This week I was able to have time to sit with both Daniel and Hal, who looked over my portfolio design to date and gave me some advice. You can read about this advice and what I did with it in my project research blog. The advice was very useful, it is always good to get different people to look at a portfolio as everyone looks at it with a different perspective and can give a different viewpoint. This is useful but also requires careful consideration as sometimes one person’s advice can contradict another’s so sometimes some advice has to be ignored, it is all about critical judgement. For me however, I would rather have lots of advice and have to consider it than no advice at all.
As we had no lecture this week, I felt this would be a good opportunity to write about another of the events I attended held by the Employability and Careers team here at Ulster University as part of their Graduate Futures program. This week I attended a session entitled Personal Branding: Your Unique Selling Point. I thought this would be about developing personal brand assets like a logo or values much like the branding module we did last year; however, it wasn’t and was very interesting and covered a lot of different topics.
Much like the previous event I attended a few weeks ago this one was split into two parts albeit on this occasion within a single online session. The first section was delivered by Camilla Long of Bespoke Communications who specialises in leadership coaching and is highly respected in that area and has given a TED talk on telling a story to unlock your influence.
Camilla concentrated the session on developing a growth mindset and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. She showed this illustration as part of the presentation:
I thought this was a great way of visualising success, as we know two thirds of an iceberg is hidden underwater and this is true of success as well. Everyone sees the outcome, getting the job or great results, they never see all the work and commitment that made those things achievable. Its important for me to keep this in mind especially this semester as I seek a placement opportunity as well as keep my university work at the level it needs to be. It is already proving to be a very busy semester and I think there are lots of long days ahead.
The presentation then moved on to look at processing the positives and recognising our emotions, two very important skills. We often brush over the positives in life and concentrate on the negatives and the things we want to change. This is not a healthy mindset and failing to recognise and process the positive things that happen daily, can lead to us feeling down and like we are not achieving anything. Recognising our emotions and categorising them correctly is also very important it is easy to feel overwhelmed and overreact to certain emotions by taking time out to think and relax we can process these emotions and deal with them in a more positive way.
Camilla then took us through four ways we could unlock our potential, by answering these questions:
By answering these questions and what he answers can teach us, we end up with a long list of skills and experience that we can use to reach our potential.
Next, we need to see how we can develop a growth mindset and for this we look at three things we are good at and one thing we want to develop, by then looking at how we got good at something we can build a plan as how we can improve the thing we want to develop. We can show this by using the illustration from earlier:
By doing this we can have a clear plan on how to improve in the areas we want to.
The second part of this workshop moved to a different area, how to create and develop a presence online to appeal to employers. The main place to create such a presence is LinkedIn and this part of the workshop concentrated on techniques to create a successful LinkedIn profile and build up a network through it.