Don’t Forget ‘You’! Top Tips on Self-Advocacy & Guide to Nominating Yourself & Others for an Award

This post was originally written for Curiously Code

My not-so secret ‘secret’

I’ll let you into a not-so secret ‘secret’. Out of the 5 awards I have received from the tech community since I made my career switch into the technology industry, one of those awards, more specifically, the 2022 FDM EveryWoman in Technology awards, I actually submitted a nomination for myself.

It was the first time I supported myself through something like this and even to this day, I still feel a bit weird about it, but I hope that by putting my thoughts down on a blog post, I can encourage you to be kinder to yourself and be your own advocate.

Awards, accolades and job titles aren’t everything…

First of all, I just wanted to open this post by saying that if you put the main goal of your career success solely on winning awards, achieving certifications, accolades or fancy job titles, you will find that this is simply not enough.

This is not to say that these things are bad, they’re pretty good stuff and opens up so many opportunities. Awards help to amplify the things that you’re doing and encourages others too! The keyword here is ‘amplify’. This suggests that there is already something that you’re doing that is unique to you and even without the awards, you feel very content with what you have, as what you have is everything.

At the end of the day, people will remember you as the person that helped them, brought them joy, made an impact and left a legacy. Sometimes as human beings, we always seek more, but we often forget to look back at how far we have come and what we have already to appreciate the journey.

Don’t Forget ‘You’! Kim’s Top Tips on Self-Advocacy

For those who know me personally, I’m still growing and trying to speak to myself more positively. I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed quickly and that’s a pretty vicious cycle. I don’t naturally like to draw attention to myself and would just prefer to blend into the crowd. This means that if I have done a good job of a task and people say ‘well done, good job’, I would just say something like ‘hey, thank you, but yeah it was no biggie anyways’ or ‘thanks, yeah, I guess you could say it’s good, but I did receive some help’. I hope you can relate to this tendency to wash down achievements somewhat for fear of standing out.

Here’s the thing though, if we invert this logic, it doesn’t make sense because unless you speak something out into existence, not many people would notice.

I’m naturally a heads down and get stuck in sort of person, but I realised how important it is to take a step back and advocate for myself that bit more!

Self-advocacy is really powerful because it helped me to speak more positively about myself and talk about my accomplishments (not in a narcissistic way but to give form/life to the things that people cannot see). This is not to say that speaking up is equivalent to being arrogant. You can speak up with respect for others and yourself and in a kind way. To borrow the phrase that’s used from the Google #IamRemarkable initiative workshops, “It’s not bragging if it’s based on facts!”.

You don’t have to sell your soul in order to advocate for yourself. You can still advocate for yourself and be authentic too!

Creating a Highlights Log

I have recently started logging my highlights on a Google Sheets and this has served me in multiple ways. It has built my confidence, enabled me to view my highlights objectively, supported me in organising my log, so that it makes things a lot easier when it came to updating my website or CV, or just for a positive boost.

Be sure to read on to the very end of this post for a free template you can use to start your very own highlights log.

Guide to Nominating Yourself for an Award

When I started my technology career, I was fortunate enough to have had a lot of support from the community to help me grow in my skills and confidence. I remembered the first time I saw a call for nominations for a technology award on LinkedIn and I clicked on the website and stared at the words ‘Nominate Yourself’; I just laughed and thought ‘I would like to be considered for an award, but no flipping chance’. There’s so much that’s not spoken about this mentality and I think it stems from the following thoughts:

If I nominate myself, will people…

Laugh at me?

Judge me?

Think that the award is worthless because I nominated myself anyway?

Think that it’s unfair and others deserve it more?

Somehow, the feelings of guilt and embarrassment come into play here and it’s completely natural, no one wants to stick out of the crowd and especially not in this way.

I’m here to challenge thoughts on this and here are the reasons why you should put forward a nomination for yourself for anything you like. Keep these phrases in mind in your head:

I ‘can’ put forward a nomination for myself because:

• I can convey my passions, missions and values to others because they define who I am and my identities;

• I know and can articulate my achievements, successes and failures in a clear way;

• I would like to practise self-advocacy and use the opportunity to learn;

Putting forward a nomination does not equate to winning the award. There are several rounds of interviews / shortlisting after the initial nomination.

Even if you don’t want to put forward a nomination for yourself, you can help someone else by nominating on their behalf. Here’s 5 top tips for putting together a nomination for yourself/others:

• Identity one goal you will learn/achieve from this process.

• Write down some bullet points of the values you firmly believe in - this can be anything from ‘respect’, to ‘curiosity’, to ‘charity’ etc.

• What are you passionate about or enjoy doing? What is authentically you? Don’t be afraid to bring some personality here, it can be something career/work-related or outside of work. The worst thing you can do is to create a ‘fake’ nomination that you yourself cannot stand by / be proud of;

• Use a highlights log to filter any notable things you would like to highlight in more detail - a sentence or two for each highlight is more than enough.

• Situation - Describe the context / set the scene

• Task - What problem/issue were you trying to solve? Who was involved and what was your role?

• Action - What did you do? How were you involved?

• Result - What did you achieve and what impact did this have?

• Enjoy the process and have some fun. Don’t worry if you didn’t get shortlisted or win anything, through this process, you have built up a set of mission, vision and values for yourself, as well as a lovely log, increased self-advocacy skills and self-confidence and learnt something new.

Please nominate another person who deserves to be recognised but may not have had the courage to speak up for themselves yet.

Thank you

Thanks for reading my post! As promised, here’s the link to the free Curiously Code - Highlights Log template.