For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.
In today’s email:
Your personality isn’t fixed
Upgrade your self-talk
Accelerate your self-knowledge
Live bold
Laird Hamilton as career coach
ON YOUR CAREER
Your personality isn’t fixed
I coached an investment analyst who told me he wasn’t cut out to be a leader. He’d been convinced of this by a popular personality assessment. The results were not evidence-based. The assessment has no known predictive validity for work performance. It would’ve been cheaper to read a horoscope. And less damaging to how the young man perceived his leadership capability
The personality assessment also neglected our capacity to change. Our personalities can grow and transform. We learn and adapt. Our personalities aren’t fixed in time. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have strong personality tendencies, including many virtues. It means we’re not trapped by who we were yesterday.
A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.
COMMUNICATION
Upgrade your self-talk
There is only one voice we live with 24/7. Our self-talk can be growth.
Make sure your worst enemy doesn't live between your own two ears.
PRODUCTIVITY
Accelerate self-knowledge
You can work faster and smarter when you understand your strengths and weaknesses. Effective personality assessments accelerate our self-knowledge.
We built the Coacha Winning Careers assessment to help you thrive at work. We use it with our corporate clients across the globe. It assesses the 5 personality characteristics that predict high performance in your work:
Growth Mindset – the belief that we can develop by effort, learning, and persistence
Conscientiousness – being responsible, organised, and accurate in our work
Energy – having the stamina, ambition, and confidence to excel
Generosity – building positive relationships and supporting colleagues
Emotional Agility – remaining resilient, adaptable, and composed under pressure
The Winning Careers Assessment shows where you are on each of these characteristics. And provides clear strategies to help you progress.
After completing the assessment, a tailored report containing extensive developmental resources is provided. Each of the 25 developmental pages contains 3 tips at a ‘Foundations’ level and 2 tips at a ‘Masterclass’ level. These resources help people at all levels of expertise.
Our personality bandwidth is broad. We can be ambitious to do things even better at work and outside work.
1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS
Live bold
Source: GIPHY
Laird Hamilton said, “I think the key to happiness is maximizing each day. So if you’re unhappy, here’s a simple prescription: Live harder.”
We can fritter our days in distraction. Or waste them on worries that are unlikely to occur. Hamilton’s call is to lead a bolder life. This is consistent with upgrading our self-talk about who we are and of what we’re capable.
At work, this involves taking on tasks outside our comfort zone. It is imagining better ways to add value to customers. It is becoming more failure-tolerant. Living bolder maximizes our career and our happiness.
If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.
CAREER WISDOM
Laird Hamilton
Laird Hamilton (1964 — ) left school aged 16 to pursue modelling and surfing. His big-wave surfing revolutionized the sport. Hamilton co-invented tow-in surfing, where jet-skis bring surfers to massive, fast-moving waves. Brett Lickle towed Hamilton into a Maui wave ‘better than 10 stories tall’. It was possibly the biggest wave ever ridden. Hamilton also popularized stand-up paddle boarding and hydrofoil boarding.
Hamilton and his wife, Gabby Reece, have built several successful businesses. These include the plant-based Laird Superfood and the fitness business XPT (Extreme Performance Training). XPT is designed to push physical and mental boundaries, drawing from Hamilton’s experiences as a big wave surfer. Some of Hamilton’s wisdom:
There are lots of aspects of our lives we don't have control over, but we do have control over ourselves. That's one thing you can own.
It's a lot easier to embrace the pain cave when you're doing it with someone else.
Don’t be afraid to really use your imagination. Let it run wild. It’s one of the most powerful tools you’ve got.
Understand your personality at work
We’ve built the Winning Careers Assessment to help you understand what drives your success — and where you can grow next.
It measures five traits that predict high performance: Growth Mindset, Conscientiousness, Energy, Generosity, and Emotional Agility.
You’ll receive a personalised report with practical insights and 25 pages of developmental tools used in our corporate coaching programs worldwide.