The Traveling Introvert

Hello and welcome to the Travelling Introvert. Today I want to talk about being a manager. Whether you've created this role yourself or you're new to being a manager and how you need to craft and create a peer support system. Now, you may have been a manager before, you may know everyone at your workplace, you may have been promoted to be a manager so you know everyone and you know what's going on, or you might be a new manager in a new role in a new company. Either way, you need to have a support system during the first 90 days of any new role.

It's super stressful and having a support system is beneficial in many ways, not just for the first 90 days, but for your ongoing success as a manager and a leader. Now, when you're thinking about setting up your peer support system, the idea is for you to get a system that helps you feel supported and helps you manage stress and is a go-to group of people humans that you can go to about work stuff. So, for example, I was working with someone who has crafted their own position within their job and they're the first person that's done it. They took certification and now, like the other director of Insert Bank here, they've never been director of anything in any other organization, don't have experience in this role in any organization or any other organization. So they don't know what they don't know.

While they know the culture of the company, while they know everyone that they work with, they don't know really huge gaps that they might have in their learning just because of the way certifications are made these days. They don't necessarily cover a lot of real world scenarios and nothing gives you more experience in working in different types and sizes of organizations. So this person has gone out to try and create their peer support system of fellow humans that work within her industry as well as outside of her industry, but have the same role or job title, or have had the same role and job title previously because they can help fill in the gaps of what she does and doesn't know. Not only that, having insight into other industries and other verticals and seeing how they do things will help them figure out what might be missing from their work. For example, after getting this group of peers together, she figured out that she needed a better infrastructure and policies within their workplace and also just generally software.

The company did not have software to track general things for this particular type of work. Not only that, it gives you people to go and bounce ideas off who aren't part of the work, click or don't know about the drama and aren't involved in those sorts of things. It gives you a space to learn and to grow and see how different people deal with the type of situations that you have or how they've dealt with them in the past. And everyone learns together. And so there's nothing better than having that feeling of nonjudgmental support when you are in the first throws of a new position or just when you are a little bit further along.

I want to expand your knowledge now, you can't just go ahead and get anyone when you're thinking about building a peer support system, but do think about where the gaps in your knowledge might be missing. And this is where it's a really good idea for you to kind of do a skills audit and figure out where your blind spots, your weaknesses might be. And then go ahead and find people who have skills and strengths in those areas to be part of your peer support network. This helps you take care of yourself as a manager and a leader. This shows your potential for growth.

This helps you on your personal journey. And by doing this, we will help expand your network. And it's not expanding your network because I need to do networking. It's because you want to support others who are in the same situation. As you will end up finding people who you want to mentor or you want to be part of their peer support group where you are further along in your journey than they are, when you also want to find out all sorts of industry things that you might not have known, websites to go to, pieces of software tricks and tips that you just didn't know about.

It's all about gaining knowledge. It's not necessarily about the networking and the people. It's about gaining knowledge so you can be good at your job and successful while balancing out and reducing that stress. Because you know you have people that you can go to who will answer your questions in times of need. Thank you for listening.

This is [email protected] helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week and don't forget to do that skills audit. Bye.

Hello and welcome to the travelling introvert. Today I want to talk about how you can view your business as a creative project. Now, as an introvert, you may or may not see yourself as a creative person. I definitely have struggled with seeing myself as a creative person only to have creatives look at me like I'm got two heads and don't understand why I don't consider myself to be a creative person. However, you too can view your business as a creative project and this might help you tap into your creative side and help you come up with new and innovative ideas.

And so I want to talk about some tips on how you can go about viewing your business as a creative project. Whether you be a freelancer, sellerpreneur, a small business owner insert word here. So start off by defining your creative vision. And for some people that's their values. For some people it's their mission statement.

What is your creative vision? Do you want to help introverts around the world build their careers and get hired? Or do you want to stamp out imposter syndrome? Do you want to make sure that every flower has a shady spot to rest in? Whatever your creative vision is, define that.

