If you’ve been out of the workforce for a while caring for your children, don’t apologize. “Recognize yourself as a competent professional instead of wasting time explaining an absence from work,” says Michelle Tillis Lederman, founder of Executive Essentials in New York City, which provides executive and career coaching. “If you come from a place of insecurity, it translates that way.”
Upgrade your identity
Now that you’re brimming with confidence, you have to visualize yourself in your new job. For instance, if you’re in the number two slot aiming for the number one position, you have to start thinking and acting like a leader so that the world starts seeing you differently as well.
“There are parts of your identity you’ve just accepted from childhood and take into adulthood,” says Mary Lynne Heldmann, an executive and team coach and author of When Words Hurt: How to Keep Criticism from Undermining Your Self-Esteem. “Identity becomes destiny if you keep looking at yourself that way.” Take an inventory of everything you believe about yourself—both good and bad. It’s likely that many of those beliefs are limiting, such as I am not very organized, or I could never be the CEO of a successful business. “You need to challenge each and every item on the list,” says Heldmann. “Limiting beliefs aren’t reality. They’re just something that we make up. So why not change that to beliefs that work for us?”
While you need to ground your intentions in reality, you don’t want to limit your goals or become tied to a specific outcome. Your new way of thinking may lead you into something completely different from what you’d originally envisioned—but just as rewarding. “As you get clearer and clearer about the future you intend and you keep connecting to it,” Heldmann says, “you actually move closer and closer to its becoming a reality. I’ve seen so many lives change for the better simply because people created a new belief system.”
By Michelle Roberts
Part 1 | (Part 2)
