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Are you like a car racing around an endless track? Zipping along with the finish line in sight isn't the only way to be productive and effective at work. And what if there isn't a finish line and your focus is simply racing around the work track? What if you slowed down - or even stopped? A friend was updating me on working for a new client and she said: “He wants to sit around and talk… I keep thinking, ‘Shouldn’t we be getting some work done?’” It made me smile and I responded: “That is work. I sit around, listen and talk to people – it’s called being a sounding board. How else do you generate fresh thinking and better perspectives?" Making and taking time to talk, to listen, to share ideas, to process, to develop – all of these things are “working”. In my experience, people underestimate the value of making time to stop, listen and talk, but it’s a fundamental part of how we come up with the best (not first or fastest) solutions. It's certainly how I help people move forward in their work and careers when they've got stuck just racing around the track. In an increasingly busy world, it's vital to press pause and just...stop. For a bit. Breathe, assess and move forward recharged knowing you have clarity and can act with purpose to you maximise the return on investment for your efforts. It's not slacking off. It's acting with purpose, which is a time and effort saver. It never ceases to surprise me how little time people allow themselves to ‘think and reflect’ on well, anything. They are so busy being busy and doing, doing, doing, racing around the track that they aren't investing in analysis to assess if what they are so busy racing around doing is actually the optimal activity. It's true with my clients who all too often have been so busy doing, doing, doing that they look up one day and realise they took a wrong turn and ended up in a career cul-de-sac or they feel unfulfilled, under-appreciated and just...stuck. They haven't invested in strategy. They aren't checking in with themselves to ask "Am I going in the right direction? Am I where I want/need to be?" No wonder they find themselves stuck or going around in circles! And I know how that happens and feels, it's what happened to me. And it's not just in our career that this can happen, as this article in Psychology Today points out, " Thinking-time also facilitates thoughtful big-picture solutions. We tend to just put one foot in front of the other and before we know it, years have passed and we're in that same career, relationships, or have the same approach to living, when thinking-time might have helped us realize that we need a change, perhaps a major one." So, go on. Take some time to think. Regularly. You, your life and your career deserve it - and it will ensure you don't get stuck. Great thinkers did it and it worked for them so take some time to think . Whilst you are thinking, ask yourself: Am I happy with my career? Are I where I want to be? And if not, where would I like to be? What do I want more/less of? And invest in some time to think with a thinking partner, a sounding board, like me, who can help you find the right questions to ask and how you answer them to get you on track and accelerate your progress. My Taking Time to Think blog can help too. Get in touch for a free chat and let's see how some space to think and being asked the right questions for your situation can help you recharge your career so you can zip along with purpose, not just speed. Click ‘Book a call’ on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk Why not follow me for more career confidence-boosting tips, tools and talks: LinkedIn   Louise Newton Instagram   @career_therapy_uk More thinking, less racing. What's stopping you? If you'd like to receive no-fluff, practical insights direct to your inbox, why not sign up for the twice-monthly   Career Therapy Newsletter ? It’s packed full of thoughtful career support grounded in years of coaching experience...and real life. Check out my other articles on careers and confidence:   You can grow your confidence ,   Pick your shine time ,   5 steps to building confidence  and   Want more confidence? Take control . Photo Steve Johnson for Unsplash+

Representation: Men have traditionally dominated fields such as science, technology, engineering and

Confidence can grow under any conditions I spoke to a client recently who said, “I’m not confident.”

