How To Create Your Own Super Secret Annual Review

Annual reviews bring up a mix of complicated feelings.

Doubt, guilt, fear, frustration, indignation.

Hope, pride, appreciation, gratitude, compassion.

The emotions rise to the surface one by one or all at once—and then we must put on a brave face and push through our feelings so we can string sentences together and advocate for ourselves during the dreaded conversation. No matter whether the overall tone of the exchange is deflating or empowering—it is typically one of the tougher dialogues we experience in our careers.

While I haven’t had one of these reviews in a few years, I remember the internal conflict I would feel when it came time to hand my self-assessment (the part I could control), over to my supervisor who had the final say on my performance, compensation and professional development. In essence, I was relinquishing ownership of my own learning and growth.

Now, with distance from the experience and a boatload of new leadership tools, I know the way to avoid this uncomfortable scenario: Get ahead of it.

I work with clients to complete their own super secret annual reviews and professional development plans for the year to come. Here’s how we do it:

1. Start with an organizing principle—your values
In order to evaluate yourself, you need to know what you’re shooting for in your career. If your life and career are driven by a certain set of values—this would be a great place start. My personal values are courage, connection, inspiration, peace and fun, and to stay on track I make a list of all of the ways I’ve been in action around each of these values and the results that have come from these actions.

2. What did you learn and where can you improve?
This is my favorite part of the secret review. If you’re a human being, there are always things you can do better. Where in your career are you not living your values? Where are you not getting the results you want? Because nobody will ever see this document and it will not impact your compensation, you can feel free to be 100% honest. Plus, you’re evaluating yourself based on what’s important to you and not what’s critical to your company. Of course, if you’re in the right role these two sets of criteria would likely align. If they’re vastly different, that is data that can inform how you move forward.

3. How will you follow your curiosity in the coming year?
Start by asking yourself: What are the things that energize you, that bring you into flow? The things that when you’re doing them make you feel most like you? How can you add another dimension to that expertise? What are the things you want to learn that are disconnected from your current role, although your intuition is driving you there anyway? When generating this list of learning opportunities, note which items on the list feel like a "should" and which give you butterflies just imagining the possibilities. Next, map out the months of the year and note your curiosity focus for each month being sure to strike a balance between aspirational and practical. January will be storytelling while February could be sharpening public speaking skills. With a loose map, you can set your targets and allow yourself to flesh out the details at a later date.

When it comes to timing, I highly recommend doing your Super Secret Annual Review before you complete the self-assessment for your role. This way, you can allow your own review to inform the document for your company. Know that for your own review, you can throw around sentence fragments and simple language. There’s no need to spend extra time dressing it up. It’s for you, and only you know what you mean, at least most of the time. If it seems like an unnecessary step that you don’t have time for, remember that the one person responsible for driving your career forward (in the direction you choose) is you. Your boss and your company and your mentors may provide guidance and valuable input, but you are the only one who can put that data through the filter of what’s meaningful to you and decide on your best next move.

Do You Need A Mentor To Succeed?

After graduating college and jumping into my first job as a Publicity Assistant at a local television station, I nurtured a blooming fantasy about one thing that was going to make or break my career. I dreamt up a mentor and together we moved mountains, broke glass ceilings and built up my confidence to a point where I was simply unstoppable.

She was the model of success I wanted to create for myself.

We met once a month to discuss my career evolution.

She weighed in on colossal decisions, providing counsel on how best to move forward.

She nudged me, pushed me farther than I thought I could go, and always kept my career path and my success top of mind.

The first ten years of my career exploded, and I rode the wave of my growing abilities and a changing industry. While I had inspiring bosses who cheered me on for a period of time and conversations with colleagues who saw something special in me and were candid about their own stories to help me learn from their experiences, I never found that one person I hoped would save me from whatever stuckness I stepped into along my path.

And I did get stuck for several years. I knew I needed a change but could not see a way forward. I blamed my mentor for not showing up to perform her duties and myself for not being able to find her.

Then, through a confluence of life events like a milestone birthday, a close friend imparting wisdom as he died of ALS and my growing bandwidth as my daughters moved out of baby neediness, I grew a visceral understanding that…

The only person responsible for my life and my career is me. Nobody is going to save me from the unhappiness, the missed opportunities, the stuckness. My Fairy Mentor Mother may not come.

