Interview tip: Manage your image by telling good stories

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The way you talk about yourself is very powerful. Whether or not you are conscious of it, the way you tell stories of your life frames how people see you, and how you see yourself. So you may as well do this consciously, and also be conscious that people get the most tripped up in their storytelling when they are talking about uncertain moments in their career.

“The stories we tell make an enormous difference in how we cope with change,” writes Herminia Ibarra in the Harvard Business Review. Crafting good story is essential for making a successful transition to your next point. Yet most of us do it badly — we can’t figure out a story arc, so we just start listing the facts of our career. But if you can’t tell people why your prior path and your new path are part of one story, then you probably can’t see it yourself, and that leads to feelings of being confused, lost and insecure — all the feelings that are typical of an uncertain life but do not have to be.

“Creating a story that resonates helps us believe in ourselves. We need a good story to reassure us that our plans make sense — that, in [making our next step], we are not discarding everything we have worked so hard to accomplish. A story gives us motivation to help us endure frustration, suffering and hard work,” says Ibarra.

For example, when someone bugs you about how can I trust you to stay at this company when you’ve changed your mind before, you can come at that person with a story. Don’t hide things because coherence is important. When you’re telling a story about yourself, coherence is the key to making the listener trust you. If you can make your story of change and self-discovery “seem coherent,” writes Ibrarra, “you will have gone far in convincing the listener that the change makes sense for you and is likely to bring success — and that you’re a stable, trustworthy person.”

Most importantly, coherence goes a long way in convincing yourself. “Think of the cartoon character who’s run off the edge of a cliff, legs still churning like crazy, he doesn’t realize he’s over the abyss until he looks down. Each of us in transition feels like that character. Coherence is the solid ground under our feet.”

The first way to envision yourself in a new phase of your life is to tell people about it. But there is another benefit to meeting new people: You can see yourself in a different light. Ibarra writes, ” Strangers can best help you see who you’re becoming, providing fresh ideas uncolored by your previous identity.”

The best reasons for wanting to change what you’re doing are grounded in character — they talk about who you are, what you are good at, what you like. Bad reasons are external, like getting fired. Giving external reasons for making change make you look like someone who is a fatalist. You need to show that you are taking charge of your life, not just reacting to what comes along.

More is good, though: The more detailed and more varied your reasons are, the more acceptable your next steps will seem to other people.

You feel comfortable telling it and the other person gives you positive feedback in the nonverbal cues department. When you are practicing, the best people to try it on are people who don’t know you. They don’t bring any preconceived notions of who you are to the conversation, so you can tell them whatever you want. In the conversation with a stranger you can try out being your new self, and you can tell if you ruin your clean slate with a terrible story.

Storytelling takes practice, but everyone who is making a big change in their life has everything a good story needs. You are the protagonist, and there is intrinsic conflict in that something changed in your world to make you want to change jobs. The journey of your story is your search for your next job.

If you’re feeling lost on this read John Gardner’s book, the Art of Fiction. Maybe you think it’s totally over the top to read 200 pages about story telling so that you can tell a one-minute story. But this is your life. And you are going to get through all the tough parts of your life by telling stories, intentionally or not. So why not take control of things and get good at talking to yourself about yourself?

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Test the waters of self-employment without jumping in

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The odds are that you will probably consider self-employment at some point: Eighty-nine percent of people in the United States who make more than $50,000 a year are self-employed, according to Entrepreneur magazine.

As with all decision points, the way to make the best choice is to know yourself. If you get bored easily, do a lot of different jobs. If you are a type-A hyperachiever, do one business really, really well. If you have a small tolerance for risk, keep a full-time job while you explore other options. All are great ways to make the shift to working for yourself.

One of the most interesting recipes for self-employment comes from self-employment evangelist Barbara Winter. Winter says that it’s easier to have five jobs that generate $10,000 a year than it is to have one job that generates $50,000 a year — the perfect scenario for opening an eBay business, renting out a room in your condo, writing press releases for your friend’s startup, etc.

