Question from a college student about acknowledging his accomplishments and abilities

The email below came to me from a college student with whom I’ve been exchanging emails for a while after meeting him at a past speaking event. Here, he explains how he’s been recognized for being active on his campus, but he’s not sure of how he can acknowledge it fully and communicate it at the right times…Definitely a great thing for a future business professional to get right early on. He asks for my advice on how he can increase his awareness skills to truly recognize whether something that he’s done is distinctive or not.

By the way, in both the original email and my reply, I tried my best to anonymize details in the commentary that might reveal the identity of the sender of the email. I usually just put in the initials of the person to keep him/her anonymous, but this exchange had more instances of identifying information than most emails that I receive.

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JS wrote:

Marquis,

Sorry it has so long since we last talked, I have been super busy planning [a Spring conference], which just ended this weekend and went very well. [A senior school administrator] is making it seem like I did a lot for this conference, and I kind of did, but it doesn’t really feel like it because I am doing so much other stuff, and planning this conference didn’t impede on any other things I’m doing.

Why I’m telling you this is because in reality, I did do some awesome stuff in planning this conference, but for me I have an expectation that those kind of things are normal, and if it doesn’t conflict with anything, I’m used to being busy; so, I don’t really notice that I’m doing much.

This leads me to my question I have for you: how do you recommend me improving my self-evaluation skills to acknowledge what I have done, to its full capacity, and so I will be able to effectively communicate to people what I have done and how awesome I am when it is needed?

[…]

Best,
JS

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My response:

JS,

Great question on improving your self-evaluation skills. Most people don’t even think about that kind of stuff, especially while they’re still in college. Self-awareness is one of the most important capabilities that one can have when driving a career in business and, sadly, so few people have it that it ends up being a great way to distinguish yourself from the pack.

When I think about how I evaluate my own performance across just about any metric, I think about 3 things:

• Developing a baseline – It is tough to know whether you are performing well or poorly without understanding what the general expectation should be for a given activity. Coming up with this baseline will allow you to determine what “the bar” is and, from that, you can get a sense from whether you are meeting the bar, exceeding the bar, or falling far below the bar. I can’t really give you specific guidance on how to develop the baseline because it is dependent on what the given activity is, but I’m pretty sure that you can figure it out given the context of the situation. For example, if you need to maintain a 3.0 GPA in order to stay in [your academic program], that is a metric that you can use to serve as your baseline.

• Observing how others perform according to that baseline – Once you understand where the bar is, you would need to start paying attention to how other people are performing in relation to that bar. When I say “other people”, those folks could either be direct peers to you, people who are more senior to you, or even people who have little in common with you. The key here is to observe the performance of the community of folks with whom you may want to compare yourself later and this doesn’t necessarily have to be a single group of people. For example, since you’re from the Chicagoland area, you may want to pay attention to how other students from the Chicagoland area are doing performance-wise, but you might also care about how you’re doing as compared to all students in [your academic program], as compared to all male students, and maybe all students who are interested in working in Latin America one day. You’ll have to determine your likely comparison group based on what feels right according to your own aspirations.

• Evaluating how my own performance compares to both the baseline and to others – Here’s where you will determine where you are in terms of your own performance. I recommend comparing yourself to both the baseline expectation and where others are performing because the comparisons can help you to tell different stories about yourself. For example, if you are meeting the bar but are performing below the level of others, the narrative would usually focus on the face that you’re coming in under your peers, not that you’re actually meeting the overall baseline expectations. On the other hand, if you’re exceeding the baseline and your peers are mostly performing below the bar, you will all of the sudden look like an absolute superstar. So, this kind of multi-layered comparison of where you are creates a platform for you to be able to tell your story in several ways.

Once you have done this 3-step process, you’ll have some concrete “evidence” that can be used to describe what you’ve done, why it is distinctive and notable, and, most importantly, why it is awesome :-). Imagine being able to say something like: “I’ve done X, Y, and Z over the course of my freshman year, which is significant because freshmen usually only do X during their first years at [your university]”.

One thing to remember is that this is only my perspective on your questions. If you ask this question of other people, they may provide a different response, but this approach has always worked well for me and has ensured that I’ve kept myself performing at the highest level that I can over time.

Marquis