Putting Yourself Out There > Being Right

My attachment to rightness

I am a thoughtful and deliberate person. People have described me as being articulate. Over the past 6 months, coaching has brought awareness to a number of attachments I have. One of them is my attachment with rightness. Earlier in life this showed up as conflict with others - as in, you're wrong and I'm right. Today, it shows up differently. My attachment to rightness shows up as conflict with myself. In other words, I have developed a mild obsession with communicating the right things in the right way. For me, communicating the right thing has meant developing a perspective that is defensible, justifiable by thoughtful arguments and facts. I blame this on my PhD program (ugh, those psychologists!). Communicating the right way has meant me sinking energy into word choice and sentence structure - thesaurus.com has been my secret friend for many years. The unfortunate outcomes has been me being less willing to speak up or promote myself when I have not obsessively outlined and fact-checked my rightness.

As the say, "If you don't have something right to say, then don't say anything at all."

As you can imagine, always being prepared to say the right thing in the right way is exhausting, anxiety-provoking, and impossible. Avoid this at all costs. It's not worth it.

The good news is that through working with a coach, I have brought awareness to this thought and behavior pattern. Through awareness, I can acknowledge what is (i.e., my attachment to rightness) and consciously make choices that result in different outcomes. That is where this blog came from: my attempt as putting semi-baked ideas out into the world.

My need to promote myself

Speaking of putting ideas out into the world, my coach challenged (actually, "double dog dared me") to come out on LinkedIn as a coach and promote my services to my professional community. With my Co-Active Professional Coach Certification program quickly approaching, I'd excited to work with more clients. After all, the required 100 hours of coaching aren't going to complete themselves. From what I hear, an effective way of getting what you want is to ask for it.

Here was my plan:

• Step one: I need to tell people what I'm doing.

• Step two: I need to ask people for their business.

Sounds easy, right? You can imagine how my attachment to rightness might get in the way of me doing this: What's the right thing to say? What's the right way to say it? What if I embarrass myself? What if people don't respond to me? In the past, I would have just opted out to save myself the suffering. Now, however, I feel committed to following through.

For me, personally, starting with a blank page is paralyzing. It's guaranteed that I'll carefully evaluate judge every sentence and end up with nothing. Instead, my strategy is to start with a framework - a set of prompts - to help me think through my value proposition. This allowed me to brainstorm on the *content (*the "what") and I'd worry about the structure (the "how") later.

The framework I chose was the set of prompts within Book Yourself Solid. You can also access these prompts in the free Book Yourself Solid workbook. These prompts helped me identify and articulate my target market, their needs/desires, and my value proposition. To me, there's a clear distinction between "knowing" all of this and actually writing it down. I strongly recommend the latter.

The structure and call-to-action

Answering the Book Yourself Solid questions provided me the content. Now, I needed to structure the content within a concise, clear, and engaging format that fit within LinkedIn's character count. Here's what I came up with:

1. Create a hook, describe a pervasive problem

2. Introduce myself

3. Introduce what I have to offer that target market can benefit from

4. Create a sense of urgency (real, not fake)

5. Tell people how to take action and make the action easy

From here I wrote and rewrote a few drafts, incorporating feedback from trusted friends and my coach. Getting their feedback was important to me because I wanted an outside perspective on how I might come across to others. In my request for feedback, I included my objective and specific questions for them to consider:

Objective:

I'm making my first post on LinkedIn and Twitter about my coaching practice. My objective is to generate some leads for potential clients during certification. I have chosen to only work with a small number of clients because I want to maintain balance among my career at CZI, coaching, and my personal life. ← Practice what I preach!

Feedback Requested

1. Length: Is this too long? Too short? Just right?

2. Content: What's missing? What's can be edited out? What's boring?

3. Tone: How do I sound? Are there ways I could sound more approachable, fun - and more like me?

4. Dealer's choice: What other thoughts do you have?

Through feedback, I learned that I could be more clear in some areas and could be more playful in others. My feedback providers also helped me structure sentences differently. A huge "thank you" goes out to them! :)

Final post

We all experience feeling stuck in our careers: not progressing forward, not feeling connected to our work, feeling like an impostor or outsider. I've felt stuck - and it sucks. What propelled me forward was working with a coach and, consequently, training to become a coach myself. Now, I coach other UX professionals while also continuing my own research leadership career.

I love supporting UX leaders, researchers, and designers to propel themselves forward in their current roles or toward exciting new opportunities. One-on-one, we reconnect with what it means for you to live in alignment with your core values, shift perspectives that don't serve you, and set meaningful goals toward the career and life you desire.

Simply put, I help you tap into truths about yourself that you may have lost sight of: your creativity, resourcefulness, wholeness, and power. Hint: we all have these. :)

I am taking on two additional clients during my six-month #Coactive Professional Coach Certification (CPCC) program. Throughout certification, I'm offering packages at rates well below the typical costs of coaching.

Interested? Grab some time on my calendar for us to get to know each other. If you have a friend in mind, then please encourage them to do the same. There's no charge or commitment for an initial chat.

Schedule online: https://paulderby.as.me/

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Is it perfect? No, but I'm at peace with that. Rather than striving for perfection, I'm striving to put myself out there. Because of my attachment to rightness, putting myself out there was something I often avoided. Not anymore. 💪