Laura McCaffrey

Coaching

women in stem

Exercising Emotional Adulthood in Your Career

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Let’s talk about emotional adulthood.  This concept was introduced to me by Brooke Castillo, and it has so many applications across all aspects of our lives.

Emotional adulthood, in general terms, means that we take complete responsibility for all of our feelings.

We have control over how we feel.

How empowering is that!?

Those feelings that we’re having, they were created by our thoughts. They were created by what we’ve decided something means. They were created by the story that we’ve told ourselves.

We can decide not to let something hurt our feelings.

This doesn’t mean that we’re passive when someone violates our boundaries or does something that we don’t like. What it does mean is that we get to choose how we react.

So how does this apply to our careers? Some of the connections are super obvious. Something a coworker says or does has no power to make us feel bad. That piece of feedback from our boss? It can just be business and we don’t have to make it mean something about us as a person.

It goes even further than that too. It means that we don’t expect anything to be handed to us in our careers. We are responsible for figuring out what our next step should be in our careers. No one else can do this for us.

Emotional adulthood in our careers also means that we take care of our careers by actively developing and nurturing relationships, working on our core competencies, documenting our career accomplishments, and staying organized with our tasks and goals!

In the next few weeks we’ll do deeper dives into strategies for how to get each one of these areas in your career in shape so that you’re ready to kick of 2019 with a solid base!

Are You Trading Yourself For Your Career?

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Just a few short years ago, I used to joke around that being an engineer stole a little piece of my soul.  I felt that it made me hard, and slightly uncaring.

That analytical piece of my mind was always on the go, and I rarely stopped what I was doing to really feel my feelings or think about how my actions at work were impacting other people.

As women in STEM, often we get sent the message that we have to be unfeeling to be successful in the careers that we’ve chosen.

But many of us chose these careers because we care about the impact our work has on the world.  On people.

Being in STEM doesn’t require that you edit out your feelings and compassion.  All STEM asks of you is that you apply logic to solve problems.

We can be ourselves at work and still be exceptional at out jobs.  Emotional intelligence is recognized as one of the biggest predictors of success in any professional field.

Once I integrated my more emotional, intuitive side with my logical side, I found that I was even more effective in my work.

How are you editing out parts of your personality at work?  How can we begin to re-integrate those pieces?

Uncomfy Conversations

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In one of my favorite quotes from Tim Ferris, he says “A person’s success in life can be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have”.

And oh how true I have found this to be!

Early on in my career, I would try and avoid uncomfortable conversations. I felt that I should just suck it up and deal with whatever was going on.

Once I started supervising other people, I had a completely different perspective! Lots of uncomfortable conversations were needed to:

1. Communicate clearly what my expectations were

2. Give feedback (as is expected from a manager)

-and-

3. Have my people’s backs when they needed me. I had to speak up and be an advocate for the people that work for me!

Having uncomfortable conversations as a supervisor helped me, in turn, to be more ok with advocating for myself.

At this point in my career and life, I have to say that I actually enjoy having uncomfortable conversations. I know that if I’m starting to get those butterflies in my stomach I’m on the right track. I’ll only feel better, be more productive, and have better outcomes and understanding on the other side of that conversation.

So here’s what I’ve found works for me in my approach with uncomfortable conversations:

1. If I’m feeling emotionally charged, I’ll take as long as it takes to calm my mind.

2. I think about why this is important (to me personally or to the goal we’re trying to achieve).

3. I think about how to deliver my message with compassion, since the ultimate goals is to have a productive outcome, not to flatten the other person.

4. I think about what my ask is, or what my desired outcome is.

5. Then I go do it.

When I’m nervous, that’s my cue that I need to have that conversation. When it feels like there’s a lot on the line, like there’s potential for me to mess it up, that’s when I push forward because that means it’s important.

And when I’ve had that conversation, I’ve never regretted it.

What uncomfortable conversations do you need to have?