And then as part of that, develop a plan that supports that plan and that vision. But make sure it also supports your creativity. And keep in mind your time management, your energy management and things that are important to you. For example, maybe you're about anti hustle, maybe you're about five minutes a day is enough. Whatever it might be, make sure that your plan supports this.

Then set aside time on a regular cadence to brainstorm new ideas that could be every week, every quarter, every month, or whatever works for you and your lifestyle. And then keep a journal or book or to do list or whatever it might be of your thoughts and ideas. Having a place to dump thoughts and ideas is really helpful. Some people call it second Brain. Just a way to get it out of your head and try and take on new challenges and experiment with new things.

Don't be thinking that once you try things that are the be all and end all and that's the way it has to stay, we really get caught up in thinking that once you try a thing, that's the last thing you can do and if it doesn’t work, that's the end of it. It's an experiment, it's a creative project. Another thing that's really important is don't be afraid to delegate or outsource tasks that don't support your creativity. If you are not into writing outsource to delegate it or find a way to do it differently, like voice to text. Find different ways that support your creativity so you're not being sucked into things that drain your creativity.

Also be open to feedback from others, of course, constructive feedback. And embrace change and embrace failure. As part of the learning process. Not everything is going to go right, not everything is going to go perfectly and not everything is going to go the way you think it's going to go. And that is okay.

I know someone that I work with is currently showing everyone, every time they quote, unquote fail, they might go and apply for a certain thing. They are creative, so they'll apply for certain art programs or for certain jobs or like voiceover work, and they have now taken to posting every time they don't get that role or don't get that job to help normalize that. Hey, not everything you see on my Instagram and my LinkedIn is going to be me success all the time. These are quote unquote failures. But also, like, I tried and I didn't get it and that's okay.

And I'm learning and moving on. Take time for yourself outside of your business to refuel your creativity. Be that taking time off, going to the beach, going for a massage, whatever it might be. No one is creative 100% of the time, so don't expect yourself to be either. So all of these things will help you with saying no to things that are not in line with your vision and your creative project.

And if you are currently having problems saying no, please check out the link with a worksheet that will help you in different ways to say no and set those boundaries that help you're to keep you on course with your creative project, your creative vision or life in general. Thank you for listening.

This is [email protected] helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.

Hello and welcome to the travelling introvert. Today I'm going to talk about leadership. I was talking with a client the other day and it was a group of managers who were in for some leadership training. And the first question is what makes a leader a leader? And this led to like a 45 minutes discussion and conversation between what makes a leader different from a manager or from an influencer.

Some things that came up right now is that how being a manager is considered to be old school and very rigid, and more about giving people tasks, and how a leader is like the new cool kid on the block. But people really couldn't identify what makes being a leader different. One person was like, well, a leader is someone who gets followed. People follow you if you're a leader. Which led to the conversation about, okay, so there's a bunch of people on Instagram with thousands of followers.

Does that make that influencer a leader? And they were like, well, not necessarily that's an influencer, it's a little different. Okay, so what makes a leader a leader? And they were like, okay, well, people have to trust you, all right? Don't people trust their managers?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So there starting to be a degree of separation between what makes a leader a leader and a manager a manager. Then we started to talk about inspiration. Leaders inspire people. That's something that they all agreed on, that they are inspired by leaders, but they themselves did not feel that they were inspiring, yet they consider themselves to be leaders.

And yes, different people will inspire different types of people because not everyone inspires everybody. You will inspire someone who aspires to be like, you right, but it is a form of leadership. And then there was the question, can everyone be a leader? And they were like, huh? So then I flipped it and said, can everyone be a manager?

And they're like, no, no, no. Good. Managers gives tasks in a clear way with timeline, expected turnaround. They answer questions, they give examples of what done looks like.

They explain why it's important managers do a very specific thing. Okay, all right, so very clear definition what a manager is and very specific people can be managers, but not everyone can be a manager. Yet so many people are in management area or roles who shouldn't be there, according to a lot of people. But leaders, anyone can be a leader because anyone can inspire someone else.

