Me, condensed

When I started my current job, the first couple of weeks were similar to most other places. HR induction, reams of information, sources, names, services, all thrown at me in the first few days, you know the drill. They also had set up some introductory meetings with people around the business. Not necessarily anyone I’d be working with directly, just a few people who took 30 mins out of their day to give me an overview of what they did and how they viewed the company.

It was an excellent way to get a sense of the culture and attitudes from the workplace, always an issue when working in a largely remote role (I’m only in office about once a month).

One of the people kicked off our chat by saying he was going to show me a PowerPoint slide. Ummmm, okay? I thought.

Social workplaces

The slide he showed me was a combination of a snapshot of his CV, as well as some photos and a brief blurb about what his interests were.

He said it was something he’d picked up at a previous company and found useful as a way to condense things that go beyond work, the things that you’d normally start to pick up when sitting in the same office as someone but which can be hard to get to know when you are all working remotely, and interactions are only around a meeting/call where chit-chat is usually minimal.

As a fairly laidback chatty guy, I’ve never had an issue making connections in the work place, even if I do sometimes lean on the fact that my role is typical as a mediator or go-between, so it’s easy for me to take every side of an argument (although always with ‘the business’ when a decision is needed). It’s the soft skills type of thing that I’ve never struggled with.

But it got me thinking, how would I describe myself? How can I summarise ME and my achievements into one slide. What would my slide look like?

My slide

Here is what I came up with. It should, I hope, offer enough information to have a discussion around, be that a similar professional background, or a shared interest, or even just similar life journeys.

Self evaluation is hard

Of course there is much more to me than this —as you would know dear reader!— but as a conversation starter I think it’s as good a place to start as any. Yet it wasn’t easy to edit myself down to just this one slide.

I recall a conversation with a previous HR Director, he was (no doubt) challenging me a little over my tendency to push aside compliments and achievements, and we got onto the topic of self evaluation and how we present ourselves (in the workplace).

Similar to advice I’ve had from counsellors, he thought the best way to approach this kind of exercise —summarising yourself and your career— was to find a way to step outside of your own sense of self and imagine you are helping a colleague go through this exercise.

It’s the same thing I do sometimes when I sense I’m being harsh on myself —something that has cropped up recently as I’ve embarked on a new exercise challenge— such as when I was beating myself up for having bailed on going for a cycle one morning. I went for a long walk instead which is perfectly fine but it wasn’t what I’d planned to do and that tends to lead me to think I’ve ‘failed’ because I didn’t do things exactly to plan.

Rather than berating myself I pondered what I might say to a friend who’d done the same.

“Ohhh you didn’t cycle but went for a long brisk walk instead, well done! I didn’t even get out of bed until 8am and you’d already been out and exercised! Awesome!!”

Isn’t it funny how we are kinder to others than to ourselves.

Stepping outside of yourself isn’t easy, but I admit that just pulling this slide together, even with the professional focus it had, was a fun little exercise in reminding myself who I am.

Which begs the question, dear reader, who are you?