Avoiding Comfortable

Have you ever tried to be unique, to stand out — but then, after eight rounds of self-editing, self-doubt, and adding the “what will people think” filter, settled on something that, while vanilla, made you feel very comfortable? Now that you’re comfortable — think about the last time you did something comfortable that really catapulted you to a special place, a place you were excited about, and proud to shout about!

I do a lot of comfortable. Like — really, really comfortable. Apparently, I left childhood with this impression that being bold, standing out, having wild expectations for life was some sort of flaw. That you’re really only truly contributing to the world if you are the most humble, take no credit, and quietly let the universe swirl around you while you end each day just thankful that the same universe simply continues to let you exist in it’s vacuum of wonder-ness. Even saying it out loud makes me want to lay on the ‘delete’ key from anxiety that some karma awaits me if the universe thinks I write simply to have a sympathetic internet ear acknowledge the struggle.

So in my happy little world of comfortable, I’ve made the decision to go the route of comfortless in my current project. What is this project ::they ask with wide eyes of anticipation:: it’s writing my resume. Ta-da!! I know you were probably looking for more — but wait, let me finish!

I was asked to write my goals down at work — what are you going to achieve this half? So I started thinking about what I’ve achieved in my last four years with this team, which naturally lead me to copy/paste that list of projects into my resume for an informal annual update. I come from Recruiting so I can hear Recruiters everywhere getting physically sick at that statement, in pale-faced fear they’ll have to read this dreaded 3 page list. Not to worry — I also realized halfway through page 2, the ridiculousness of this method. But now what? A) close the doc because; well, honestly who cares, I’m not job hunting anyway…or B) come up with a new approach. Of course I choose B simply because it seemed like a fun challenge and could probably get me through a few more weeknights of crappy summer television.

I started by trying to pick 4–5 things from the list I’m really proud of and focus on those in greater detail. Still boring. But what I learned about myself in writing those statements was even more disturbing — I write like a girl! My 4–5 “really proud of” things, I absolutely refused to own on this sheet of paper — my team this and that, committee member, key contributor, blah, blah, blah. And all of our wins (because reminder they weren’t MY wins) are contributed to — “building strong relationships”, “listening”, and “compromising”. These are phrases that, more frequently, women tend to use to describe their work, and words that in unconscious bias testing tend to be associated as “feminine”.

Now before you get mad at me for saying girls can’t write like girls, or think I’m implying those qualities are bad qualities, let me explain. I’ve been getting some immersive diversity and inclusion education lately. Formal through my employer — informal through social media (i.e. Media coverage of Olympic women athletes, Trump vs. Women, etc.). To sum up what I’ve learned — the world doesn’t take you that seriously as a woman, so you need to present yourself like a man. I’m going to be honest and tell you my D&I Partner at work would be horrified to think that’s how I’m advertising my key takeaways from training, and in all seriousness I did learn a lot there. It’s just that when I combine it with what I see with my eyes in the real world—today — I see everyone working hard to be more aware of their unconscious bias and make opportunities available to all, but humans are simple and slow to adapt and change. So you have to do something while we wait for everyone to get there.

Take it back to the top, Brianne. After all of this reflection I wrote the most uncomfortable, but best, resume of my life. It’s uncomfortable because it is finally an authentic representation of all I am and hope to be at this point in my career. A year ago I would have stuck with my copy/paste, vanilla flavored resume to get me a lot of calls — lots of calls makes you feel good, right? Then I would have taken on all the work to weed through the good and bad culture fits, made a list of pros and cons of the different roles thrown at me, and picked the role with the shortest list of cons, or even more likely, got tired of the process because nothing felt that good and what I had was comfortable so said “I’m good for now” and filed Mr. Vanilla away for at least another year. Now I have a snazzy new uncomfortable resume. I work for an awesome company, and this makes collaboration and teamwork the metaphorical watermark of the doc, which allows me to bring myself into clear focus for the first time. I can now see my energy, my passion, my drive and my expectations of what’s to come in this resume. I can say with 100% confidence there are Leaders out there that would read this new resume and say — she is just not for us — and I am THRILLED about that! My resume is ME on a piece of paper — so now they’ve done the hardest work for me by saying “you’re not a fit for us” and because I believe so whole-heartedly in the paper version of ME, I agree and don’t even feel bad about the rejection!

This baby-step into uncomfortable — stating who I am, setting high expectations for my career, and stating my value — has already made me more confident in myself and my value to my team. I believe in my ability to step more easily into other places that are uncomfortable now. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet…the objective in sharing this post wasn’t to learn how to write a cool resume (which I did, and which I will share the system with you in my next post) but simply to demonstrate the payoff of avoiding comfortable, and instead seeking out what lives on the other side that you might be missing out on by accepting vanilla. Onto uncomfortable baby-step #2, putting something out into the internet that in a normal week I would likely edit eight more times and probably decide to keep in draft for eternity!