The Traveling Introvert

Are you having feelings of imposter syndrome when applying for jobs or when at a new job?

Imposter syndrome at work is especially damaging and can affect you in many ways. Holding you back from promotions, being known as the person that can't be handed an extra task, long hours at work, and overall added stress. Imposter syndrome needs to be dealt with before it derails your career entirely. 

Almost everyone has suffered from imposter syndrome at one time or another. 

When having this feeling, you need to analyze why exactly you have this feeling. Are you in the wrong department, do you not understand the assignment, are you in the wrong career, or do you not understand the assignment right now? Once you know why then you can address the problem. Create a plan for your particular reason. Maybe you need more training, or you might have a bad manager, or you need time to settle into your career, or it could be time to look for a new job? 

Having imposter syndrome can cause us to overcompensate and set unrealistic goals. This creates a self-feeding cycle of failure. Start by setting small goals to get your confidence going. 

Always get advice and find a mentor. Find someone who has accomplished the things you want to achieve or someone "higher up" than you. 

Recognize what you have achieved. Track your accomplishments to look back on as reference when the feeling of imposter syndrome comes on. 

Your career can take over your life if you let it, especially with imposter syndrome. These feelings can have you working long hours to overcome your own perceived shortcomings. The lack of balance can take a toll on your physical and mental health. 

When you don't know the answer, ask for help and get clarification. Getting clarification will help ensure you are on the right path to do what needs to be done. You can't do your best if you lack details. When in doubt, ask questions. 

If you are feeling derailed by imposter syndrome, consider this. You came into this job with a specific purpose in mind. Whatever that may be, allowing feelings of insecurity to pull the rug out from underneath you won't help you accomplish your goals. Take a step back recenter your vision, and move forward with that. 

The lost art of doing nothing

You should be scheduling time out to do nothing. 

On your days off, you might find that you have lots of things to get done. Whether it is doing chores, seeing people, side projects. You might often find yourself scheduling out your days off instead of allowing yourself to go with where the day takes you. 

Due to the nature of technology nowadays, with notifications and easy access to our phones, we gravitate toward that instant gratification, and we have a large fear of missing out. This makes it hard for us to do nothing and plan nothing. 

Don't feel guilty for not being "productive"  all hours of the day. Our bodies and minds are not designed for that. If you continue to push yourself without a "do-nothing" break, you build up a deficit that can eventually lead to burnout. 

Don't even plan things that will make you feel better. Truly let your body or mind take you through the day.  Does your body need more rest, does it need to meditate, does it need Netflix, does it want to bake a cake? Listen and let your mind and body decide. 

It can take effort and practice, but go with the flow, don't check your mail or phone. Don't be "productive." Let yourself play, let yourself be.

Prioritizing yourself

One of the worst things you can do is feel guilty about prioritizing yourself. Prioritizing yourself is a need, and you should not feel guilty about your needs. 

People who care about you will respond healthily to you putting yourself first. 

Set boundaries or time for yourself and explain why this designated time is important to you. It May take time, but the people around you that care about you will understand why this time is important to you. 

Sometimes friends and family don’t mean to take advantage of you. Instead, they assume that if you say yes, it’s because you wanted to say yes. Instead, try saying no, not right now, let me check my calendar, or I would rather do…

Set boundaries and help yourself prioritize yourself. 

Block out the downtime to prioritize yourself by doing the things you like. Walking, reading, painting, meditating, coloring. If you allow yourself this time, you will be a happier person and enjoy life more. 

It is not optional for you to take care of yourself. If you don’t, you won’t be productive. You might end up sick and stressed. It shows in your work when you’re not allowing time for yourself. People will be able to sense that something about you is off. They might not know why, but your energy can be telling. 

You can only control yourself so give yourself that time. Prioritizing yourself doesn’t mean neglecting others. 

Needs and wants are different, and learning to differentiate is very important. When you finally learn to put your needs before other people’s wants, you will be happier. 

If you don’t put yourself first, no one else will. Don’t feel guilty about being true to yourself.

Balancing self-esteem 

Having healthy and balanced self-esteem is key to a happy and healthy life. 

Sometimes people assume that introverts don’t have high self-esteem or even that they have low self-esteem.

And then, there are times when self-esteem morphs into ego or overconfidence. 

There is healthy self-esteem. Here you have the confidence to be honest with yourself. You know your strengths and weaknesses, and you love yourself. Healthy self-esteem encourages you to live your life to the fullest, make good measured choices, and keep going even when mistakes happen with a lesson learned. 

Then there is low self-esteem. Unhealth low self-esteem leaves you with no confidence and a fear of making mistakes. Often this leads to a poor quality of life where you feel scared and trapped. Here you take in a lot of what people say about you, especially if it is negative.  

