Why You Are Your Best Advocate
Ego often gets conflated with arrogance. But it’s healthy to bring forward your accomplishments as a self-advocate for your career.
HR is often known as a people champion. You’re in the thick of it, helping build career roadmaps for your workforce, making the case for investing in great talent, building a strong culture, and the list goes on.
Self-doubt and imposter syndrome are common experiences that many of us face, especially at work, but they can get in the way of advocating for ourselves or advancing our careers. What does the voice in your head say to you?
When you embrace your confidence, you start to see that you are in fact awesome, capable, smart, talented, and so much more. These self-affirmations bring benefits to your career as well, helping you become a more strategic partner and contributor, no matter your role.
Embracing your confidence can be a strength—be that a confidence booster when you see those results impacting your organization or a self-affirmation that you are in fact awesome, capable, smart, talented, and more.
WI chatted with Kelli Thompson, executive career coach, author, and long-time friend of Businessolver, on an episode of the Benefits Pulse about how confidence can be our greatest asset in the workplace. Kelli also spoke about this with us at our annual conference, Vision, in her keynote talk, ‘Leading with Clarity and Confidence.’
Here are the top three lessons I took away from these talks with Kelli.
It’s great to be confident
It’s easy to conflate “bragging” with being confident in your abilities. Even the most seasoned HR veterans can find themselves questioning their right to take up space in discussions essential to their careers.
But let’s reframe that a bit: You likely spend most of your day or week being an advocate for your workforce, be that establishing a strong benefits strategy to support their wellbeing to hiring incredible talent to support your organization’s ability to deliver great results. Yet within your daily work, there’s another voice that’s equally deserving of your advocacy: You.
Tuning into your confidence isn’t about boasting or being self-centered; it’s about acknowledging the wins, both big and small, that might otherwise be overlooked. It’s looking at how you’ve personally contributed to your organization’s growth and being unafraid of recognizing where you’re a strong player for your organization.
To advocate for yourself effectively, you need to highlight how your contributions create a meaningful impact on your business. That’s not bragging, it’s a business case.
Prioritizing your needs helps you build more opportunities
You’re great at helping others prioritize their needs to pave their growth paths. Don’t forget to do that for yourself.
Have an honest conversation about your growth opportunities:
- What do you need to move forward?
- Why do you want a change?
- What value are you bringing to your organization?
In Kelli’s book, “Closing the Confidence Gap,” she talks about how you can use facts to propel yourself forward in your career. Kelli talks about how the “but first I need to do X” can get in the way of putting ourselves out there, advocating for our needs, and using our learning and growth opportunities as stepping stones, not barriers.
Demonstrating this alignment to the company’s goals through your stories and data—the how and why of what you’ve achieved—can position HR professionals as indispensable allies, ensuring real business achievements are deeply understood and appreciated.
Your doubt AND your confidence can help you stretch outside of your comfort zone
The question of “have I done enough?” is a double-edged sword when it comes to your career. It means you’re striving, growing, and not settling, but it can also be paralyzing. Confront it head-on, for within that discomfort, your ego’s whispers are the fuel for the fire.
But that doubt can also be fuel for your advancement. Those moments of doubt aren’t detractors for your success, they’re a roadmap. Those moments indicated where you can continue to grow and help you build the case for asking for that next opportunity. So that you can start saying “I’m learning and growing.” instead of “But I’m not there yet.”
Self-advocacy extends beyond HR. It’s universal career advice that often requires HR-specific tweaks. But no matter the jargon, it’s a sentiment that resonates with all of us. When we start embracing our doubt as advocacy, we start opening more doors for ourselves.
CTA: Hear more from Kelli Thompson about how you can be your best advocate on the Benefits Pulse: The Power of Yes for Your Career
