Self-care for your Internal Communication career…

…which can empower you and your team to secure all the:

  • influence
  • confidence
  • time
  • budget and
  • opportunities…

…you desire.  For good.  For everybody’s good.

However successful you’ve been in your career to date, does this list sound like something that could bring you and your team even more fulfilment?  If it does, may we explain how we can help achieve it all?  We’ll need just three and a bit minutes of your time:

Two key questions

If you don’t already have everything you want in your working life, it must be because the people – who are in a position to let you have those things – aren’t completely up for doing so.  Yet.

Why not?  Let’s try a quick thought experiment.

If you were to ask those key decision-makers: “Do you take Internal Communication seriously?” what do you think they’d say?

Now, what if you were to ask them: “Do you take Internal Communication seriously enough?”

Chances are that second question would stop them in their tracks (and might risk getting some people’s backs up).  But it may also help explain why they don’t yet feel confident enough to be giving you all you desire.  After all, if they did, they surely would.  So how come their confidence is coming up short?  What’s the key you haven’t yet found?

Maybe it lies in the very nature of ‘confidence’ itself.  Is confidence just a single thing?  What if – without realising it – your key decision-makers are wearing ‘The Wrong Trousers’ of confidence?

Wrong-trousered confidence

Everyone wants to feel confident at work, do they not?  In fact, they need to.  It’s biological.  If a human’s confidence deserts them, the Fight/Flight/Freeze response kicks in.  And that’s hardly tenable for someone at work.  So – when people find themselves in novel situations – they may often resort to ‘false flag’ forms of confidence:

  • Some default to ‘unwarranted confidence’. They rely on bluster and bravado – convincing themselves their capabilities are unrealistically high.  This has long been recognised as the now famous ‘Dunning Kruger effect’.
  • Other people rely on a sort of ‘Cross-your-fingers-and-hope’ form of confidence.  This can often happen if they share a certain responsibility with other people (and particularly if they don’t know those others very well).
  • Then there’s perhaps the most famous false-flag of them all: “Fake it ‘til you make it” confidence.

Needless to say, none of these is healthy – for the psychological well-being of the individuals involved, nor the operational well-being of an organisations for which they work.  But it’s hard to criticize anyone for resorting to them – and even sticking with them long-term – if they’ve nothing better to fall back on – or move on to.  So, what is that ‘something better’ that you could give them?

Justifiable confidence

We believe that only justifiable confidence is healthy for the well-being of organisations and all their employees.  And confidence becomes justifiable when it’s rooted in a sufficient volume of credible evidence.  In some long-established professions (such as accountancy, medicine and law) that evidence has been built up, and embedded, over decades or even centuries. 

But with Internal Communication, it hasn’t been.  And that presents you with a challenge, does it not?  Has the paradigm – which you, and your leaders and other clients have inherited – enabled them to have justifiable confidence in their own decision-making when it comes to IC?  Of course not.  Is that your fault?  Nope.  Is it theirs?  Hardly. 

So this means that, even if you feel your have justifiable confidence in your abilities, because of your:

  • years of experience
  • seniority
  • qualifications
  • proven ability, and
  • measurable business results…

…your decision-makers may not be able to tell if it’s enough for them to give you everything you desire for yourself and your team. 

This, then, means you need to answer at least one, and possibly two questions:

  1. If you’re not yet sure you have justifiable confidence in every one of your working practices, and those of your team, how can you establish that confidence?
  2. When you have that confidence, how can you get your key decision-makers to share in it?  

Achieving ‘shareable’ justifiable confidence

If you’re going to have everything you desire for your career, we need to get out of this corner into which fate has backed everybody.  This means finding a way of creating that ‘sufficient volume of credible evidence’, and getting it accepted across your organisation. 

Is that even doable?

Absolutely.  And we can explain how – to you and your team – in our FREE Career Self-care Session.