Then there is the overinflated self-esteem. This is also unhealthy. Overinflated self-esteem can trick you into thinking that you are better than everyone. This is ego and can ostracize you from your friends and family. 

Your self-esteem can fluctuate. But it is important to keep balance.  Unbalanced self-esteem can lead to poor quality of life. People with low self-esteem can miss out on important experiences. And overinflated self-esteem can push people away.

Most excess confidence or extreme lack of confidence is a form of deception. You are the one person you really don’t want to lie to, and unbalanced self-esteem is likely you lying. 

Understanding what self-esteem means is important. It is defined as confidence in your own self-worth and a sense of self-respect. You are not respecting yourself if you don’t believe you deserve respect and happiness. Neither is it when you hide behind a false sense of confidence. 

Being honest with yourself is the most important step. Only then can you start working on the changes to your life for the better.

As an introvert, you likely like to have alone time. 

There are benefits to spending time alone.

Schedule into your days alone time. Here are some benefits to a healthy amount of alone time.

It is important to enjoy your own company, alone time enables you to just be in the moment with yourself. This will overall give you more peace and can make you a better friend 

Time alone can encourage creativity. When you are alone and centered you will find that this is when your best ideas will come to you due to the lack of distractions. 

You might find that you get more done. Without distractions, you will be surprised at what you can get done in a short amount of time.

Spending time alone is a great way to recharge. Even 10 minutes to yourself can be beneficial. Find something that revives both your mind and body. 

Spending time alone can help you clear your mind. A few deep breaths alone can recenter you. 

Ideally, you can find an hour of alone time each day but even 10 or 30 minutes can be beneficial. If you can’t, even a 2-minute break alone with deep breaths can give you what you need to recenter and take on the tasks ahead. 

Spending time alone can help relieve some stress. A lot of stress comes from the people around you. Scheduling the alone time gives you something to look forward to and keeps you pushing through your day. Your alone time can be spent any way you want.  Sit, meditate, read, watch tv, it’s up to you. Humans are not meant to always be on, scheduling alone time will allow you to be a more rounded and healthy person. 

We all multitask, so being aware of when you are multitasking and why can be very helpful. 

Everyone might think they are good multitaskers, but our brains are not wired to multitask; it's not designed for it. 

It is important to avoid multitasking when doing specific tasks. (ie. Reading, driving, learning, writing). 

What we call "multitasking" is actually task switching. Meaning you go back and forth between tasks. You aren't really doing both at the same time, more so not focusing on either task. Multitasking also causes you to be slower. When you don't give 100% focus to one task, it will take you longer to complete your tasks. 

Multitasking can also cause you to make some mistakes. Mistakes can range from deadly, like in instances of texting and driving, or just an unneeded mistake. 

When completing a task with multiple steps, be sure to focus on your task at hand to avoid mistakes or inaccuracies. 

Multitasking can make you stressed. When things are taking longer or mistakes are being made, this adds stress. 

When your brain has too much going on, it can get information overload that can cause problems with your memory. Your brain starts filtering information incorrectly, giving everything the same weight of importance. 

When you have multiple tasks to complete, do one task at a time, do not kind of do each task at the same time. 

Knowing and acknowledging that you are task switching and not multitasking allows you to categorize similar tasks. For example emails, you might want to work through your emails consisting of info, things to get done, archives, calendar invites. If you filter each of thous individually, you will find that you will get things done quicker because you will not be task switching through your email work. Attempting to multitask can ruin your creativity and take the joy away from the things you like to do. Take the time to enjoy life by focusing on one thing at a time. 

Have you been thinking about time management and how you block out work time?

Are you blocking out your week, month, quarter, year?

One of the most important things when planning is creating a time management plan. A time management plan helps you avoid procrastination and make the hours you have count. It can alleviate pressure and let you enjoy your downtime because you know you have put in the hours needed to get your tasks done. 

Having a plan ensures you get things done more quickly and can allow you to spread your tasks out accordingly. 

Create a plan that is unique to you. 

Think about the following:

Be realistic with your planning. Listen to your internal clock for when you best complete tasks. Suppose you are not a morning person or night person, don't schedule out work time during that time frame. 

Set time limits: with tasks you like and dislike. Sometimes tasks we like can keep us procrastinating from tasks we don't like.  

Avoid distractions. Plan ahead on how you will deal with distractions.

Differentiate important tasks from none important tasks. Make it a habit to plan to do more important tasks first. This will make you feel accomplished, and it gives you the motivation to get more done. 

Both calendars and lists can work together but find what works for you. with technology, make sure to set reminders for tasks. 

