See How Far You’ve Come

I once had a professional choice to make that I wasn’t sure about. I asked my mentor about it.

Many people are geared to constant progress in their pay and title, many also gun for new or more challenging responsibilities and opportunities. It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come when you only focus on what you haven’t achieved. In this post, I think of the phenomenon through my own evolution around it.

Foliage Walk Down The Memory Lane

Around two years ago, I had started in a new job. I was walking home from the office, the autumn foliage bright in the late afternoon sun. For some inane reason, I was thinking how much further along I should be in my career, only a few weeks into my new role (I can’t recall if I’d seen a peer get a better promotion that day or something else to trigger the ‘I’m not good enough’ reaction). And then I physically paused. Three years ago you had only just graduated, and now you work as a manager. See how far you’ve come?

Think of the moment when you heard great news. When you got something you’d worked for, hoped for. Maybe a promotion, or college acceptance. Maybe a job interview after so many rejection letters. Did you feel elated? Did worry, stress and doubt dissipate in an instance? And at which point did you stop feeling like you’d actually achieved something worth celebrating?

I’m a huge proponent of retrospectives at work. I reckon so many companies circle the drain with their issues because no one takes the time to review a completed project and assess what went well and what didn’t; certainly few places care to evaluate on-going practices and god forbid, make changes before things grind to a halt. I’ll hop on that train ride in a later post, but for now, I say that it’s good to take a long look in the rearview mirror in your own life, too.

[Insert Title]

People categorize because it helps us make sense of the world. Sometimes those categories stigmatize or reduce us to one type of thing only, but our brains need categories to operate more efficiently. Referring to World War II is easier than referring to ‘the period of time between 1939 and 1945 during which certain armies went to war in different places on the planet.’ Similarly, titles and achievements help us make sense of others: a director is likely to have more say over things at work, a mother is a person with children, and someone with a master’s degree is likely of at least a certain age and has spent at least a certain amount of years at university.

I used to be very hung up on titles. In 2021, I ran a YouTube channel and many of the people I interviewed on it said that titles matter less and less the older you get; it’s what you get to do that matters. Now, three years later, I start to believe it. Titles matter at work (I wrote about it in a previous post), and they matter when looking for employment, and they may influence how people see you, but they’re not a proof of your worth, nor skill. They aren’t always comparable from one country to the other, or even inside an organization. Frequently, the seniority level is a contractually agreed upon thing, reflecting the negotiation skills of the title holder.

As an example, my roles in communications. I’ve had three different roles in communications, and they have each been completely different – the tools I used, the tasks I had, the place in the organization, the people I worked with. In some roles, I’ve coached leaders on how to communicate strategy but in others had nothing to do with either; in some placed, I’ve set up and maintained intranets while in others I’ve not even touched them; I’ve created visuals and used design tools while in other places I’ve been told I cannot even pick photos for presentations.

I drifted to title talking because my foliage walk down the memory lane actually recapped the titles I had held: from graduate to trainee to specialist to manager. In my field (as I understand it), that’s an upward trajectory, and when I got my first internship I didn’t even dream of getting to a manager until my mid-thirties. This also reminded me of perspective. We tend to want to go to the end of the book to find out what happened, fast-forward videos to the conclusion. But it’s every page of the book, every second of the film, where the ‘what happened’ happens. You just can’t skip the bits that aren’t traditionally LinkedIn post worthy. And to that – make them that. Celebrate your smallest successes.

How Do I Know If I’ve Come Far?

I never got to the habit of a learning journal, but I like the idea. If you don’t want to pen down your thoughts daily, make a habit of writing down, or recording in any way, how you felt when you achieved something. And keep those moments at hand.

You can also just look at what you’re doing in your life right now, whether professional or otherwise, and compare your approach to when you first tried it. In my case, I started working with social media, analyst relations, and press relations a year ago with no prior experience. It was hard at first, having to piece it all together with no manual. I remember the first press release I wrote: it took me two hours, and I got it back filled with suggested changes. Six months later, I spent half an hour on it and got minimal suggested tweaks, some of which I accepted and some of which I did not. Not only had my skill level increased, but my confidence, too. The same applied in analyst relations, only with much steeper a learning curve. I started working on this field with no idea what it was (maintaining relations with industry analysts who consult prospects on which vendors to consider and who author reports that do the same), not knowing any of the people I was going to be assisting, and having never done an analyst briefing. Six months in, I could prepare an agenda, pull together the basis for the presentation materials, and suggest improvements to the way things were done. The biggest difference was mental: from feeling completely lost and scatterbrained, I felt on top of things, sure of my method, and able to mentor others.

You’ll note that for both of the above examples, I emphasized the mental change the most. It’s understandable – no one enjoys feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing. But the older you get, the further you want to get in your career, whatever it is, your greatest asset is knowing who you are. That’s something no one else can be better at than you; that’s something you have to be able to demonstrate. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses, know what you can and cannot do. Only you know where you started and how it’s going; only you know if your achievement was a cakewalk or a perilous journey full of traps and distractions. Be proud of where you are and how you got there. Well done.

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