Being a self-advocate

- One of the most challenging situations that we can find ourselves in in our careers is when we have to advocate for ourselves, especially in situations with those who we think of as more experienced or more expert. Self-advocacy is the ability to speak up for your own interests, to back your ideas and articulate your needs. And it is exactly these kinds of conversations that can make us want to shrink into a corner. To help you with this, I am going to take a lesson learned from an unexpected field of improv comedy. When I studied improv, an exercise we were taught was to think about status within a conversation. Status is essentially the power dynamic between the characters. The idea is that humans, just like other pack animals, very subtly communicate where we rank in regards to each other. If one character is presenting as low status, then the other character that will counter that by presenting as high status. Job interviews are a rich example of high and low status conversations that I'm sure you've all experienced. The interviewer has the power to give or not to give the job and so they naturally present as higher status. The challenge for the interviewee is to not automatically adopt that lower status position but match the potential employer. It's this dynamic that can prevent us from self-advocating in the workplace. When we feel as though we cannot articulate our needs or the pushing back on a project might cause conflict, we are inadvertently adopting that lower status position. In order for us to become our own powerful self-advocates, we need to approach these conversations from a perspective of balance. We need to believe and also behave as though the power is in our hands, equally distributed between the participants. So to do this, we must do three things. Firstly, think about the conversation as a collaboration. Your managers and peers benefit when you self-advocate. Research has shown that company cultures who encourage ideas from everybody in the business have a better bottom line. Your self-advocacy is you giving clarity to those around you. Perceive your self-advocacy as helpful because in our busy and distracted world, truly it is. Secondly, get comfortable with your expertise. It is hard to self-advocate when we do not trust our ability. Ensure you are fully informed, either by reflecting on what you already know or doing that bit more research and equipping yourself with as much knowledge as possible. Thirdly, be mindful of the physical manifestations of status within a conversation. Think about how high-status people communicate. It's likely that they are steady, calm and clear. What this means is that the most important element for any self-advocating conversations is practice. If you know you'll be having this kind of conversation in advance, practice verbalizing out loud so you get really comfortable with the language. Or practice key self-advocating phrases, such as I have a different perspective on this, which is or thank you for your suggestion, but I believe we should do X. It might seem really silly but I spent hours practicing the phrase great question, I actually don't know the answer to that but I'll do some research and get back to you because I always used to flounder when clients asked me a question I didn't know the answer to. Your exercise is to think about those opportune moments in your career when you would love to self-advocate more and answer the following question. If I were self-advocating in this situation, what would I say? Think of those phrases and practice articulating them out loud. I would love to hear what self-advocating phrases that you come up with.