4 weeks in the life of the Women@Work and TAG Career Accelerator Program
High achieving women often get to a point in their career where they have a niggling feeling that they want more for themselves. They know deep down that they are capable of more and yet something is holding them back.
Sometimes, it is a lack of clarity around what their next steps look like.
Sometimes, it is a lack of courage, kind of knowing what’s in store for them next but not being bold enough to take the actions required.
Sometimes, it is a lack of confidence or self-belief, talking themselves out of making a move rather than talking themselves into it.
The combination of clarity, courage and confidence are top priorities to nurture and develop to shine a light on the way forward and create the sparks of change.
Women’s careers can get stalled for many different reasons. A prominent one that we see is that there is so much going on in their personal and professional lives that they find themselves deprioritized to the bottom of their to do list or even not on their to do list at all, vanished! Women often take on a high volume of unpaid work and mental load outside of the workplace and work exceptionally hard to prove themselves inside workplaces. When this is combined with a strong desire to do well in their careers, many mid-career professional women are very, very busy ladies with not a lot of time on their hands. Leading to a sense of operating on autopilot, losing control over where they are going and losing sight of what they truly want.
If the busyness stops you from really knowing yourself on a deeper level, not taking the opportunity to stop the daily treadmill limits your ability to truly reflect and be able to sail intentionally in the direction you seek then read on. The alternative is to remain caught up in the day to day, which can lead to being led by life and work and not leading yourself in the direction you want to go.
The Women@Work and TAG Career Accelerator Program is your chance to establish your own answers to:
- What would my career look like if anything was possible?
- What do I need to learn about myself in order to get there?
- What do I need to do differently to serve my future success?
- How can I enlist the help of others in pursuit of my goals?
- How can I make sure I get there?
The career accelerator is an opportunity for mid-level professional women to take time for themselves, to focus on what they truly want for the next steps in their career and help them unlock the way to get there. The key word is acceleration, it’s like a bootcamp for your career, to take you from where you are now to where you want to go.
Belonging to a supportive circle of women, in an online setting twice per week for 4 weeks, guided by an executive coach to leverage the wisdom of the group you will benefit from a group coaching process, as you move together through the key stages of career acceleration together.
Gaining Clarity
You might think you know yourself. You might think you know who you are. But look closely, do you really? All transformative journeys start with the foundation of emotional intelligence -self-awareness. Once you create space to observe yourself better your self-awareness expands, and you can start to get clearer on where you are going and understand how to get there. If there is no space and time for self-observation you simply cannot get there.
Before coming together as a group for the first time you will receive program pre work, which is a guided reflection process. The opportunity to get to know yourself and get ready to create space for the new to emerge.
Creating the path
Change takes place in small incremental steps not in giant leaps. Having a macro goal of what success looks like to you in your career will help you get there by achieving the micro goals along the way. Focusing on the things that matter to you daily will help more of that to perpetuate. This starts by looking for patterns in our motivation levels and our emotions which can act like a steering wheel to guide you to what is most important and keep your focus and your energy there. Rewriting the story you tell yourself that keeps you where you are instead of moving you forward, will catalyze your macro goal and turn awareness into action.
Equipping for success
The career accelerator program will help you understand what your blockers and energisers are towards more success. Through discovering your values, your purpose and your strengths and how they drive your behaviour. Your values need food. If you are unhappy, restless or unfulfilled at work it could be because your work is not aligned to your personal values and therefore not nurturing or cultivating them. Your values highlight what you stand for and what is most important to you. If you are not feeding and nurturing your values or worse, they are being violated in some way, it will have a drastic impact on your job performance and satisfaction. Starving yourself from something you enjoy eating has a similar effect of becoming unsatisfied, so becoming aware of cultivating our values, honoring them and being able to articulate them will increase your chances of experiencing fulfilment and being positioned well to keep advancing at an accelerated pace.
Knowing your strengths is a practical way to get some insight into what you might want to consider doing more of or less of. Your strengths are your energisers. If we think of energy like a bank account using your strengths gives us more energy in the bank and also give us a an ROI as they perpetuate more energy, not using them will deplete your energy stores, your motivation levels and you won’t be fooling anyone even if you are pretending to be happy and productive, it won’t be genuine and will not go unnoticed.
Building your pack
Women are naturally very strong relationship builders and yet, women tend to hold back from asking for the help that is needed, being more adept at providing help for others rather than serving your own interest. This is especially true in the workplace. Leveraging the relationship network is probably the single most important and most often overlooked aspect of advancing in your career. The career accelerator program will reveal how to leverage the power of relationships and networks and build your success stakeholders.
Leading yourself
Being able to lead yourself through good times and setbacks is an essential skill that needs to be in place to be an effective leader of others. The daily rituals and intentional actions you take out of the program will continue to grow your career trajectory.
Building your self-appreciation muscle and the ability to recognize your skills propels you. Identifying opportunities to keep demonstrating your value and aiming higher, bigger and bolder than what you first thought is possible, by creating a momentum plan to take you there.
With the added accountability of a 3-month journey of peer mentoring when the program concludes, you will have that added person along the way who will cheer you on, keep you on track and be your critical feedback provider.
Take the chance
This program will help you to draw a line in the sand, take stock of where you are in your career, take a closer look to where you want to be and dig deeper to who you really are and connect all of that to accelerate you towards your future career plan.
You will get clear on:
- Why do you behave the way you do?
- How do you make decisions about what you focus on?
- How do you feel about yourself in your current role?
- What is serving your career growth?
- What is not serving your career growth?
- What do you want to be different?
Positioning yourself to move onwards and upwards in your career with a clear way forward and an opportunity to maintain the momentum beyond the program.
More articles from the ameliorate group on behaviours that hold women back from their careers can be found here (Lou please add link to existing articles)
To sign up for the Career Accelerator click here
Article written by Simone Lawrence-Managing Partner, Executive Coach and People Developer at The Ameliorate Group. The ameliorate group is a leadership and corporate coaching consultancy offering a range of bite-sized learning solutions to long-term development programs incorporating executive coaching for leaders, teams and women in the workplace.
Simone has over 20 years’ experience developing people. Leading HR, L&D, operations, sales, business development and fundraising teams across a variety of industries from corporate and NGO sectors. Simone works with current and future leaders and teams to leverage their strengths, raise the bar on their success and transform behaviours to support career and organisational goals, with a specialty in accelerating women in leadership.