This is, essentially, juggling five jobs, but Winter’s book describes ways of making it seem manageable: “The juggler walks out on the stage with ten sticks and ten plates, but doesn’t begin spinning them all at once. Methodically, the juggler positions the first plate on a stick and gets it into motion. Once done, the juggler moves on to the next, then the next, and so forth. Eventually, all ten of the plates are spinning away, each with its own momentum.” (This is how I feel about blogging — it’s like throwing another plate in the air for me.)

If you have spent some time in the workforce, consider becoming a consultant, which essentially is making a single, focused business out of yourself. “You should have at least five years of workplace experience before you go on your own,” says Laurie Young, founder of Flexible Resources, “because you are offering your experience.” Also, you need marketing skills to sell yourself. It takes a certain kind of talent “to show people you have skills they can use.”

Find a market niche that you can dominate. Otherwise there is no way to distinguish yourself from all the other consultants, no way to stand out. (Two good books on this: Small is the New Big, and The Long Tail.) Young did this herself, as a recruiter. She is a headhunter for people who want flexible jobs (she herself job shares the CEO position at Flexible Resources). If she were a more typical headhunter, she would not stand out above the crowd as well.

Alexandra Levit worked in public relations for Computer Associates and then struck out on her own, as a consultant in publicity and marketing communications. In terms of making the transition, Levit advises that you “try lining up a few jobs that you can have before you take the leap,” and be prepared to spend “about 30% of your time marketing yourself.”

Levit provides a snapshot of reality for all entrepreneurs when she says, “Don’t expect the drawbacks to be only financial. You need a lot of self-discipline to sit down in your home office and work without any external pressure. Working for yourself means you’re responsible for every aspect of the business,” and this means, ironically, even some of the annoying tasks you were trying to avoid by working for yourself.

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Overrated: Cleaning up your online identity / Underrated: Cleaning up your offline identity

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The idea of having a perfect online identity is not realistic. Instead, maybe you should focus on making your offline identity one that you’re proud of.

First of all, no one is getting away with anything online. Today recruiters are expert and tireless Internet researchers when it comes to scoping out candidates. I just read a story about someone interviewing for a job who was asked about his wish list on Amazon. I would never have thought of that. (In fact, I can’t even figure out how to find other peoples’ wish lists on Amazon.) The list of ways to snoop feels infinite. And the list of ways to fix snoopable problems seems very limited.

If there’s someone in your life who is glued to their computer each night, posting career-killing commentary, maybe you should forward a link to this Wall St. Journal article by Vauhini Vara chronicling one man’s struggle to get his page removed on MySpace:

“He emailed MySpace, begging the site to take down his old page. Nothing happened. He sent at least eight more urgent messages to the site, including a note to MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson. Finally, he received a cryptic email telling him to write his user name — “craigisanidiot” — and password with a marker on a piece of paper, to take a photo of himself holding it up, and to email it to MySpace along with a note saying, ‘I wish to be removed from MySpace.” (Note to the concerned: It worked.)

A pseudonym will not save you. A majority of bloggers use pseudonyms, but people will find out who you are. The first weekly column I wrote was about my job while I was in my job. I used a pseudonym and presumed I was safe. I wrote about my CEO’s pharmaceutical cocktail and diagnosed him (correctly, I still think) as manic depressive. I described the scene of my boss sexually harassing me. I documented my expensive and useless business trip. It turned out, pretty much the whole company had been reading my column.

If you are going to be anonymous, take a tip from Waiter Rant, who never reveals his restaurant but never disses it either, or Your HR Guy, who writes funny human resources scenes, but publishes his policy of not getting fired for his blog.

But don’t go to the other extreme. If you get too careful, you’ll be like college student Matthew Zimmerman, and find yourself unable to write anything. (Don’t worry, he got over it.)

