Career Management: How to Ace Your Annual Review Meeting (Part 2 of 2)

5 Tips on how to prepare, manage, and follow up after your annual performance review meeting.

For most professionals, an annual review is as pleasant as a root canal.However, your performance review can provide an amazing opportunity to review your career development plan. By using the 5 tips discussed below, you can turn this around and instead use the time of your annual review to have a constructive conversation with your boss about your achievements and your future goals.

In my previous post, I discussed three tips:

Tip#1: Review your projects and articulate your contributions
Tip#2: Make your department (and boss) look good
Tip#3: Send your list to your boss ahead of the meeting

Today, let’s focus on two more tips to help you make the most out of your performance review:

Tip#4: Design your career development plan for the next year

Based on the past year, you certainly have ideas about projects that might be of help to the department, or specific skill set or technology you would like to learn more about. Have a list of talking points ready to deliver about the past year, and your ideas for the coming year regarding your projects and your career development plan. For each idea you have, rank the risk factor in advance. Is this project a low hanging fruit that would probably get implemented anyway? Would this project be a major stretch for the department? Evaluate the chances of each idea, and rank them from easier to harder. During the meeting, start talking with your boss about an easier project (rank 1or 2), followed by a more challenging one (rank 6-7). This will enable you to test the waters while maximizing the occurrence of a consensus by the end of the meeting. Your goal is to show that you are a team player who is engaged and wants to contribute to the department.

Tip#5: Have multiple mini-reviews throughout the year

You might think that one review per year is more than enough, but each review does not need to be a meeting in person. Instead, send periodic emails. A good trigger for an email is completion of a project, or when a major milestone has been reached. Articulate what the value of the project was and what your contributions, as well as those from key team members, have been. These quick updates could also be about proposing several alternatives for next steps to your boss. Again make it easier on your boss by offering two or three alternatives on how to approach the next steps instead of asking how to proceed in general. This will enable your boss to ‘vote’ for one direction that you are prepared to take, instead of having your boss figure out what next steps are needed. These mini-reviews will also help you emerge as a professional that is open to coaching and is engaged in his/her career development.

What other strategies or tips do you have to make the most out of an annual performance review? I look forward to your comments!

Photo Credit.

Overwhelm: A Career Signifier

Being efficient relies on noting times when you step into and remain overwhelmed and what you do to get out of it. The overall aspect of taking on too much and not having an exit strategy can create a cycle of feeling tracked and overwhelmed.

As you become more skilled and busier in your work the likelihood of becoming overwhelmed and distracted becomes more prevalent. Being overwhelmed is when you have more to do or process than what you perceive you have time for. The challenge with overwhelm is that it costs businesses millions of dollars each year with employees not being productive, efficient and on top of things.

It impacts the work place because employees are not given the specific tools and strategizes to change their attitude and perspective. In this blog I will go into detail about specific techniques I coach clients on that you may find helpful.

There are specific tips I am going to share with you. In additional I have a unique model I have developed that you can apply to any situation to get out of overwhelm. Please email me to get your copy.

Here are some suggestions I recommend. The first is to say no to certain activities and conversations that don’t support your goals. It’s honorable to say no in your life so you can make space for what is most important. In partnership with saying no is always opening to understanding and knowing your limits. As we live longer our body changes and our life energy reserves shifts, which impacts our limits and our capacities. By knowing this you save yourself time and energy. I recommend you take brakes every 1.5 hours or so and take notice of your natural rhythms. Are you more likely to be an early morning person or a late night person? Track your most productive and energetic times and use that time to do the most demanding and meaningful work. I also encourage you to play with how you do tasks by experimenting with your use of time and task management.

Specifically after you know your natural rhythms you can relax into the moment and let your past and future melt away. To reduce and begin to eliminate overwhelm it’s important to look at what is essential in your life and career and do what gives you the most reward and out put. As you choose to release relationships, activities, volunteer projects, clients, career directions, to dos in general that have drained you then you create more energy to dedicate to what is important for you. In previous blogs I have mentioned the 80/20 rule where we receive most of our enjoyment and success from 20% of what we do. By reducing what you choose to take on, remain involved with and focus on you can reduce the amount of work and projects down to a manageable amount that you can work with. From there I suggest you systemize and automate as much as you can of what you have taken on into daily rituals and systems that allow you to create a way to focus on completing things verses remaining on a treadmill of busyness.

