🔴 Take These With You
This week, I want to give an anecdote for you to take with you all week. If you’re part of a team at work, or trying to get more responsibility in your role at work, this could help.
To set the stage, my job is to make Instagram content for VeeFriends. I’m 26 years old and on the pathway to a management position in the next few years. I’ve been working in social media for a little over 5 years now.
It’s taken me 11 months to feel like I’ve got a good handle on my role as a Platform Strategy Producer at VeeFriends.
That sentence is wild to write out, but it’s true. From the beginning, my manager/mentor told me it was going to take a while to feel like I got a grasp of everything, and we’re right on track for that. I’ve been surprised at the patience displayed while working at VeeFriends.
Your takeaway: If you’re working to be excellent at something, it takes a ton of patience to feel the momentum of all the hard work you put in. If you’re heading in the right direction, just stay patient and trust the process.
It’s been a lot of testing, learning, and feedback cycles with my manager and creative team. Through that experience, I’m now aware that I have strong intuition when judging if a piece of content will perform well or not.
Now, to be confident in creating content, it takes reps. In my 2+ years between ONE37pm & VeeFriends, I’ve posted nearly 2,000 pieces of content and paid close attention to the reasons why content worked.
However, a strong gut alone won’t get you very far when working with a team.
I used to get frustrated because I wasn’t able to convert my gut reaction into an explanation for the people I worked with.
You must be able to translate your feelings into words for your team to understand your idea. Especially as a manager, or someone who is looking to gain trust with those above you in the organization, you have to speak their language. Use examples, metaphors, and numbers to show that you have done your research. Otherwise, they might think the idea was something you’ve just come up with a minute ago.
So, this week…
Exercise patience
Focus on clear communication using examples, metaphors, and numbers.
Let me know if this hit for you in the comments below! 💚
Backing up my ideas with evidence is definitely something I’ve struggled with in my own career. Not because the evidence doesn’t exist, but because I spend so much time researching that it makes it difficult to know what to reference. I’m still learning, and I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one!
As someone who’s recently took on a role where I felt no right doing, patience has definitely been key.