The BBC News tells us How to Blog and Not Get Fired, but it seems much harder to give advice on how to blog and still get hired. When it comes to recruiters, a blog is like a lighthouse: You don’t know how many people have been repelled because they never show up.

At some point, you just have to be yourself. Figure out your best self and be that — online and offline — and then no one will be surprised.

The people entering the workforce today did not grow up posting every little thing that happened to them. But in five years, those kids coming to work will have no way to cleanse the Internet of their posting transgressions from when they were fifteen years old.

There will have to be new standards for what is okay to have online. It will have to be okay to say, “Oh, yeah. I remember when I posted that. Stupid, huh?” Interviewers will have to judge people by what they are doing right now, or else they won’t be able to hire anyone.

So for now, take a look at that wish list you made. Does it make you look like a moron? Instead of getting rid of anti-social items and replacing them with crowd pleasers, ask yourself why you want to read books that reflect poorly on you. Ask yourself who you are.

Karen Salmansohn writes about the idea of congruence: “Be yourself wherever you are, whether at work, with your partner or with friends. When you compartmentalize yourself to be wildly different in different circumstances you can start to feel out of whack. Create a life that is congruent with the person you truly are.”

The impact of incongruence is big: You’ll have an online persona that conflicts with your work persona. You’ll have huge stress. When I was making fun of my co-workers in my column it was because I was a fish out of water in that office. When your impulse is to write mean things about the people you work with then you probably shouldn’t be there.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review (paid) shows that in order to be a great leader, you need to make your work consistent with your core self. When you can be authentic in your job and authentic when you blog that’s a step toward living congruently and you will be priming yourself for success.

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How to find happiness: Listen to scientists who study it

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We spend so much energy trying to decide what career will make us happy, what job to take, what kind of boss we need. But today happiness is actually a science, and we can teach ourselves to make better decisions faster based on what we know about happiness.

This science of happiness is such a popular field that 150 colleges offer courses in it. If you can’t take a class, read this article in New York magazine for a fun introduction to the topic.

The article is slanted for New Yorkers because New Yorkers are more unhappy than everyone else, (which is unfortunate since I live there). But most of the information in the article is useful to everyone.

For example: “No matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make them happy.” This is because our mind plays tricks on us: “We are more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones we can.”

Here is something that really affected me: “Those who seek out the best options in life are called maximizers. And maximizers, in practically every study, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do.” One way to stop being a maximizer is to move to where you have fewer choices, (which takes us back to the New York City problem.) Another way is to make choices faster, before you obsessively weigh every possibility.

Other zingers: Kids don’t make you happy, losing limbs doesn’t make you sad, and if you have as much money as the people you hang out with you’ll feel like you have enough.

How can you not be curious about this article? I read it three times.

Now, if I could only make better choices…

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Five ways to do better in a job interview

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Most people who want career coaching from me set up an appointment. My brothers send random emails that they tag as urgent. Here’s one my brother sent at midnight last night:

“Why don’t you ever write about how to interview someone? What do I do when someone goes on and on about himself and I don’t care. Should I cut him off? I only have thirty minutes to do the interview.”

Answer: The most important thing to find out when you interview someone is if you like the person. You can teach someone to be competent in the skills you need, but you can’t teach someone to have an appealing personality. No matter what the person talks about for thirty minutes — really, much fewer than thirty— you can figure out if you like them.

Which leads me to the first thing you can do to be better at interviewing:

1. Learn how to conduct an interview.
You need to understand what is driving the interviewer and how he or she is thinking. So know enough about the interview process to put yourself in your counterpart’s shoes. If the person is bad at interviewing, you can run the show. If the person is good, you have to figure out how to meet their agenda, make your points, and still be likeable.

2. Learn from other peoples’ mistakes.
The best way to see people making errors in interviews is to interview them yourself. But you can also read about other peoples’ interviewing incompetence. Jobaloo shows how candidates misread a seemingly innocuous question. And CareerBuilder lists some examples of extremely bad judgment.

