You have more control over your career than you think

 
Who is responsible for your growth in your career? For the impact you can make? Whether or not you make it to the CEO role?

Some people might say their manager. Or the company they work for. Or maybe their parents, for bringing them up in a certain way.

I remember my fellow graduates in my first job. Many of them came from elite universities - Oxford, Cambridge. I didn’t - but I still made it into a highly selective graduate leadership programme at a FTSE100 business. I worked hard, and I accumulated the experience I needed to show during the interviews. I am convinced: Where you start doesn’t have to decide where you end up.

Then a couple of years later, a manager told me: “we need to hear your voice more.”

Again, I could have decided that this is just who I am, I can’t change that. Instead, I became curious: Why do I find it difficult to speak up, and what could I do about it?

Slowly, I built a toolkit that let me speak up and get heard. Over the years that took me into VP level roles, into running my own business, and eventually led to the creation of Keys to Impact.

So the true answer to who is responsible for your growth? You. (even if that feels uncomfortable at times…)

You steer the boat, in any weather

Yes, your environment has an impact. But how much you understand yourself - your strengths, your ambitions, what you value in life - has a much bigger influence. That’s the critical skill of self-awareness.

Imagine your career like sailing a boat. The weather dictates how fast you can go at times, and how easy it is to sail. That’s the influence of the industry and the company you work in.

And yes, sometimes we even have to face more storms and stronger currents as women in STEM.

But you determine the direction, the way of tackling the weather, or whether you even want to stay on the boat. In career terms, that means you decide your goal and how you want to deal with any obstacles on the way, in a way that feels right to you. And only you can know that.

To steer, you have to know where you actually want to go, and how you handle a boat. That’s why self-awareness matters so much. It’s the most important skill on that journey - knowing your values, your preferences and your goals.

Self-awareness is the skill of noticing your internal state (your values, strengths, ambitions) and your external impact (how others perceive you).

When you are highly self-aware, you can:

• take projects and roles that play to your strengths, which sets you apart from others and accelerates your progression.

• stay aligned with your values, which means you have higher energy for your work and get more done - and stay happier too.

• learn new skills and behaviours much faster, and in a way that sticks, because you know your own baseline and what will feel authentic to you when you change something.
  
  

Most of us think we are self-aware

Dr Tasha Eurich found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. (Research linked at the bottom.)

Three flags can alert you to areas where you can become more aware:

• You become defensive when someone gives you critical feedback

• You experience emotional outbursts and don’t notice the trigger beforehand

• You feel energy drained at work but don’t know why

Most people resonate with one or more of these flags - and that’s ok! You will never be done with building self-awareness. It’s a lifelong journey, especially since life events (parenthood, moving to a new culture, losing a loved one) change your baseline and expose where you have blind spots.

The Johari window: three ways to grow
 

A great concept to visualise this is the Johari window, developed in 1955 by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham.

 

It shows both dimensions of self-awareness, internal and external, in four boxes:

• The arena: what you and others know

• Blind spots: what others know but you don’t

• Facade: what you know and others don’t

• Unknown: what neither of you knows

Your job is to grow the arena. There are three ways to do it:

• Ask - to become aware of things from your blind spots

• Reflect - to pull things out of the unknown

• Share - to move things out of your facade
   

Move 1: Ask people you would follow in a zombie apocalypse

To grow external self-awareness, and shrink your blind spots, ask for feedback.

Two words of caution.

First, ask people who you trust. One of our community guests recently called this ‘the zombie apocalypse test’. Only trust those you would actually follow in a zombie apocalypse. Many people have their own motives for giving feedback - so don’t take it blindly on board without thinking about where it comes from.

Eurich’s research points the same way. She suggests finding a “loving critic” - someone who wants you to succeed and will tell you the truth without sugarcoating it.

Second, the higher you go in your career, the less honest feedback you will hear from your team - people tell leaders what they want to hear. So make it safe for them: Say that you value honesty, and that you would rather hear it from them than have it hold you back in your career.

Move 2: Ask “what”, not “why”
 

Growing internal self-awareness is actually much trickier. This is about pulling things out of the unknown, where nobody can hand you the answer.

You need to sit and reflect and understand the causes of your behaviour. But don’t ask yourself “why”. Ask “what happened just before?” or “what triggered me?”

Eurich found that “why” questions send us looking for a plausible sounding explanation. That usually means packaging the truth in a slightly nicer format, not the actual truth. Especially when it comes to facing your own flaws, which many people find difficult.

Here is the difference:

Why did I not share my view? → “I’m not confident enough. I’ve always been like this.” Plausible but useless as an explanation - you can’t take action.

What happened in that meeting that led me to not share my view? → “Someone interrupted my colleague. I got angry about the unfair treatment and couldn’t concentrate on the discussion.” This now gives you something you can act on. Next time someone gets interrupted in a meeting, you know that you might get triggered by that, so you focus on mentally staying in the room and give yourself a moment to come back to the discussion before you speak.
 

Move 3: Share your ambition and successes
 

The facade is the box we ignore most. It’s everything you know about yourself that the people around you don’t.

Your ambition usually is in this box - as well as your most successful achievements- because we rarely mention these.

This is not about bragging, but instead making sure the people who decide your next role have the same information about you that you already have.

For me, that changed when I genuinely started telling my mentors and sponsors at my company - the CHRO, the CEO - that I wanted to move into a Director role, and started asking what exactly I was missing. We discussed it, then I worked on filling the gaps. Over time, that meant I changed how people saw me, and I was able to get that Director promotion.

I could have reflected on that ambition privately for another two years and nobody would have known. Sharing it with them did two things: 1) It told them what I wanted. 2) It gave me information about the gaps that I could not have got any other way.

Your action this week

Think of a moment at work last week when you felt frustrated or stuck. Then ask yourself: What happened just before? What triggered me to feel like this?

The answer will tell you more about yourself than any personality test.

PS: Building self-awareness on your own is hard. It’s easy to put off the reflection, and to talk yourself out of getting to the root cause. That’s why we do it together in the Keys to Impact Community, with scheduled sessions and other ambitious women who hold you to account. Join us here.

PPS: Eurich’s research on the self-awareness gap is linked here.