Eliminate the need for urgency in your life. Train your clients or staff to give you enough time to get things done, set family time and time to recharge into your calendar as well. 

Create a daily action plan. Pick three things to do that will work you toward a future plan or goal. 

We only have the capability to make so many decisions in a day. Little daily tasks like choosing outfits or meals count towards this capacity to make decisions. 

It is important to cultivate an environment where you trust yourself to make good decisions.  If you trust your decision-making, you know that everything will be alright or that a good lesson will come from a bad decision. 

Here are some ways to start trusting yourself. 

Connect with your gut instinct, quiet your mind, find the voice of compassion and respect and listen to that voice. This skill takes practice, so keep at it. 

Avoid people who weaken your self-trust. “Naysayers”

When you make a promise to yourself, keep it! When you don’t do something you say you are going to do, you slowly erode trust in yourself. 

Be kind to yourself, don’t be an inner critic of yourself.

Forgive yourself when you make a mistake or make the wrong choice, and trust that you will make a better choice next time. 

Keep a list of the times that you followed your instinct and note how it felt in your body. Use this as a feelings reference for future decisions. 

Surround yourself with people who support and understand you. These people will encourage you to listen to yourself!

Just make that decision, trust yourself enough to know that you are making the right decision, and stop holding yourself back from getting things done.

Do you have trouble with productivity consistency? 

Some days you can get a lot done and then other days you lack the energy to get small tasks done?  A reason for this could be the type of work you are doing or that needed to be done the next day. It could also be mental fatigue. You could be pushing yourself too hard past your work stopping point. Your mind like your body can’t work all out, all the time. Slow and steady will give you a better average of work completed. Get into a good rhythm that works day after day. 

Productivity also includes taking quality breaks. This will take some trial and error to find what kind of break works best for you.  It could be a 5-minute break when you are in a good rhythm, or a longer break when you are switching to a different type of task. What you do during your break is also important. Stay hydrated, eat a snack, take a walk. Do something that will allow you to recover. Remember to be mindful of what works or take notes for future reference.

Don’t max out on productivity one day and then be maxed out for the rest of the week. Consider blocking out smaller 3-4 hour productive blocks. We are not designed to be productive all the time. 

I had a question come in that I wanted to answer today on the show and it was a question about productivity. And this person mentioned that they have really unproductive days after super productive days. They recently tried out basically like pomodoros. So it was like 25 minutes on five minutes of 24 minutes and twelve minutes of and it worked really well for them for the day.

They got a lot done and was even able to get sort of ahead of schedule. However the next day and they did this for about 7 hours the next day they got literally nothing done. They were either learning out doing a top back a piece of paper filling on the internet. They got some work done just through to guilt, but like, the day was gone, but I know it can be productive. This worked for me yesterday.

Why isn't this working for me today? And there's multiple answers to that. It could be the type of work that was done or the type of work that needed to be done the next day. It could be the fact that you might have been pushing yourself super hard and you didn't realise where you're stopping point was because it's like, I'm now going to the gym. If you go hard all day every day, it doesn't work out.

You do I know 100 pushups and that's the maximum you can do. And you try nd do 101 Luke your body's like not not doing it. If you try and do 100 on Monday and then try and do it on Tuesday and then try and do it on Thursday and every day of the week you'll have like, you know, a certain amount of push ups, but really your body can't do that. It needs slow and steady. If you did maybe 70 push ups a day instead, you could probably get a better average and you wouldn't feel so exhausted the next day.

So instead of trying to go all out every day and pushing everything to the Max, it might be better to look into where you get into a good rhythm and you're like, I've done. I've done good to dive on a certain amount. Maybe that's 3 hours work. Maybe that's far as a focus work. And then I'm going to stop and take breaks and do something else.

And here's the other important part about productivity is it shouldn't just be about the work that you do, but it should be about the quality of the break that you take and everyone is different. But you need to figure out for yourself what type of breaks work best for you and how often and that might depend on the type of work that you did. So there could be some breaks were a five minute break is enough because you want to keep rolling on and maybe you're writing a paper, whatever else kind of work that you might be doing, or you might be doing the type of work where you're actually context switching.

So you finish one thing in 25 minutes. When you stop and you go do something else.

So you might need a ten or 15 minutes break in between to go and context switch and do something else. Now, what you do during that break is just as important as what you do while you're working. Do you eat? Do you stay hydrated? Do you go and breathe fresh air?

Do you splashing cold water on your face? Do you zone out? Do you give your brain a chance to recover? So what you do on the brakes is just as important, if not more important than the work you are actually doing. Think about what type of breaks work best for you, depending on the type of work you are doing, and it will be sort of hit and miss and will take some fine tuning and tweaking.