3. Know your agenda.
What is the image you are trying to convey in the interview? Match that to the kind of job are you trying to land. You should have three points about yourself that you aim to get across in the interview. Before I became a full-time writer, mine were: great at executing a plan, a manager who everyone loves to work for, very reliable. I wanted those points to come across because I wanted to be hired to a position where I would have a lot of responsibility to execute a visionary plan and manage a large team.

4. Practice.
You can find tons of lists about how to interview well. Take a look at them and you’ll notice that they are all about practicing: Avoid too much information, cut the puffy stuff, know your strengths and weaknesses. These are all things you can practice. If you think you can wing it in an interview, you’re wrong. There are no questions that cannot benefit from preparation, so any question you look unprepared for makes you look clueless about the interview process at best and lazy at worst.

5. Be comfortable with silence.
People who can remain calm during silence look powerful and comfortable with themselves. People who have to fill silence end up saying stupid things. Part of your interview practicing should be to sit, saying nothing, so you are comfortable when that happens in an interview.

The interesting thing about preparing to ace an interview is that most aspects of preparation carry over into the rest of your life. When you know who you are, and how to convey that to other people, when you are comfortable with a pause, and you are good at reading another person’s agenda, you will function better in all aspects of your life.

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When it comes to office politics, consider the sibling factor

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Time magazine’s cover story is How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are. There are a few good tidbits about how your sibling experience affects how you are at work.

Adult life is made up of relationships – at work, in marriage, among friends — and we learn the skills for these relationships through siblings because we spend so much time with siblings during our most formative years, according to Susan McHale, psychologist at Penn State University.

One example is if there is a favorite child (which researchers see in the majority of families) all the kids will use it to their advantage. As in, “Why don’t you ask Mom if we can go to the mall because she never says no to you.” And we end up using the same tactics at work: “You go tell the vice president that we missed our sales goals. He has a soft spot for you.”

Negotiation styles between siblings affect skills beyond the home. If kids have good conflict-resolution skills among themselves, then they will have more success in school. Regardless of race, income and family structure, it’s the style of play that will make the difference in future success.

Favorite statistic from the article: “Kids in the 2-4 age group have more than one clash every ten minutes,” which I read as my older son hit my younger son with Buzz Lightyear.

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The portfolio career: To find fulfillment try simultaneous careers

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Recently, Aaron Karo performed stand-up comedy in a string of sold-out shows. He also bills himself as an author, a public speaker, and a sitcom actor. Karo has always juggled a few careers. After college, he went to work for an investment bank. But he was also writing a weekly newsletter that had tens of thousands of subscribers. And he wrote a book.

About ten years ago, British management guru Charles Handy predicted that people would replace the idea of one, full-time job, with several different part-time occupations. He called this the “portfolio career,” and Karo provides a good example of how this trend is taking shape.

A portfolio career is not the same thing as holding down three bad jobs and wishing you could figure out what to do with yourself. Rather, it is a scheme you pursue purposefully and positively, as a way to achieve financial or personal goals or a mixture of both. This new type of career choice can include several highly skilled, professional posts, often mixing employment with self-employment, and volunteer work or learning work with fee-based work.

While there has been scattered adoption of the portfolio career among baby boomers, the idea is gaining a lot of traction among younger workers, even though they never use the term. As members of Generation X entered the workforce; two-thirds of them were looking for an alternative to full-time employment as a more efficient path to self-discovery and finding the right career. For people in their twenties and early thirties, a portfolio career is a means of getting to know oneself, hedging one’s bets, and protecting their quality of life.

Most people have skills that cross into more than one profession. And if you take any one of the popular personality tests offered by web sites and career counselors you will find that peoples’ personalities do not fit neatly into one type of profession either.

So the idea of having to choose one single profession is frequently unappealing. Ezra Zuckerman, associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told me, “A lot of people feel alienated when thy feel there is more to themselves that they have not shown [in their work].” Young people are particularly drawn to the idea of a career as a vehicle to fulfillment and self-actualization, so they are less apt than Handy’s generation to settle into one, narrow career.