Seeing all of our facets and dimensions helps us understand our strengths and how others see us Do you know your strengths? Underpinning my work - and my philosophy for building a happy, sustainable career - is the idea of focusing on what you’re good at. Strengths are the fuel that makes work feel energising rather than draining. Of course, it’s important to be aware of your weaker spots and plan around them, but true momentum comes from leaning into the things you do naturally well. When you take your strengths from good to great, and then from great to extraordinary, you not only stand out in your career, you also feel more confident, motivated and fulfilled. Strengths self-awareness makes you more productive. It helps you decrease risk. Increase positive outcomes. I’m fantastic at ideas, bouncing concepts about with other people, working out the best way to get things done. I’m not great at detail. I can make myself focus when I have to, but I’ll always get someone with ‘detail’ or ‘logic’ strengths to read a contract because I know they’ll see things I don’t. It's about using the best tools for the job - and having the self-awareness to keep space for innovation and cross-pollination of strengths. But how do you know what your strengths are? Ask some or all of these questions: What makes you successful at what you do ? This question directs us to look at what you are good at, when you’ve been successful and what took and held you there. And you can ask yourself what you enjoy, what gives you a buzz. Usually, the things we enjoy, that we thrive on, that lead to good outcomes, are in some form or another our strengths. What do people come to you for? This question is another way to identify your strengths. People come to you because they know you are good at things, whether those things are what you find naturally easy or have learned how to do. Are you highly organised, a clear thinker, a strong problem solver? And don't think everyone else is - or can easily do what you do. They aren't and they can't. What are you known for? Knowing how you are seen and thought of gives very clear indicators of not just your strengths but your values. A simple but highly effective way to uncover this data is to ask 5+ people, ideally who know you in different contexts (friends, family, work, social), to give you 5 words to describe you. Put the answers in a grid to compare them and you'll see clear themes. I've done this exercise with almost every client I've worked with - it's that powerful! Your strengths include the things you do naturally well. Don't overlook or downplay the things you've always been able to do or that come easily to you. These are your super-strengths. Online tools You can get some outside help to identify and build on your strengths. The Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment tool is a $20 investment to identify your top five strengths and it's a very insightful tool. As my ideas were forming about being a career coach, it revolutionised how I thought about myself - reversing the (American-driven) quest to work on (and eradicate) your weaknesses and instead, know and build on your innate strengths. Here was a tool that said not only was I OK as I was, but I was amazing at being me and there were things I was brilliant at. Rather than continuing to tell myself I wasn't great at contracts, workflows and operating in a unilinear way, I could celebrate being curious, a maximiser, a strategist, empathetically perceptive and a keen problem solver. And knowing I was good at these things helped me exploit and amplify them, going from good to great and - in some cases - from great to amazing. Critically for my sense of self and confidence, it told me it was natural not to be good at some things. I wasn't rubbish or defective. My strengths are in other areas. From my time at school, I'd known my brain doesn't work like others'. Mine works in multiple bursts, not straight lines and is a mix of both right and left brain attributes. It doesn't make me odd, it makes me, me. And I leaned into that. It was revelatory and incredibly empowering. Over the last 12 years, I've used the Gallup StrengthsFinder with clients for work on personal brand, confidence building, CVs and career development. It’s not definitive - you can pay more for a fuller list - but I’ve found seeing the top five strengths to be uncannily accurate and insightful. And there are free tools like Strengths Profile that give you a starter overview. Talk to a professional Finally, there’s talking to a career coach (like me). Someone who can listen to you talk about your work, your passions and your hopes and pull out your strengths for you. And then show you how you can use them to your advantage to be happier, braver and more effective at work. I have a lot of experience helping my clients remove their limiting beliefs and reverse their thinking that they have no super-strengths. Know your strengths. Own them. Cherish and use them and you’ll shine. Maximise and exploit them and you will soar. Why not book a free introductory chat to see how a session of Career Therapy can help you identify your strengths and learn how to maximise them? Click ‘Book a call’ on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk Why not follow me for more career confidence-boosting tips, tools and talks: LinkedIn Louise Newton Instagram @career_therapy_uk If you'd like to receive no-fluff, practical insights direct to your inbox, why not sign up for the twice-monthly Career Therapy Newsletter ? It’s packed full of thoughtful career support, grounded in years of coaching experience - and real life. What’s stopping you? Check out my other articles on careers and confidence: You can grow your confidence , Pick your shine time , 5 steps to building confidence and Want more confidence? Take control . Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

If you don’t grab your interviewer's attention right away with strong presence, you’ll lose them; they

