On Appreciating Yourself

It’s so amazing to me how some wonderfully spectacular people have absolutely no appreciation of how special they are. Seems to me that all we do with long lists of “required competencies” – most of which have little or nothing to do with how you actually need to interact with others to accomplish the goal – is make people feel inadequate. So I hope you will understand how proud I was of Kevin, our fabulous VP of Sales, the other day.

Seems he sent an HR leader her own hiring report. Now usually we don’t do this, since who wants to read things that might be negative – things you don’t even want to change about yourself, even if, magically, you could. Apparently the HR leader read it and was not happy. (No one ever is, really, and mea cupla - it is we dumb “experts” who have caused it with our overemphasis on impossible generic “perfection”.)

But Kevin rose to the occasion and went through it with her, bit by bit, making sure she understood that for what she was expected to do there could not be a better fit – even though there are lots of jobs for which she would be a much less than perfect fit. Not that she would actually want to do any of them…

I know he must have done a great job. He shared this comment she sent him:

“I read this report again and was surprised to find that it really wasn’t that “bad.” I think I can live with this assessment! I intend to share it with my boss and see how useful he thinks it is considering what he knows about me from having worked with me for several years and/or whether he thinks it would be useful in making a hiring decision.”

What I love about this is how she moved from fear to appreciating how truly excellent she is for what she does, just by having some real feedback from a real person.

I hope you are appreciating yourself today!