The arguments for a portfolio career at the beginning of one’s adult life are clear. Professor of psychology at Harvard, Daniel Gilbert, told me that the best way to figure out what will make you happy is to try it. A portfolio career gives you the opportunity to try three or four types of work at the same time, and to keep switching out choices until you come up with a portfolio that you like.

Karo, for example, dropped the banking career when he stopped liking the daily suit-and-tie routine. And when I ask him when his next book is coming out, he hems and haws and it’s clear that the career as an author is not so appealing — at least right now.

The trick in all career decisions is to figure out the intersection of your skills and your passions. This is an ongoing process, not a final destination, so a portfolio of part-time careers is more conducive to this path of discovery than a single, eight-hours-every-day career. Andrew Zacharakis, professor at Babson College told me, “Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. Your passion is likely to change over time but finding your passion is good practice. Part of the search for you passion should be a search to know what your skill set is. Ask parents, mentors, and friends. Try to mach skills you have with your passion.”

The problem with a portfolio career is that you run the risk being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none — a problem in terms of both money and fulfillment.

“The most secure portfolio careers are with people who have a fairly solid skill base that people will pay for,” says Ian Christie, career coach and author of the Bold Career blog. “You have to hang your hat on something. Either a functional skill, like accounting and you can be, say, a personal trainer at home. Or you need to find a market niche and provide a lot of services, such as training, development, outsource contracting, etcetera.

And you probably need a creative outlet in your portfolio. “When we are involved in creativity we feel that we are living more fully than in the rest of life,” says, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. Any work can include creative thinking, but, he told me, “if you want to be creative then you must learn to do something well,” To excel at something requires you to challenge yourself continually. Achieving high skill level at something is an important step toward fulfillment because, “most people want to think they have explored the limits of their potential.”

Karo says he receives a lot of email from people asking how they can follow their creative dreams. And his advice is, appropriately, the Instant-message-length version of Handy’s book-length theory: “You’ve gotta do it on the side. Diversify your revenue streams. Do what you’re passionate about.”

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How to reach the new American dream

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American dream has changed. It used to be a college education, a steady job, a nice house (and a family to fill it), and a better financial picture than your parents. There is a new American Dream that is still about “doing better than your parents” but not in a financial sense. This dream is about fulfillment.

Boston-based artist, Ariel Freiberg, just got engaged, and she and her fiancé are gearing up for this new dream. “We were brought up to think it’s important to own a piece of property. It’s how you build your life in this country. But buying a house is not a major goal for us. It is not what will make our lives secure and it will not help us define ourselves.”

“The idea of the American dream is taken out from under us,” explains Anya Kamenetz, blogger and author of the book Generation Debt. “There used to be a contract with employers — healthcare, pensions, predicable employment,” but today there are none of those guarantees.

Additionally, the cost of a college education is far outpacing inflation, making it more difficult to make this first steps toward the American Dream, according to Tamara Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-somethings Can’t Get Ahead. The average student loans come to around $20,000, which means $200 a month out of an entry-level paycheck. On top of that between 1995 and 2002 median rents in almost all major cities have increased more than 50%.

Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech about how “a lot of kids don’t know what work is” and young people “think work is a four-letter word.” These were not renegade words, but rather an expression of the prevailing attitude among her fellow baby boomers.

The boomers mistake a rejection of their American Dream as a rejection of reality. But here’s some news: Young people know that work is a reality for everyone. It’s just that everyone needs to work toward something; so young people have a new American Dream.

“The new American Dream is much more entrepreneurial,” says Kamenetz. “And it’s about shaping ones own destiny: mobility, flexibility to do your own work and the ability to have a career as an expression of who you are as a person.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you craft your own version of the new American Dream:

1. Cushion an entry-level salary with a move back home.
The first step in restructuring the American Dream is to save money to ensure flexibility. Moving back with your parents is smart if you can do it. Most jobs are in big cities, and starting salaries simply cannot pay the rent in those cities. People who are not able to get subsidized housing from parents are much more limited in terms of their early career choices.