And just because they don't know that they're inspiring somebody else doesn't mean that they are not a leader. Every one of us has someone that looks up to us. And it might not be everything that we do, it might be one thing that we did. That person is like, oh, wow, that was awesome. I'm inspired by that.

We might not know it. Most of the time we don't know because it's very rare someone comes up to and goes, you inspire me. And to be honest, if they did, I'm not sure how our reactions would be right. But everyone has the competency to be a leader, whether they see themselves as one or not. You're always a couple of steps ahead in your journey, whatever that journey might be.

Then somebody else, somebody will look at something you do and be like, oh, I want to do something like that. Someone will listen to something that you say and be like, oh, that really inspired me to go and do A, B, or C.

Thinking about the fact that anyone can be a leader should make you think differently about how you view other leaders and how you wish to inspire others or the people that inspire you. What do they do? What did they say? Who do they connect with? Who do they network with?

And what makes them inspiring? Why do you aspire to have certain traits of another human? So remember that it's not being a manager makes a good manager. The key trait that separates managers from leaders is to be inspiring, and you can do that by just being you. Thank you for listening.

This is [email protected], helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.

I'm grabbing another one from the archives for you this week, and this is a classic one to talk about how you can make your work visible, as well as doing sort of a mini skills assessment to see your areas of strength and your areas of growth so you can access this free four part mini assessment. And let's start by making you the star you deserve to be seen.

Grab the free assessment here

Hello and welcome to the travelling introvert, or the not so travelling introvert. Today I'm going to talk about why you need to regularly assess your skills. I think something that happens as we go through life and we come across a problem, we deal with it, we move on to the next problem or move on to the next thing. And there's a kind of time of year where people are planning for the next year and looking back from the previous year and we tend to look at what we've done, what we've accomplished. And one thing that really needs to happen is to regularly assess what skills you have and what you've learned or what you need to change or what isn't useful anymore.

And we don't do this enough. Anyone who wants to improve and prosper, even your professional or your personal lives, you need to make time to assess your skills. And this can be, I don't know, every quarter is a good way of doing it. I mean, when you're an employer, you know often employers will have a yearly assessment, feedback and so on and so forth to make sure that their employees are learning and growing with the new company. This is because it benefits the company as a whole.

If you improve your team, the company improves and the bottom line improves. And so, whether you're an employee or an employer or just entrepreneur, regularly assessing your skills is really important. And so think about these things. When you are assessing your skills, what can you do to improve your quality and speed? Productivity is a crucial attribute for successful people.

And to do this, you must improve your quality. And by doing so, you'll take less time doing things. After all, getting more done isn't good enough if it's not done well.

Also, when you're regularly assessing your skills, use it as a time to self-reflect. Self-reflection is vital for successful career business life in general. It provides time to look within yourself and see where you can improve and what you've accomplished. So putting this in your calendar on a regular basis and making it a non-negotiable is a way of doing this. Now, when you are thinking about assessing your skills, also think about your strengths and how you can maximize those and all lead to new ones.

Repeating daily life stuff can make things easy to ignore what you are truly good at. So reflecting and testing your skills and reassessing your abilities will allow you to focus even more on areas that you are great at and allowing you to perfect that skill even more. And on the flip side, of course, is also understanding your weaknesses and how to improve them. Just how looking back and reassessing your skills will highlight what your strengths are. It should also highlight what your weaknesses are, your shortcomings and make them far more visible to you.

This is great because if it's done more than once a year. You want it to work towards bettering them or having a plan to mitigate your weakness. If you are selling, if you are bad at certain things, you can outsource it or you can learn to make it better. Often, if you reassess this on a more regular basis, you'll figure out where that gap is. An outsourcing is fine, but the sooner you figure that out, the sooner things can balance out and work out better.

Also, when you're assessing your skills, it allows you to take education and learning into your own hands. It provides you the ability to be more self-aware and acknowledge your achievements as well as your failures. And it also gives you a clearer, more defined path to learn and develop yourself interpersonally and professionally. If you want to grow as a person and have a more successful career or business or work on your life goals, you need to continually make time to evaluate your abilities so that you know where to improve and where you lack. You can go ahead and look for online skill assessments or personality tests.