Or perhaps she already has, but she looks different than expected…

We might just meet once a year or every two years, or maybe we only ever met once, but the conversation had a tremendous impact on me.

She may have been ten years younger than me, but offered me the right brilliance at the right time.

She may be a friend who is sometimes one chapter ahead and sometimes needing my support.

She may be a writer, a podcaster or Oprah.

She may be a he.

What I know now and wish I knew then is that I can find inspiration from anyone and anything. It’s up to me to be open to receiving these messages, taking them to heart and putting them into action. I can break out of the rigid mentor lore I painted in my mind so that I can have mentoring conversations when I least expect them or several times a week instead of only once a month. What a better deal for me and less pressure and time for all of my people. And I have so many people who step up to be there for me in the moments I need them. They don’t need titles to help me move mountains, break glass ceilings or build up my confidence to make me unstoppable. Love, gratitude, respect and taking a turn on the upside of the mentoring see-saw make us feel whole.

What To Do When You Don't Get The Job

Sometimes after four interviews with seven different people, a presentation you spent a three-day weekend slaving over, a barrage of compliments that inflate your confidence toward only one outcome—you don’t get the job. You feel like you were thrown off a cliff, robbed of the future you were promised.

When this happens, I work with clients to acknowledge all they’re feeling.

Rejection: Why didn’t they want me?

Despair: I’m never going to find something as perfect as that role.

Anger: If they didn’t want me, why do they keep using all of the ideas I shared with them? (Side note: Employers, please stop using candidates ideas. And candidates, know that if you share your ideas, employers who may not choose you, may choose your ideas. I like to file this under the "not illegal, but very uncool" category of hiring tactics.)

Once you are one with your feelings, here are some ways you can get your mojo back in your search and in your career.

1. Reframe the loss
Just like finding the right partner, finding the right job is about fit. If you didn’t get the role, there was something that you have yet to uncover that didn’t make you a fit. It could be something on their end that they know about and you don’t, or something they’ve known about you all along that suddenly becomes important. In order for you to move on, it’s critical for you to know that it’s not that you’re not right for any role, rather you’re not right for that role. Your opportunity is out there waiting for you.

2. Ask for feedback
Once they let you know that you didn’t get the role, you can ask them for feedback that might be helpful as you continue your search. While hiring managers and recruiters give feedback a small percentage of the time, when you do get it, it can provide incredibly useful nuggets you can use to tweak your search or better understand how you can talk about the gaps in your experience. It can help you both learn how to do better next time AND clarify their decision-making process for going with someone else. Often times it makes the decision a lot more clear-cut when you realize, "It’s true, I don’t have that experience and if they’re looking for someone who’s done that, I wouldn’t have succeeded in that role."

3. Do a debrief of your performance
There is no perfect interview performance because there is no perfect human. Of course you did well enough to make it through several rounds of interviews, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you could have done better. Give yourself some time to think through the answers where you may have stumbled or the points at which you talked and talked simply to fill the uncomfortable space. Or perhaps there was a point you went negative on a topic you had on your "Don’t mention these things" list. Make a list of areas you can improve and then spend some time tightening up responses—reframing topics that prompted you to unearth the skeletons—even if it’s simply fine-tuning. This is your chance to learn and take your interview skills to the next level.

4. Distill the essence of what you loved, seek it elsewhere
Go beyond the obvious to better understand what ignited you about that specific role or project. What do you really want that you thought this position could provide? Once you make a list of things that drew you like a magnet to this opportunity, realize that this job was one way of many to get you to those things. This list is your new set of marching orders for the next role you’re going to find. What are similar companies or industries where you may be able to look for a role with these things? It’s like having that great date with someone you know is not the one for you—but he or she helps you realize that this feeling and this person is out there for you and the trail of clues have been left for you to crack the case.

No matter how many times you go through this process of pulling yourself up, the rejection hurts. If you use career transitions and job searches as ways to validate your fears, insecurities and beliefs that the world is conspiring against you—you will find evidence to support all of these claims. And on the flip-side, if you realize they are opportunities to grow, to learn, to expand, and to try things that are outside of what feels comfortable and safe, you will find momentum and build that resilience muscle—capable of driving your success in parts of your life far beyond the scope of your career.

What's Your Time Worth To You?