2. Get comfortable with risk taking.
The new American Dream is for risk takers. This is actually not groundbreaking in terms of the American Dream. For immigrants, the American Dream has always meant risk-taking. But today young people are taking risks that parents would have never dreamed of, like playing contact sports without any health insurance and signing up for a mortgage with a freelance career.

3. Protect your time.
The American Dream of Baby Boomers came at the expense of personal time and family time. Success is not having more things than your parents. It’s having more time. More time for hobbies, for travel, for kids. “It’s not about how much money you have, it’s about living your life on your own terms,” says Barbara Stanny, financial coach and author of Overcoming Underearning.

4. Don’t assume personal fulfillment requires a small career.
Sure, the new American Dream has nothing to do with financial studliness. But don’t sell yourself short in the name of personal time. “Higher earners with balanced lives don’t work more hours, they are just more focused,” says Stanny. “To make more money you don’t have to work more hours. There is a difference between settling for a low income and taking a job to feed your soul.”

5. Buy as small a home as you can.
You preserve the most options for your future if you can buy a home on one income. “The advice used to be: always buy the most expensive house you can afford because it’s an investment. Today it’s different. Buy only the amount of house that you need so it doesn’t become an albatross around your neck.” says Phyllis Moen, author of Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream.

6. Make decisions by looking inside yourself.
Be aware of the tradeoffs you’re making. For example, big cities are exciting and filled with career opportunity, but you pay a high premium for living there.

When talking about her decision to stay in Boston, Freiberg says, “There’s a certain vibration living in the city that feeds me and my fiancé — this inspiration is something that we can’t get in the suburbs.”

Choices are difficult today because the new American Dream is not as measurable as the old one. You cannot look at your bank statement or count your bedrooms to assess your success. The new American dream is about fulfillment, which is a murky, slippery goal, but young people like Freiberg know it when they feel it, and you will, too.

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How to get along with difficult co-workers

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People with good social skills can get along with almost anyone, and if you want to be successful in your career, you have to make people like you: Figure out what matters to them, what makes them tick, and then speak to that when you interact.

The key to being likeable is to be able to adapt yourself to different situations. This does not mean that you have to be someone you’re not. Each of us is complicated, adaptable and curious. You need to know yourself well enough to understand a broad range of facets of yourself so that you can call up the right one with the right crowd.

The field of psychology that focuses on this particular issue is social psychology. And, fortunately, we have massive amounts of data from clinical research to tell us how thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others: Use this research to train yourself to be someone everyone wants to work with.

Think hard about how you approach a group. Do you hope that the group conforms to you or do you conform to the group? As long as you respect the people in the group, conforming to them enough to form a bond is not a bad idea. No one can be with their soul mate 100% of the day. But you can find pieces of yourself that match up with just about everyone, if you are in-tune with yourself and other people.

Social psychologists call people who analyze social situations and try to match their public self to the situation “high self-monitors”. Self-monitors are very good at gauging what their audience expects in each given situation. And these people are very sensitive to impression management techniques — they watch other people use them and then use the techniques themselves.

For some people, this skill of monitoring themselves within a group comes naturally — they are chameleons who can mirror other peoples' moods. Chameleons know what to say when their boss's pet gerbil dies and they know what to say when a co-worker suggests a date.

Other people are low self-monitors. These people attempt to alter a situation to match their private self. These people have one way of conducting themselves and have no idea how to change for a given situation. These are the people who make inappropriate jokes at a client meeting or are too stiff and formal at a company picnic. Chameleons generally disgust these low self-monitors, but I've got news for you: chameleons don't lose opportunities for being difficult to work with.