Ask friends and co-workers to assess you. Look at past reviews, past things that you've said about yourself. These are just a few ways that you can get valuable feedback on your current abilities so that you can enhance your career, advance your business, and accomplish your goals. Reviewing is crucial. Thank you for letting this is [email protected], helping you build your brand and grow your business.

Have a great rest of your day.

This is a great one for the archives and it's currently what I'm doing right now. I would love to know how you prioritize yourself. What things do you put in place to put yourself first? Be it your needs for recharging, be it your needs for creativity, be it your needs for just being able to get 8 hours of sleep. So how do you prioritize yourself first? And please go ahead and let me know in the poll. Do you, number one, engage in self-awareness and development through digital content? Kind of like this? Number two, do you work with a coach or mastermind group like myself? Do you three have a gratitude and mindfulness practice that you engage in? And number four, do you never really prioritize yourself? Let me know and enjoy listening to this episode. Bye.

Hello, and welcome to the not so travelling introvert. Today I want to talk about prioritizing yourself. I'm guilty very much of not doing this. I don't want to say I'm a regular basis frequently enough and one of the worst things you could ever do is pile on the guilt of wanting to have some time to yourself and putting yourself first. In fact, putting yourself first is really the reverse of being selfish.

Because of that fact, there is no reason to feel guilty. I want to talk about some of the ways that you can be helped by prioritizing yourself. People who care about you will respond healthily to you finding time to put yourself first, especially when it comes to your health and happiness. Because they want you to be happy. If you tell them that these 15 minutes, an hour, a day, a particular activity that you do alone is important to you and why they truly care about you, they'll respect it.

And even if they don't first and you explain why, they see the benefits of you getting that time to do what you need to do and prioritize yourself. Then they will understand. Don't get me wrong, even your best friend at times might take advantage of you if you let them. But it's not that they don't care about you or they even mean to take advantage, it's the fact that if you just say yes, they assume you wanted to say yes. Try saying no or not right now or let me check my calendar.

Or actually I'd prefer to do blah blah blah set boundaries. So you help yourself to prioritize yourself. When you have some downtime, that's just for you to do whatever it is that you love doing, whether it's reading, painting, walking, meditating, coloring, all of those things. If you put aside downtime for you to do these things, you will be a happier person because you get to do things that you enjoy. So you will enjoy life more.

And let's be honest, prioritizing yourself is a requirement, not an option. The fact is you shouldn't feel guilty for doing something that is a requirement in your life. It is not optional for you to take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself in the way that you know best, you won't be productive or happy and you can't blame other people for that. And then if you think about it, what happens if you don't put yourself first?

You'll end up sick in some way, shape or form. What happens when you feel sick? If you go to bed for a few days with the flu or any other illness? Does the world fall apart? No.

If you take time to take care of yourself, you're less likely to be stressed, you're less likely to get ill. And even when you do, you won't be ill feeling stressed that you're missing stuff, or that you'll feel guilty being sick, that won't happen because you know you're taking time to prioritize yourself. When you're overworked and say yes to all the things or things you'd rather not do, it shows. People might not be able to interpret the actual reason behind your attitude, behavior or energy, but they will be able to sense that something is off. And this can make people feel uncomfortable without understanding why.

So don't do it. Only you can control yourself. You might have a hard time with guilt, and I get that. But the truth is you can only control yourself. You can't control all the things that are going on, no matter how much you try.

And just a word of warning prioritizing yourself does not mean neglecting others. Some people think that me time means that you neglect others, but that's actually just not the case. You have to learn to differentiate needs versus once. Needs are before once. You need time to yourself, you need time to recharge.

You need to take care of yourself. That's far more important than whether you run the PTA bake sale or whether Betsy does. There's a difference. And honestly, the more that you learn to put your needs before other people's wants I'll say that again. The more you learn to put your needs before other people's wants, the happier and healthier and better you will feel.

