So we don't have a ton of time, so we're gonna go ahead and get started and talk about your career narrative today.It's really important to determine who it is who's in control of your story, and who it is who's telling your story should be you. I know a lot of us rely on mentors and sponsors and coaches, and there are differences among those roles. So I wanted to highlight those quickly. Mentorship provides guidance and support, whereas sponsors speak for you when you're not in the room. And the sponsor is so important because they can advocate for your career advancement. A mentor works with you to provide guidance and support for your growth. Those are keywords for mentors, development, growth and guidance for you. But for sponsors, they're going to advocate for you, champion you, provide you with access and influence when you're not in the room.

And so when you're crafting your story, it's really important that you develop a story that the sponsor can use to verbalize who you are and where it is you want to go. But you can't rely on your sponsor to do that for you. You have to develop the story with your sponsor's help, perhaps. But in order to have that communicated well and sort of in the frame that you wish it to be communicated, you have to be the crafter, the author of your own story. So there's another role out there, the coach, who this is one of the questions I get a lot, do I need a coach? And a coach helps you develop specific skills. So the mentor is about growth and development. The sponsor is about helping you develop influence and access. The coach is about helping you grow specific skills. So keywords for a coach improvement strategies and goals.

And so if you're trying to work on something specific and really improve your own, patterns and determine if you can get better at a certain skill set, the coach will help you do that. How does this all play together? Well, a mentor might determine that you have a gap in a certain set of skills and a coach could help you develop them. Or a sponsor could be attempting to gain you access in a certain area, and you might be having difficulty developing that growth pattern. A mentor could help you, sort of build that growth trajectory and a coach would develop the specific skills that you need to slot in. So all three roles are very different, can and you can have the best setup possible. But unless you understand your desired career trajectory and have your own advocacy put together, you won't be branding yourself well. So how do you develop your own career story?

You know where you've been. And the first step is determining how you frame where you've been. How does it fit into where you want to go? So especially for those of us who are career changers or transitioning different types of roles, it's important to set yourself up well and sort where it is you've been and what it is you've done so that it supports where it is you want to go. In other words, let's say you've been staying at home taking care of children for ten years, and now you're reentering the workforce. It's not that you've been doing nothing. You've been doing a lot of organizational and strategic leadership. How does that support where it is you want to go? I mean, that can feed almost anything. Right? So you have to be able to sort yourself and what you've been doing so that it supports and lifts where it is you want to go. And you're the only one who knows where you want to go. You have to tell your support team where that is, your trajectory.

Planning your career story is really important to developing your brand. And your brand is such that this is your short statement about who this person is. So your LinkedIn tag, this is what I do. This is who I am. And you can help tell your own tale by developing that brand thesis statement. You know your strengths and your weaknesses best. So working with your team to determine your approaches and make you the center of the action, you craft your narrative. You craft the narrative, and that makes it authentic. You wanna keep it concise. You can't tell a twenty year story that rambles around. You wanna keep it tight and memorable and positive. You're unique. You have an interesting path. So when I talk about my trajectory, I talk about how I was an English major who ended up in IT, loved it, and have decided to make my career about communicating IT and the technology and its language to people who don't necessarily speak that language.

It's a positive, it's a, it's a unique and transitory statement that everyone can understand. I have to be able to put that statement in the hands of other people and trust them to communicate it. So it has to be uncomplicated, and it has to be something that other people can understand well. And if I tell the story well, then other people can tell it well for me, and I can allow it to be communicated further and shared more if I present it thoroughly but concisely, authentically, and memorably first. I hope that makes sense to everyone. I think we're at our stopping time, but I wanted to make sure to put all of these ideas in front of you because it's really important to put out there the right narrative for yourself and make sure you're telling your own story properly.

I hope that that helps everybody. Be sure to connect on LinkedIn if you don't mind. I'd love to have that. We've got such a great group here. Thank you.