills, and I calculated my worth through my employer's lens versus my own. Over the course of my career, I've created and pursued professional goals, but there were also hard times when I felt lost and uncertain of what I should be aiming for. By discounting what mattered most, I was working hard, but without a true purpose.

So, what exactly is your worth? For many of us, it's how much we earn, but in truth your worth runs way deeper than that. It's about understanding what enables you to do your best work, defining your nonnegotiables for your career, and embracing your unlocked potential.

As a first step, I'd like you to cement your career values, as this provides the foundation for the professional goals you will pursue.

Cement Your Career Values

Your career values are your guiding light, in good times and tough times. They underpin everything. Jobs will come and go, bosses and coworkers will come and go, but your values remain—and they are unique to you.

Remember, you have choices, and when it comes to your career you decide what matters most. I recommend documenting your career values using the following question prompts and reviewing and refining your responses several times a year. This makes your values a priority.

Your career values encompass the following core principles:

• Your achievements
• Your purpose
• Your inspiration
• Your style of work
• Your mission
• Your reputation

Career values provide the foundation for you to create goals that align with your purpose and principles. In chapter 9, you will find a worksheet you can use to save your responses to the following questions:

1. What matters most to you personally when it comes to your career?
2. What's on your must-have list when it comes to the work you do next?
3. What makes you feel excited and inspired about your work?
4. What motivates you to do your best work?
5. What are you naturally good at?
6. What would you love to do more of at work?
7. What energizes and excites you?
8. What type of environments do you want to work in?
9. What's your preferred work schedule?
10. Is there anything that's nonnegotiable for you at work?
11. What are the greatest accomplishments of your career?
12. What is it about the accomplishments that make them special for you?
13. What do you want your career to feel like?
14. What do you want to be known for?
15. How do you measure success?

When you start to think about your career values, your responses to the questions may require deeper and longer reflection, and your responses may change or evolve over time. There are no right or wrong answers and it's not a test. Your responses are for you to define. This is a space for you to consider what matters most in your career so that you can build a platform for goal setting and actions that will get you closer to where you want to be.

Get Your Goals Ready

Most people are asked about their goals roughly once a year when the performance review cycle rolls around. Somewhere in the self-assessment form you're asked to complete for your supervisor there will be a question along the lines of “What do you want to accomplish in the next year?” or “What do you want to be doing five years from now?”

Some of us may be tempted to answer, “I want to be working somewhere else” or “I want to have your job and your salary.” Most of us panic a little about the question and try to figure out an acceptable and appropriate answer. Whether it's a performance review that's looming or your own personal thought process, considering our future can be scary because we just don't know. Being asked about goals can feel like the worst kind of test.

• “Can I be honest?”
• “Am I thinking too small?”
• “Is my goal too big and unachievable?”
• “I straight up don't know what I'm aiming for.”

These are legitimate thoughts when someone asks you about your career goals. Goals are powerful, complex, and captivating things. They can be exhilarating and terrifying, all rolled into one.

So, what happens if you're confused about possible career goals? Or maybe you know what you want, but you don't know how to get there.

How to Set Goals

After you've documented and reviewed your career values, it's the perfect time to align your goals. If you're not sure where to start, pick a goal that really excites you, or could be a stepping-stone to something that really excites you.

Some of your goals might be big, some might be smaller, but there are no rights or wrongs when it comes to what you decide on. It just needs to feel right. The only thing I ask is to push yourself out of your comfort zone. That can be hard at first, and it may take a few attempts. I shared a set of goals with one of my mentors once and his immediate response was, “That sounds great, Octavia, but I'd like you to dream bigger.” That one statement alone was transformative to me. So, I added another layer to my goals that were bigger than I'd ever contemplated. He was right. After all, if you'd told me I'd start my career in one country and build it in another, I'd never have believed it.

Here are some questions to help you get started:

1. Based on your career values, what do you want to experience in the next chapter of your career?
2. Where do you feel stuck?
3. What do you want to set in motion?
4. What skills do you want to develop?
5. What's a next step that's just out of reach?
6. What's a next step that would feel like a giant leap?

How to Stay on Track

When you've chosen a goal to pursue, start to outline the next steps you need to take to make this goal happen. Often, professionals I work with assign a deadline to a goal, for example:

“I want to secure a new role by the end of the calendar year.”

As a coach, I think it's fantastic that you have a time line in mind for what you want. However, I always recommend focusing on the time frames to the actions you will take to pursue your goal. For example, the steps you need to take to do that might include updating your résumé, talking to your network about opportunities, and of course, spending time looking at job postings. Assigning time frames for key tasks, or including the frequency for key tasks, is what will propel you forward.

Including when you will do the tasks creates an action plan, which could look like this:

• “Create an updated version of my résumé by the end of the month.”
• “Set aside time twice a week to reach out to people in my network to ask for advice about my search.”
• “Allocate Sunday afternoons as uninterrupted time to review job postings and prepare applications.”

I believe the best way to stay on track with your goals is to focus entirely on the actions you need to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: My Commitment to Your Career
• PART I: PREP
• PART II: PUSH
• PART III: PIVOT
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement