The Art of Being Bold At Work

Good morning, everyone. Happy Monday. It's a beautiful Monday here in Minneapolis. Sunny and blue sky. Going to just hang out for a second or two as we get started on the live stream. So for those of you that don't know me, my name is Jean Nichols. I am a coach. I am a consultant Reiki master. I teach a lot of spin classes, so I do a lot of things that are around movement and helping people make positive change in their lives, whether it's through my coaching and consulting work or if it's through spin classes or sound baths.

Good morning, Dante. How are you today? Hope you're having a great day. It's nice to have you here. Hello, everyone. Hello, DJ Kirkavia. It's nice to hear you or see you out here today. Hello, Jules. Welcome back. Nice to see you again. It's a beautiful day. Hello, David. Here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's blue sky. Temperature is a little questionable, but we're getting there. So today, my name is Jean Nichols. I am part of the Cadre family here and I'm so excited to be here on a Monday. I'm not always a Monday person, so sometimes I think we need to get a little extra to get ready for Mondays.

However, I. I am working on a shift in mindset about how might we make Mondays more magical and how might we take some bold steps at the beginning of our weeks to really set the stage for what the rest of the week is going to shape out to be. So the last couple of Mondays, I've talked about strengths. As I've mentioned, I'm a certified strengths coach. I work with a few different personality inventories. One of them is the well known strengths finder assessment. And I talked about how we spend our time.

So how much time are we spending in a day energized by the work that we do or the activities that we do? I've talked about how we might think about our strengths a little bit differently and really focusing in on the activities. What activities help us to feel energized, excited, successful? What activities might make us feel drained? And today I thought I'd put it out there and call this one or being bold at work. And why I say it that way is sometimes it requires us to get out of the day to day regular tasks that we do and take a leap into asking for something more that we want to bring into our jobs so that we can be active participants in how we shape or shift our career.

And that requires us to find some new courage. And I'm going to go backwards a little bit here. I listened yesterday to Doctor Charryse Johnson talk about when you grieve you. And I was very much encaptured by her, her whole stream. So if you haven't listened to that one, I would highly encourage you to go listen to Doctor Charryse Johnson and when you grieve you and why I offer that one up as it relates to being bold at work, is there times in our career, there are times in our days where we might feel a loss for maybe some work that we had done in the past or we had a change at work.

A lot of the work that I do is around change management and communications and helping people move through change on a day to day basis. And change isn't easy to go through. We might also experience, hi, Luke. Good morning. We might also experience in our careers a layoff, an organizational restructure. We might get a new manager before we're ready for them to leave. Our old manager to leave. And so when we think about tying in that when you grieve you message from doctor Charryse Johnston that she posted about this weekend.

And then we think about taking bold actions at work. It's really one of the things she commented there was about becoming your own ally. And so when we think about becoming bold in our careers, bold in our days, bold at work, it really is becoming our own self advocate. We can have really great mentors or we might not even have a mentor. And so one of the first steps that I invite all people that I work with too, is to find someone at work who knows them really well and knows their history well.

And maybe you just started a new job and that's not available for you yet. You can always go back to some of your old mentors, but really taking into consideration how might you become your best ally, your best advocate for understanding what your strengths are, what activities really drive your engagement and that you feel super successful with and then acknowledge where you want to go. So I'm taking a couple of the a words and paying them forward through this bold action with work and acknowledging who we are as individual contributors.

Whether or not you're a manager or people leader, you also have work that you give and you put out there. So when we think about bringing forward our strengths and tying our strengths together, it takes us the activity of really getting crisp and clear on what is the work that we love to do. So igene, for example, I love solving complex problems. I love walking into situations that are unknown and trying to create solutions and magic from the unknown and then helping people move forward through that unknown and move with them together.

A large part of my job and my work is around change management, but I actually have a finance and technology background. So I used to build and design business models for people to think differently about their work and to make it a little bit more simple so we could have better conversations. I really love solving those complex problems and moving that work forward. In order for me to, I would say, really reshape my career, it took and required me to take some actions. I worked with a coach. I happened to have access to a free coach.

So that was nice. And my job, I also spent a lot of time really trying to understand where in my history of my career was I most successful or that I felt the most successful. Because everybody around us can tell us what they see about what they think our strengths are, and no one's really going to know except for you. You are the only person that can tell me if you are excited by entering invoices or depleted by entering invoices. You're the only person that can tell me if you find great joy in managing people or not managing people.

You are the only person that can tell me when you felt the most successful and why you felt the most successful. So in order for us to really start to take and become more active and proactive in building up our careers, in building up ourselves, it requires us to really get crisp and clear on what do we feel? Where do we feel strong? Where have we felt successful and why did we feel strong or successful there? Was it the environment? Was it the work? Was it the approach? Was it the outcome? Diving into each of these elements a little bit more can really help us to go to our managers, to go to our supervisors to create an action plan of discovery for what that next job might look like.

Because now I have. I have a book, I have tools, I have statements that can be used in a conversation to say to my boss, I'm going to pretend, Luke, you're my boss for today. If I'm having a one on one with Luke, what I want to be able to do is say, hey, Luke, this week. These are the things that I'm working on. These two things I'm super excited about. So if you have more of those coming up in the future, maybe I can be a resource or somebody that you ask to help you with this type of work. These are the two activities that I'm the most challenged by, and here's why.

I might not have enough information to do the job. I might not be clicking with who the stakeholder is and I need to understand them better. Can you help me? So when I, Jean, can go into my one on one with Luke and confidently, and maybe not so confidently, because the first time we do that conversation, it can be really hard, but start to have the conversation so that Luke starts to understand where I feel successful more and where I feel like my strengths are. And he can start to also then understand where I might be depleted in my week.

He can help me come up with a strategy to work through it. Sometimes people see us getting things done as a strength. They might see that we have 100% accuracy and believe that to be a strength of ours. They might perceive that that work is something that we're energized by. Until we use our voice, until we share with people what we really are energized by or depleted by, no one's really going to know. And so if we think about taking bold actions, I have. I pulled out a book that I really love. It's this book called Never eat alone.

When I was rethinking my career in finance and what I really enjoyed about working in finance and really what was draining me in that, in the. I would call it redundancy. Because a lot of that work was repeatable work. I had to spend a lot of time really understanding what I loved about why I went into finance and technology and how I wanted to shape that and what it would require me to do to be able to do that. And this book, never eat alone, was one of the books that I grabbed from a mentor a long time ago.

It's not a new book, but one of the statements in here that I love, and I'm quoting it specifically from the book, you have to start taking ownership of managing your career. You have to start making an effort to change your brand from an anonymous insert, whatever your role is, to a slightly famous difference maker. So when I think about a slightly famous difference maker, that doesn't mean that my name will be plastered on a billboard or I will all of a sudden become a social media influencer.

But what that does mean is that maybe in your day to day, maybe in your job, managers across the organization are now starting to talk about you and how you've been able to solve different problems, how you've been able to step up to new challenges. And so what I love about taking that statement of taking personal accountability for my career, it means that I no longer get to be. I now get to be, I now get to be an active participant in what comes next. I've been laid off from a job a while ago when I worked in corporate America before I started my own consulting company.

And if I go back to the doctor. Sharese Johnston's when you grieve, you going through a layoff was, it was hard, right? You miss your family, you lose your manager, you lose your best friends at work. And a part of you loses your identity because you don't understand maybe why you were the one that was chosen. Or we identify so much with what our job or our career is, that sometimes we forget about the human that's behind all of that working all of the magic. The person behind all of it is us. We are the difference maker.

And so when we go through that grief of that loss or that change, after we can come up for air and we can start to work on our networking. We can start to remember what our brand was. It gives us just a little bit extra to help us start to create what that next future is going to look like. And maybe it's not a layoff. Maybe it's you're just starting to get bored with the work that you're doing today and you're feeling depleted. Or maybe you have a manager that you're not resonating with as much and you're feeling depleted, not appreciated, or not as excited about your work anymore.

We can choose to continue to stay in that. And the more and more drained we feel by our job, that energy oozes into our. Into our whole life. On the days that I feel the most drained about my job, I want to walk my dog less. I feel more annoyed by the fact that I get to take my beautiful dog for a walk. Or maybe I go to happy hour with friends or lunch with a colleague and I'm all of a sudden complaining a lot more. And so when I think about that energy, I want to put out there, I want to put out the energy of collaboration.

I want to be excited to go for a walk. Not every day is going to be a great day, but if I can start to understand what's causing the activities to drain me, what's causing me to feel stuck, and I can take a bold action. Maybe it's a different style of one on one with my manager, maybe it's seeking out a mentor. Maybe it's watching more of these Cadre videos to see which person you really connect with and then maybe asking them some questions. Because we're all so excited to be here with all of you working our own ways forward, pass forward and working with you that's a bold action you can take.

So on this Monday, I'm going to offer up to you. You can post in the comments. I'll post a comment later today about bold actions that we can take and really consider what might be one bold step you can take, and a bold step can be as simple or as small as scheduling a one on one with your manager, or asking a colleague what they think that you're the most successful at or what they think your strengths are at. Something tiny can still be really bold because what it means is it's a start. And one of the things that I tell my spin classes is we are planting the seeds today for our future selves.

So my invitation to you on this beautiful Monday is to plant one seed, one bold seed for you to create the future version of you. Now, later today, you can dial in at noon and you can listen to culture versus climate, which is a really great addition to bold actions and really starting to understand how your culture or the climate might so support those actions or detract from those actions. So dial in, listen to more, and if you have comments, post them in the chat and I promise within an hour or two I will respond to any questions that you have or any comments you have.

So as I sign off a little long today on this Monday, I am going to invite you one more time to consider one bold action. And if you write it in the comments, I'll support you through that action. This week I'm here every Sunday at 1030. I think it's 1030 on Sundays for a little me time. Every Monday at 1130. m. On Sundays for some me time. And I will also be putting out some static videos soon and I look forward to seeing you all out here on Cadre. Make sure to tell your friends, if you're looking for a colleague or you have a colleague or someone you want to tag team with, tell them about it and let's do this and make magic together.

Have an amazing rest of your day, go do something brilliant for you and be bold.