Putting yourself out there

There’s a perverse, and seemingly converse, thing in this world about hunting for a new career.  There’s the art of timing.  There’s the odd footrace to obscurity and uncompetitiveness if you’re unprepared to be (uber)bullish on yourself, your abilities and your ‘you-ness’ (and the making of your you-ness into the perfect fit for that prospective employer’s their-ness).  Humility plays almost no part in this process, except if you count the judicious application of judgement to which adjectives are just a little too over-the-top or not.  But it’s a stretch to call that anything other than restrained or nuanced salesmanship. And being weighted-down by even an ounce of self-awareness, or holding the capacity for self-reflectiveness, can mean overcoming the voice in your head that argues the weaknesses in the very case you set out to make for or about yourself.   It’s like the unbidden public defender pops up to argue the holes in your case.  Then the lawyer for the defendant objects, and the judge either sustains or dismisses.

Fundamentally it’s about being convinced, and then confidently expressing, that you are “enough”.  And to be able to convince others of that, you have to believe it yourself.  And keep believing it in the face of the evidence, or the signs, symptoms and whatever else blows in like tumbleweed across the ego to challenge this belief. And you have to be “enough”, without being convinced (or convincing others intentionally or otherwise) that you are “too much”.