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Hi there! It’s Heather Stevenson.
Happy Wednesday and thanks for being here! Here’s what’s covered in today’s issue:
Why confidence is a career accelerant for in-house lawyers;
How to build more confidence, without ego, to accelerate your own career;
Links you'll love;
And More.
Let’s dive in.
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Deep Dive
The power of confidence without ego.
Over the course of my career, I have moved around between wildly different roles and industries. I’ve been a big law securities litigator, juice bar founder, media law lawyer, and now I’m GC at a venture firm.
Some might say I’ve moved into roles before I was qualified to do them, but I see it differently.
And no, this is not the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I know exactly how little I knew about cybersecurity before joining Red Cell, and I realize that I couldn’t tell you what the Massachusetts Public Records Law was, let alone explain how the different exemptions mattered to a newspaper, when I joined The Boston Globe.
But in each case, what I did have, was the self-awareness to know what I did not know, the skills to fill the gap between what I knew when I started and what I needed in order to succeed in the long run, and the confidence to know that I could and would use those skills to fill any gaps. And I knew I could use that, plus my judgment, existing skills and knowledge, to be excellent at the work.
I think regularly about the role of confidence in my own career and in in-house law generally. Because acting with confidence, and just the right amount of humility, has already taken me much further than I’d ever made it if I did not have the confidence to raise my hand, apply for the job, and do the hard things.
This is an issue about how you can act with confidence (and an appropriate amount of humility) in your own career, and why doing so is essential to your career progression. Even when you don’t actually feel especially confident, or when you’re unsure you’re ready.