If you can get along with different groups of people, you won’t just be liked more at work, you’ll be more equipped to meet your personal goals. People who are able to develop friendships with a wide range of people are more able to change the way they think about themselves, according to Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe, professor of psychology at University of Vermont. Developing cross-group friendships as opposed to in-group friendships makes your more adept at creating a dynamic image of yourself — you are likely to be a person who can make changes to become the person you want to be.

You want to be someone who can make changes in yourself when you see the need, because social psychologists have also found that people remember negative traits more than positive traits. So if you tell a new employee your boss is “smart, open-minded, kind and disorganized,” the new employee will form an opinion of the boss primarily on “disorganized.” Your bad traits have more sticking power on your reputation than your good traits. If you want to be liked, face up to your weaknesses and compensate for them.

Most people who hate office social dynamics think people have to change who they are to succeed. But good social skills at work are really a reflection of empathy for the people around you. Anyone who is being their best self — kind, considerate, expressive, interested in others — will instinctively do the right thing at the office.

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Training is essential, so make sure it’s a perk you receive

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The new workplace currency is training. Title is not important if you’re not staying long term. And salary increases of three or four percent are ceremonial. So use the clout you earn to get training; it will make a difference in your life in a way that salary and title cannot because training can fundamentally change how you operate and what you have to offer.

The two most important types of training teach you how to understand yourself and how you function in an office. To a large extent, you have to take responsibility for training yourself in these areas. You can’t learn this stuff passively, like learning key dates in U.S. history.

“This must be a self-motivated kind of learning,” Julie Jansen told me. As a career coach she recognizes that, “The problem is that most people don’t know how self-aware they are.” Her book You Want me to Work with Who? offers self-diagnostic tests to show you where you fall on the spectrum and how to re-train yourself.

Most people think they make a good impression, but they are misguided. So a great help is an objective third-party who can tell you where you are weak”?after all, everyone has weaknesses. The trick is to identify and fix them early in your working life so they don’t hold you back.

Workplace stars receive great training perks. “Most companies quickly segment out high potential employees and they get more advanced and aggressive training,” Jeff Snipes, CEO of Ninth House, told me. “Companies don’t usually market these programs because they create an atmosphere of haves and have-nots. However you can ask around at your company if there’s a high-potential program and what you’d need to do to get in.”

Here are some of the types of training to ask for:

1. Self-awareness coaching. Few people can accurately judge the impression they make on others. This is so widely accepted that companies are willing to pay big bucks for the a performance review that gives 360 feedback and includes in-depth interviews between a third-party and a wide range of people you work with. Once you determine your weaknesses, hiring a coach is a great way to understand the results of the review and figure out how to either get rid of your weaknesses or at least get around them.

2. Communications coaching. One of the most difficult pieces of managing yourself is projecting what you really feel to other people. So many things get in the way of authenticity in the office — most notably, your ego but also your nerves.

Lindy Amos, a coach at TAI Resources, teaches executives to communicate better by using acting techniques. She has said things to me like, “The difference between fear and excitement is breathing.” Before you decide that you are already good at projecting your true self, consider that Amos’s clients are top executives from companies you respect. If they need it, you do too. So get the training early in your career so you can make authentic connections from the beginning.

3. Training on how to navigate within a company. Many young people complain that they have great ideas but no one is listening. And this is often true. That’s because it’s not enough to have innovative ideas. You need to know how to promote them within the company.

Ninth House, for example, offers training programs that teach how to package an idea so that you can get it funded within the company. Topics in this program include how to align the idea with corporate strategy and how to find an internal sponsor, two critical pieces to being an innovator in the workplace.

When it comes to selling an idea at the office, don’t forget that you’ll have to sell the idea that training will be good for your boss and the company as well as for you.

If you’re unemployed, you can also think about training is in terms of the job hunt: Hayden-Wilder, for example, is one of a bunch of companies that teach people how to use public relations and marketing techniques to present themselves to employers.

Whatever sort of training you use — self-generated, corporate funded, or a mix of the two — if you create a life that encourages constant learning, your career and your life will be more interesting and more fulfilling.

 

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