And finally the most practical and sometimes the most profound are the items that relate to increasing your health and vitality such as mediating, exercise, eating food that works for you well, getting enough sleep, and spending time alone without stimulus such as TV, computers, conversations and work.

Overwhelm is a state of mind that you can change with your attitude and the actions you take.

Work Life balance

Being your best in the workplace means being effective in both your personal and your professional arenas. Work-life balance is a tangible and accomplishable activity. We all explore what balance is and how to achieve it as you do in your life and work.




It's important to choose to make this a priority. Some people are addicted to the busyness of being busy and non-effective. Choose to have fun and balance your personal life with your work. Once you do this you begin to see new behaviors and actions bring you greater success and expansion. The foundation of any new skill and result is to make it a priority and redesign your life to accommodate your new focus.

You can do it. Believe you in your innate ability to create enjoyment and balance between all areas of your life. What I find that is the #1 obstacle to this is that we tend to compartmentalize our lives to such a degree that we don't see how things overlap or contribute to one another. I recommend you look for the flow and commonality between work and personal life. When we generate separation it takes energy and time to stop one activity and move to the next. Ive had people loose 45 minutes worth of valuable work time due to having to switch gears and think about something totally unrelated and out of their focus at that time. See how your work and your personal life serve one another and go about being more efficient in all areas and spend less time trying for perfect balance.

I recommend that you create a list of specific items that you appreciation about your work and your personal life on a daily basis and make time to enhance and bring more of that into your life. A list is imperative because the mind will forget and trick you into believing that there is nothing that you appreciate. Aiming for balance and ease takes discipline and focus.

In addition to this I suggest you make a separate list of specific actions about 10-20 that you can do to increase your appreciation and enjoyment of life. Each day you need at least one thing you are energized by and look forward to. I suggest you have one from your work life and one from your personal life. If they can be the same that would be excellent. You want to begin exploring the connection and flow between these two areas of your life, and aim for seamless transition and effectiveness.

Work-life balance is a simple process of shifting your focus from separate spheres and moving it from a tetter totter with work on one end and life on the other end to a more balanced perspective with the fulcrum (middle part) being those actions, thoughts and beliefs which link the two sections together. The balance is generated in the overarching connection and appreciation of you and your life. Next week I will speak to efficiency and preparation for a New Year!

Intentional Time Part Two of Two

In this second in a series we will cover the specific examples of ways to work with intention and focus to have time be your ally and partner. Time is a valuable commodity as it relates to identifying and securing your responsible job.

As I shared before, time is malleable and under our direction. The best way to change our perception about time is to set intentions that contribute to our success and moves us forward not works against us. Most people you meet think of time as finite and bound by beliefs and thoughts.

What I propose is a series of experiments and opportunities to explore time from a new dimension and perspective based on your updated beliefs. Our beliefs can change in two ways. The first is by updating what we believe through new behaviors and evidence. The second way our beliefs can change is through changing our actions and our behaviors. By doing this we can update our beliefs to accommodate the new evidence. Regardless of which direction you take you become your own best evaluative source.

The first of which is the utilization of each day by remaining focused on a key question or intention. I call this the Open Ended Inquiry. By beginning each morning with a focus or an opened ended question you begin to give context and possibility to each and everything that happens to you and around you. As you work, research; engage in life things come to your awareness which bring answers to your career choices. By bringing your 100% attention to your life you engage both your conscious and unconscious minds. I recommend you choose a career question that relates to what your requirements and needs are and hold that question for one week and see what types of resources, conversations, and answers come your way. The next step is that you need to write down your insights and your awareness into a career journal.

The second Intentional Time exercise is to hold an open-ended question with the intention of a question, name or action to reveal itself to you during your sleep and in dreams. This way it comes much more clearly and directly without the input from your negative mind or inner critic. The time during sleep is both a regenerative and remunerating time and it’s also the time to plant seeds for growth and expansion. Most leaders and those who accomplish much in the world engage their subconscious minds during sleep, during exercise, and while meditation. Use these tools by aligning with proven techniques throughout the centuries for various purposes.

These tools have been used for centuries in various countries and in many different traditions. Experiment with them yourself and working with them for your career management will provide stability, and inspiration.