As a mom of a ten-year-old attending New York City public schools, I’ve joined the thousands of fellow NYC parents in navigating the middle school process to determine my daughter’s school for next year. For those in the burbs following along—no, there isn’t a middle school that she can just go to based on where she lives. There are in some parts of the city—but not ours. And so many of us attend 10 – 15 tours that are 2 hours each over a 2 month period, so we can rank 12 schools on our list in early December. I’ve decided 13 will be the lucky number of tours for our family and I will be attending 12 of those 13. Yes, mathematicians, I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. That’s a lot of f’ing time.

I gave our daughter Jane the option to join or not, and so far, she’s gone to nearly all of the tours on our list. One week into the process, we had tours for three nights straight—which for Jane meant grabbing dinner on the go and doing homework past her normal bedtime. On the third night, directly after school, chorus and Hebrew School—we walked over to the 6:30 tour, which was one block from our home. We were led into a packed auditorium that was filled to the balconies with tired parents and cranky kids. The principal began speaking about the middle school process and what she thinks about it. She went on for 20 precious minutes. I could feel the anger bubbling up as I thought, "I’m halfway through the process. If I don’t know about it by now, I’m in trouble. And after a long day with a tired kid, just tell me about your school so we can all go home and do what we need to do."

I felt myself stewing in resentment and then Jane turned to me and insisted, "Mom, THIS is a waste of my time. I want to go home."

We were in lockstep. I told her I would stay and let her know what she missed. She stood up in the auditorium packed with hundreds, including many of our friends and neighbors, while the principal continued in a flurry of irrelevance. She walked out and returned home.

My guess is that many parents would have been embarrassed in that moment—cringing at her every footstep and the bulky door crashing behind her—but pride washed over me. She gets it. At ten, she understands that her time and energy have meaning. They have value. And she respects her time enough to do what felt uncomfortable and perhaps against the rules to honor her self and her worth. Yes, tween girl feminist parenting win!

This moment stuck out to me more than most because I see many of my female clients struggle to value their time. They find themselves in overwhelm in their families or stuck in careers with no idea where to go next because they have no time to make a search—or themselves a priority.

Here are a few ways we work together to reclaim their value and their time:

1. Reframe
A wise coach recently asked me, "In the face of all of these time-consuming middle school tours, what can you celebrate about this time?" The answer was clear—more time with my daughter and a chance for us to work on a project together. Once I changed my view of the process, I have been—dare I say—having fun being with her and exploring new neighborhoods and possibilities. How can you look at the time you’re spending on things that seem like obligations in a way that truly enriches your life and helps you continue to learn?

2. Connect to your values
If you have not yet taken the time to choose your values, define what they mean to you and use them as a compass to drive your life decisions, know that this is a critical step toward helping you better value your worth and your time. If you have done this in the past, go through the exercise again to make sure that the values you choose speak to your life right now. Life happens and what was once unimportant to you—for example—before 2016, may be life altering now. I review everything on my calendar once a month to make sure my appointments are laddering up to my values. Read more about this in 5 Ways I Use My Values To Guide My Life.

3. Question cultural and gender norms
When I go to these middle school tours it’s hard not to notice that 90% of the parents in attendance are moms. It makes me angry and yet, there I am, the one in the family actively choosing to wrangle this process. My case may be slightly different in that I set my own hours, have a more flexible schedule and have reframed the process so I get something out of it—but it doesn’t make me less pissed off that as women and mothers, we continue to carry the administrative load of the household, what I like to call, "The Third Job." These are ongoing conversations in my home and I’m lucky to have a partner who works with me to challenge these assumptions. It’s not a given that because I’m the mom I’m going to take on all of this extra work to keep the family afloat. And if I do take this on, we work out what he can do to take something else off my plate—so that I can still fit in the things that are important in my work and my life.

In doing the leadership work I do with women, especially in what’s being called "The Year Of The Woman", I often feel the pressure to be a shining model of equity and to have this all figured out in my work, in my parenting and in my marriage. I often remind myself of what I say to clients, which is, "That added pressure is NOT helping you move forward or learn." We’re so hard on ourselves! The truth is that with 44 years’ experience in this culture, where in subtle and not so subtle ways a woman’s time and value are de-prioritized, I’m still in the process of figuring out how I can change what I ask for and how I ask for it while also inspiring others to do the same. I notice how my daughters are learning to do it differently—and how even the shortest, seemingly inconsequential moment can foreshadow the broadest impact. We simply need to notice it and step into the possibility it leaves wide open for us to acknowledge and spread the word.