Learn how to feed your concentration to maximise your time, energy and output Some people claim there is no such thing as multitasking and others say it is, in fact, unproductive . Certainly, we have different ways of working and there is more than one way to achieve a result. And a great way to get results is to pinpoint how to feed your concentration. I start lots of things, work on them concurrently and appear to work in chaos, some random (dis)order that only makes sense to me. The most notable characteristic of how I work is jumping from one activity to another as my brain sparks with ideas. Right now, for example, I’m writing two blogs, hopping between one and the other as ideas come to me. (I’m also doing a jigsaw, but I’ll explain that later on). Productive? It doesn’t seem it should be, but it is. How? Because I know how my brain works, and I work with , not against it. It might look like chaos to an outsider, but I thrive on it. To a point. The proactive juggling keeps my brain busy, switching from one thing to another sparks my interest and that in turn creates momentum and positive pressure that motivates me. My brain is a busy place. And it gets distracted. I get bored easily and crave new or different things to occupy me, so in order to get things done, I entertain and feed my brain. I work in chunks of time, it might be an hour, it might be two minutes, and I use a contrasting activity as a break, a time to refresh my concentration. I call these contrasting activities ‘sorbet tasks.’ Like a sorbet course in a meal, the ‘sorbet task’ cleanses my brain of what I was doing and sets it up refreshed and ready to do the next thing. A transition task might be five minutes spent reading, five minutes checking email or 10 minutes having a cuppa or putting the washing out. Whatever it is doesn’t really matter, as long as you change focus – and put your active/work brain on pause to allow your other thoughts to develop and appear. It's about taking time to think. My personal favourite sorbet task is tidying. Probably as an antidote to the chaos and pressure I generate to get my brain fired up, clearing things away for five minutes and creating order soothes my brain and helps me switch gears. In addition, I use it as a way to catalogue what I’ve done and what there is to do. If there’s nothing left to tidy, I do a bit of a digital jigsaw. Tidying is taking control, smoothing rough edges and allowing my brain muscles to stretch. But some people stay too long on one task and more than that, they struggle to switch context. This is where multitasking can be unproductive, but sorbet activities can be useful here too. They can be an enforced break, built into a schedule to help build time management skills and make a new habit - like the Pomodoro technique . A time to switch off from one activity before starting the next and consciously stopping thinking about one thing to create space to switch focus to another. But the challenge for the multi-firing of us whose brains don't work in logical or straight lines is what you do with the break time. Chunking time is a regular conversation topic with clients when we look at time management and productivity, especially those struggling to get things done because they are always so busy. My clients find that understanding how their brain works and identifying ways to take more control of what they do, how they do it and when they do it is the route to sustainable success. Identifying and introducing personalised 'sorbet' tasks is a good (and proven) way to help you move from one activity to another, closing off the previous task and getting mentally ready for the next one through distraction and space. They help you make the transition, be more productive and stay focused more effectively. Another aspect is whether you are multitasking or procrastinating. Thinking you are busy - or too busy to act - isn't about getting things done. It's the avoidance of doing something. Multitasking can work, but only if you are doing the tasks, not spending your time and energy jumping and switching between them to avoid doing something else. If you find yourself procrastinating, ask yourself if you need one or more of these three things to enable action: Information Motivation Validation If you’d like help to identify ways in which you could be more productive and/or less overwhelmed by busy-ness, why not try a session of Career Therapy? Click ‘Book a call’ on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk Why not follow me for more career confidence-boosting tips, tools and talks: LinkedIn   Louise Newton Instagram   @career_therapy_uk If you'd like to receive no-fluff, practical insights direct to your inbox, why not sign up for the twice-monthly   Career Therapy Newsletter ? It’s packed full of thoughtful career support, grounded in years of coaching experience - and real life. Check out my other articles on careers and confidence:   You can grow your confidence ,   Pick your shine time ,   5 steps to building confidence  and   Want more confidence? Take control .  Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I recently set a task for a client who was struggling to get through her to-do list.

In my younger life, I was often surprised (and irritated) that people didn’t do things the way I did them and didn’t see the world the way I saw it. How do you measure what you are good at? When I switched careers and retrained in psychology and HR, I started to understand that people’s brains process and comprehend information in different ways. Very different ways. With the ignorance of youth, I’d assumed that other people were being stupid when they couldn’t do things I took for granted and asked what I thought were obvious questions. I was also ignorant about myself, not understanding that my own skills and abilities, things I could do so well that I took them for granted, were valuable to others. I just did those things. I didn't have to think about them. And that lack of self-awareness wasn’t limited to me, as I was reminded when starting with a new career transition client. Let’s call her Lucy. Lucy’s role was being made redundant and she needed to apply for new roles. After our introductory chat, I asked Lucy detailed questions about her work experience and anticipated next steps. I then asked her what her strengths and special skills were… and she went quiet. After a mildly awkward silence, she said: “I don’t have any.” It was a surprise because she’d just spent 10 minutes telling me all about her (extensive) work experience and what made her (amazingly and measurably) good at her job. Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m rarely stuck for words, but on this occasion I truly was. How could she not see how incredibly strong her skills, experience and attitude were? It was obvious to me. But not to Lucy. She just said: “There’s nothing special about me, I just do my job.” She wasn’t being modest, she was genuinely perplexed that the complex tasks she performed each day couldn’t be done by, as she put it, ‘just about anyone with half a brain.’ I gently pushed and asked her, 'Are you just doing your job?' Lucy didn’t see how great her skills were because she used them every day and assumed everybody could do what she did. They can’t. Trust me. That conversation got me thinking about skills and behaviours we take for granted and the other times clients, friends and people I speak to don’t realise they have a skill or special ability because “it’s just what I do.” Women especially underestimate the value of their skills and experience. We need to get better at recognising our strengths - and talking about them. Giving 110%, sticking with it to get the job done, questioning, showing empathy and exercising judgement are all behaviours that, I find, we take for granted when we have and use them. And we say 'just' automatically, but by doing so, we diminish our strengths, abilities and unique combo of experience. Similarly, being innately organised, multi-tasking, building relationships, managing difficult conversations and solving problems are skills we often forget that we have after we’ve been using them for years at home and work or because they are just a part of who we are - we don’t think of them as special or valuable skills. One of the biggest barriers to achieving skills and strengths awareness is that we don’t stop to think about our skills and behaviours, so it’s surprisingly powerful when a client talks about what they do for a few minutes and I then play back to them how many skills I spotted as they were talking. If you’re struggling to understand what you’re good at or find it hard to articulate your strengths, then a session of Career Therapy will help you. You might not see at first what makes you strong because it’s ‘just' who you are, but I can help you objectively see your abilities. In a way that you can own them, answer the question ' tell me about yourself ' without squirming and be proud to shout about them (because it's not bragging if it's true). Why not give it a try? What's stopping you? Click on Book a call on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk   Check out my articles on how to know your strengths and grow your confidence . And look at some of the online tools to help you identify your strengths. Why not follow me for more confidence-boosting tips, tools and talks: LinkedIn   Louise Newton Instagram   @career_therapy_uk If you'd like to receive no-fluff, practical insights direct to your inbox, why not sign up for the twice-monthly   Career Therapy Newsletter ? It’s packed full of thoughtful career support grounded in years of coaching experience...and real life. Check out my other articles on careers and confidence:   You can grow your confidence ,   Pick your shine time ,   5 steps to building confidence  and   Want more confidence? Take control . Photo by  Markus Spiske  on  Unsplash