And to be fair, if you don't put yourself first, no one else will. Not your partner, not your kids, not your friends. So it must be you.

Why would you feel guilty about being true to you? Thank you for listening. This is [email protected], helping you build your brand and get hired. Have a great rest of your week.

I said no this month. When's the last time you said what you really wanted to say? No. I said no this month and yes to myself. I'm doing a little bit reworking on my programming and so using this time to bring back some of the most popular episodes from the archive. Now, this particular one is about saying no. You might need to say no to request for your time, to borrow your work, to borrow your materials, or even just wanting someone invading your personal or office space with an in person meeting. Here's the thing. No is a complete sentence, but sometimes that doesn't feel just right. So to help you to prepare for the inevitable, grab the download and get your best no face on. No is a complete sentence.

Hello, and welcome to the travelling introvert. Today I want to talk about, and I've talked about this before, but saying no and how to do it the right way it's super easy to feel guilty and want to avoid conflict or simply want to make other people feel good. However, if you don't say no, it can consume your whole life on how other people react and you might get stressed because of other people's happiness. Your happiness is kind of more important. So, in fact, saying no more often is crucial to come to your goals and aspirations.

And actually, it's something that I've struggled with the past couple of weeks where I wanted to say no and I wanted to set boundaries. I found it incredibly hard and so this has been helpful to me. No is not always a negative. Behind every no, there's also a yes. So what I mean is, when you say no, you're also saying yes to another opportunity that can better serve you in your life.

Just because you're saying no doesn't mean like no right now and no forever. Saying no means that you're committed to your values and goals and your boundaries. And you can always say yes without considering everybody. It's fine. The sad truth is, you will always need to think about yourself first.

Establish and stick to your boundaries. The only person you are responsible for is yourself and you can't expect others to know what you need. If you don't speak up, say something practice, assertive communication. Always speak up about your boundaries. And don't be afraid to let others know if they can't respect your boundaries, you don't need them, they're only going to hold you back.

You're only going to feel guilty and resentful on a whole bunch of other things which will just get you down and have you feeling overwhelmed. And I know it's not that easy. So finding the right words is hugely important. You don't just say no. There are other ways to let people know why you can't do it.

Suggest an alternative or provide a reason why you can't do it. Let them know that it doesn't work with your schedule or your timing is wrong. The more you can communicate and the more information you can give them. As far as I'm not doing this because of X, Y and Z, we'll stop them asking you again, but not in a bad way. If you are like, I can't do this on Mondays, then I'll ask you for Tuesdays instead.

So setting the right boundaries and using the right words are really helpful. Take the personal out of it. In other words, you're not saying no to the person asking, you're simply saying no to the activities that they want you to do. Often people don't say no because they're afraid to offend the person. However, not being fully honest with yourself isn't fair on them either.

Instead, realize it isn't about the person, but rather what they asked for. More likely than not, they'll understand why you are respectively declining their request. If you're always saying yes to people and activities that you don't enjoy, then you're not really being you. You're not really living your life. You're living the life you think other people expect from you.

And is that really what you want to do? Yes. You might be avoiding conflict, but you will easily create more by being dishonest with yourself and the people around you. A vague yes versus a firm no can be seen as more harmful, as your lack of commitment and poor attitude are noticeable. And it means people can't rely on what you say, and that's something really important.

Seeming wishy washy isn't a great thing. Knowing when to say yes and when to say no or when to say, let me check my schedule, let me check my calendar, let me get back to you within the next 24 hours. Whatever it might be is far better than being like, yeah, I guess it just doesn't work. So in the end, saying no allows you far more control and ease and less stress with your life and will help you accomplish more. It's not about making others feel unwanted.

It's not about being rude. It's about ensuring you are using your time wisely and doing the things that you want to do and following the path that you want to go on and where you want to be and your goals in life. Once you find a balance that works for you, you'll never regret saying no because of reasons that you value in your life. Thanks for listening. This is [email protected] helping you build your brand and get hired.

If you have any questions that you want me to answer on the show, email me at [email protected]. Have a great rest of your week.

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