So Journal it, write it down, take notes, have data points. But at the end of the day, it's not just about the work that you're doing. It's about the breaks that you take, how long they are, what you do with them, maybe even the time of day. So you can't just Max out on productivity all on one day and expect to be fully functioning the next day. It just doesn't work.

Is that having an introvert hangover right? You go to an event, you speak to lots of people and you come home and you're done because you've hit that wall and you're like, I'm done. I can't. I just and you come home and you're exhausted for the rest of it, like the week. But if you go speak to one or two people and leave and come home, you'll still be able to function of the next day.

It's the same sort of thing. You just need to think about it in the that sort of a way.

And so maybe try and have smaller, productive day on the whole seven or 8 hours, but three hour block or a four hour block, and it's not necessarily the amount of things you get done, but the type of work you get done right. It's just something to think about and to be fair, we're not done to be productive all the time, something that we kind of forget about. So thank you for listening. This is Janice at the Korean trip. Com helping you build your brand and get hired.

Have a great rest of your week.

Problem-solving is a crucial skill. All success comes with challenges and obstacles to overcome. 

Tips on how to problem solve 

1) Be able to adapt and learn: No one has all the answers. Focus on what you have to do to learn the answers using your " Research Mindset." You will need different approaches for different problems. 

2) Be confident in your abilities and welcome challenges: Success stories have obstacles to overcome. Remember that the challenge will help you grow and develop your skills. Experience will give you the confidence to get the job done. 

3) Focus on Finding Solutions: Don't focus your time on the problem. Instead, come to the table with a solution. Use your time to test possible solutions. 

Don't take challenges negatively. Instead, change your perspective to consider what valuable knowledge and experience and your organization will learn. 

Don't shy away from challenges. They will help you achieve more than you ever thought possible. 

Transcript 

. I want to talk about how to problem solve. A crucial factor that stands in anyone's way to success is how they solve problems. No success comes without some form of obstacles or decisions to make and things to overcome. So it's crucial to understand just how to go ahead and solve problems.

And so I want to took about four different ways that I've heard about or done or had people come up to me and talk about to solve problems efficiently, be able to adapt and be willing to learn. Sounds simple, but no one. No one has all the answers and this is okay. You're not going to have the answer right away. Instead, focus on what you need to do to learn it.

Research that research mindset that I've talked about in the past. Every situation you face will be different and will require different approaches to solve it. You can't expect the same approach to work every time and that's okay. You must be willing to adapt and learn new ideas and and come at things in a different way. With a curious mindset, successful people stress the importance of adaptability because they wouldn't be as far as they are today without it.

Just think about any business organisation. If they weren't open to trying new things, the business might have failed. Now you should be confident you a bit it and welcome challenges. No success comes with that action, hard work or obstacles. With every success story, there's always something someone overcame to achieve their goals.

You must welcome these challenges as an opportunity to grow and develop your skills. Experience ensures that you will learn to trust your abilities over time, allowing you to solve problems more quickly and with different facets of creativity. When you believe in yourself and your abilities, you will no longer focus your mind on what you can't do but what you can do or how best to do it. And one thing managers really love focus on finding solutions. Don't just bring me the problem.

That'll be what we can do to solve it. Focusing too much time on the problem rather than the solution really helps. It only leads to more frustration, stress and no action plan to take it. And so it just sits there and it is to be a problem. While you need to understand the problem to develop solutions, this shouldn't be your focus and shouldn't only occupy should only occupy a short period of time.

The rest should be used to creating and testing possible solution. Obviously you can have a solution and it might not work, but at least you've got something and stay positive and carb. So here's the thing. You will always have something to overcome. There will always be struggles.

There will always be someone who doesn't agree with you. There'll always be all sorts of things that you might see as getting in your way. While these things can be frustrating. You see silver lining. A lot of people see problems as new opportunities.

Therefore, the next time you run into a problem, a roadblock and issue a challenge instead of putting a negative cast on it straight away, turn around and try and think about it from a different point of view. What new opportunities or knowledge could you gain? And how will it help you achieve your goals or your tasks or your organization's? Goals or your tasks? Right?

Changing your perspective and keeping a Curiosity a curious mindset or research mindset allows you to save energy as it takes far less energy in time, and so you can focus on what matters the most. So just learn from your experiences and so that way you can look at problems differently. Don't shy away from challenges. Embrace it to help you learn and achieve even more than you ever thought possible. Thank you for listening.

This is Janice at the CareerIntrovert. Com, helping you build your brand and get hide. If there's any question or topic that you would like me to cover on the podcast, please email me at Janice at the CareerIntrovert. Com. Have a great rest of your day.