How to Sell Yourself - 5 Principles of Effective Self Promotion

As a career executive or aspiring executive, you recognize how important it is to sell yourself, but the thought of being self-promoting turns you off. Do you need to promote yourself because you see an opportunity but you simply don’t know how? The advice that follows will help you feel confident and empowered in selling yourself.

Anyone who has risen to the top of their field has had to sell themselves to others on their capabilities and their fitness for the job. The five principles outlined below will give you the tools to become a confident self-promoter and boost your success in your field.

Correlation Between Self Knowledge and Self Doubt

There is a direct correlation between confidence and knowing yourself. You may feel uncertain about promoting yourself because you don’t know what to say. Or you may doubt yourself because you think of yourself in terms of an inventory of credentials and work experience.
When we see ourselves as purely our job experiences and degrees, then we start to seem not all that unique. There will always be someone with more experience or higher degrees, so those are not the areas where you can best differentiate yourself.
If you don’t really know yourself, then answering the question, “Tell me about yourself” is difficult. Telling others about yourself does not mean listing job titles or divulging your career history. It’s about communicating who you are with authenticity. Confidence in yourself will come as a result of that.

Learn to define who you are, and explore what makes you unique. When you know this, you realize that you have something unique to offer that others do not, and this is worth promoting.

Cognitive Dissonance Counteracts Self-Promotion

If you think promotion is self-aggrandizing, and you value humility, then it will be increasingly a struggle to promote yourself because it is counter to your values. If you think of selling yourself as needy or desperate, there will be a cognitive dissonance that prevents you from promoting yourself in an effective way.

In either case, it would be wise to reconstruct your attitudes toward self promotion. To move forward with confidence requires that you have complete congruence from the inside out and understand you have true value in the world.

The only way for people to know your true value is to tell them. This requires that you change your attitude and view selling yourself differently. Only then will you be able to put your true self forward and reach your full potential.

Communication Creates your Subsequent Experiences

The words you say are the genesis of things that don’t exist yet. Words will plant the seeds into the garden of your future. It’s been proven that your words actually create the experiences you’ll have. So our words need to be empowered from the inside out. This means you must plan your communication around what you’re going to say, and how you will say it.

There are three parameters to know in order to master communication as you promote yourself.

Audience
Message
Context

Communicate in a way that demonstrates how your particular experiences, knowledge and achievements are important to your audience. If you know your audience, then you can align your skills and intention with their highest priority outcomes. You can tailor your message to communicate that you understand what is important to them, and that you can help them achieve their mission.

When you align with your audience in this way, you begin to understand that this is not about being pushy or self-exaggerating. Instead, you can provide great value in helping others achieve what is important to them.

Contemplation Catalyzes Achievements

The purpose of learning is greater than simply knowing something. Throughout school, college, and classroom learning, we have been programmed to believe that “knowing things” is the goal of learning. But in reality, having knowledge does not mean you can implement it or articulate it. Merely acquiring knowledge doesn’t lead to any meaningful achievements. Until we catalyze our learning, it is not truly useful.

Instead of learning about things, explore how you can learn from things. The purpose of learning is to turn your knowledge into wisdom. The aim should be mastery of knowledge: to implement your knowledge in ways that are second-nature to you so that you don’t have to use up your mental resources to use what you know.

To master knowledge, change your thought patterns and allow contemplation to accelerate your achievements. If you want to achieve something different from what you have now, such as a promotion or a different role, it will require a different way of thinking. Contemplative power leads to creative power and can help you achieve change. That is the real power behind the knowledge you’ve acquired.

Community Circulates Similarities

Who do you spend the most time with? This is a key question in self-development. A huge part of your success depends on who you surround yourself with. The people you spend the most time with can steer you toward or away from your desired path.

Do they have strategies that work to get the success you’re looking for? Are they able to coach you and give you pointers?

It would be wise to surround yourself with peers who challenge you and give you feedback that ultimately helps you grow. Those you’re around influence your attitudes and your philosophies, so make sure they are people who you aspire to be like.

A More Advanced Strategy

Anyone can seek and collect tactical information on self promotion and accumulating vast amounts of knowledge. There are books and articles that give a surplus of tactical tips and tricks. But if you’ve tried to do this, you already know that blanket tactics don’t apply in every situation. It’s key to know when to implement a tactic and why certain things work over others.

Not every tactic will be the right one to apply in your unique situation. This type of higher-level thinking is called strategy, and it is a core component of our coaching. If this is something that resonates with you and that you’d like to implement, reach out to us to learn how we can help guide you in the self-promotion strategy that is right for you.

Now it is time to move away from the knowledge-gathering stage and move on to the application. If you’d love to learn how to put the principles covered in this blog into action, join me in my executive coaching program where I’ll introduce you to a powerful self- and career-development process.
This is an implementation-to-results program for growth-oriented executives who seek greater career fulfillment through becoming a more skilled version of themselves. It is designed to help you master your mind, develop deeper insights, elevate your communication skills, and become inspired in your career growth.

If you’d love to find out how my methodology can help you with your career goals, apply HERE for an opportunity to work with me.