The grass isn't always greener somewhere else. It's greenest where you water it I’d be happier if… I’ll be happier when… If only I had… It’s easier for them… You’re lucky… We hear these phrases a lot. It appears to be part of the human condition that we envy the lives we think others live, especially now in an age of envy-inducing unrealism seen every day on social media. But if wishes really were horses, then a lot of us (especially after the seemingly endless post-covid confinement) would be saddled up and riding off into our fantasy sunset. Daydreaming about a different life or fantasising about ‘what could be…’ are fine, good even at times when you need to switch off from a difficult situation, but… We have to remember that fantasies are not and rarely will be real. That’s the point of them. At an underwhelming 5’ 2” tall (about 1.58m), I’d LOVE to be taller. I dream of it (often), but it’s NEVER going to happen. I know this but it doesn’t stop me sighing in envy as those with just a few more inches in height look down at me. I don’t think my life would be that much better if I were taller (OK, well I do a bit, I am human after all) and so I don’t let it define my self-worth. It’s taken counselling, time and coaching, but I now live by the idea of: Change what you can change and have the grace to accept the things you can’t. Serenity Prayer (Even if it makes you feel churlish and you need to have a good sulk about it). Why? Because your grass is greener than you think. What I do and encourage others to do is move away from the idea that it’s easier for other people. It’s not. Well, it might be, but struggle is relative, and everyone has their own hills to climb. What I do know to be true is that the grass is not greener over there. The grass is greenest where you water it. Make time to look at the state of the grass where you are. It’s easy to dismiss after our home-bound covid experience where we’ve become overly familiar, bored and dismissive about our situation, craving something (anything) new and more . But try to look at your grass with fresh eyes. What do you appreciate about it? What could you appreciate more? What could you do to make that patch of grass grow and be greener? Maybe once you think about it for a while, the grass might look pretty good already and just needs a feed to freshen it up. If you need help seeing how green your grass is, why not try a session of Career Therapy? I can help you assess where you are and help you sow the seeds you need to make your grass even greener. Click ‘Book a call’ on the website for a free intro call or email me at louise@careertherapy.co.uk Why not follow me for more career confidence-boosting tips, tools and talks: LinkedIn   Louise Newton Instagram   @career_therapy_uk If you'd like to receive no-fluff, practical insights direct to your inbox, why not sign up for the twice-monthly   Career Therapy Newsletter ? It’s packed full of thoughtful career support, grounded in years of coaching experience - and real life. Check out my other articles on careers and confidence:   You can grow your confidence ,   Pick your shine time ,   5 steps to building confidence  and   Want more confidence? Take control . And this article from Four Thousand Mondays on looking inside before outside to find your green grass. Photo by  Ochir-Erdene Oyunmedeg  on Unsplash

of ‘Sales’, isn’t always picked up and can not only demonstrate a lack of professionalism but also prevent

The fear of not achieving perfection is strong enough to prevent them from starting in the first place