175: How to See the Blind Spots Holding Back Your Career with Sara Canaday

By July 5, 2017Podcasts

 

 

Sara Canaday says: "You'd be amazed at how responsive people are to your graciousness and your vulnerability."

Sara Canaday gives insights that offer clarity on blind spots at work and overcoming them to advance in your career.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Key blind spots that frequently hold back careers
  2. Why the personal touch matters at work
  3. Approaches to identifying your own blind spots

About Sara

Sara Canaday (Leadership Development Expert, Speaker and Author) is a recognized expert and author in leadership and strategic personal branding. Specifically, she is known for her ability to help high potentials identify the elusive blind spots that are preventing them from taking their careers (and their companies) to the next level.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Sara Canaday Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sara, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Sara Canaday
Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so glad to have you. And I understand that you have a secret desire to be a backup dancer on a hip hop video. I would like to hear the backstory of this, preferences for a particular videos, progress made. Just give us the whole scoop there.

Sara Canaday
And I shared that with you because based on my work as a leadership consultant, and the fact that I talk about presence, not only being present but a professional polished presence. Being a hip hop dancer is kind of quirky secret desire when I’m usually in front of groups and talking about their impact and their image and how they convey themselves. And so I think it’s funny that you started with that but I wanted to give you the backstory on why I chose that as sort of my quirky thing.

But I can’t tell you exactly when it started. It goes back to the days of MTV and watching the incredible videos and seeing the dancers and I’ve always loved to dance, did it when I was younger in front of the TV, and get opportunities to do it. If I’m at a conference and there’s some sort of gala and dance, and I’m the first one at the dance floor. But I wish I could tell you exactly why that desire is there or where it comes from, I love to dance, and I’ve always thought it would be really cool to be a backup dancer.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Any particular musicians that would be an extra dream come true?

Sara Canaday
Oh, yes. Chris Brown, I love his music. He’s a combination of hip hop and R&B. Gosh, there’s just a couple of them that I really like and goes back from 90’s R&B all the way up to current hip hop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Alright. Well, that’s a good array and some initiative. So, now, I want to talk about the main du jour which is your expertise when it comes to blind spots and I think this is such an important topic and I love that you’ve just zeroed in with the whole book and the whole Lynda.com course on it. So could you orient us a little bit to what do you mean by blind spots, why is it a problem, and kind of set the stage for us?

Sara Canaday
Certainly. Well, a lot of what I know about blind spots comes from my personal experience. I spent a good 15 years in the corporate world and through a lot of observation, a lot of experience and just reflection it really became clear to me that despite our best efforts, despite amassing credentials or having degrees from the best universities that there are very sharp people in the business world who aren’t going anywhere because they have blind spots and they lack the clarity and the insight to know that they are creating their own hidden hurdles, they have their own roadblocks to their success.

Some of that I saw in terms of people who managed me, things that I would never do. And then, of course, I had my own hard knocks, things that I knew about myself or discovered about myself that may have inhibited my effectiveness or made me less engaging with others. And so it’s both of those things, it’s the watching others and then learning about myself where I began to realize that blind spots can make a huge difference in your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so you’ve taken the time to catalog and name a number of these pervasive blind spots. Could you give us maybe a sampling of two or three that you see being the most commonly-occurring as well as the most potentially damaging?

Sara Canaday
Sure. And I think you’ve mentioned my book and my Lynda.com course, and there’s a distinction between those two and I think it’s worth mentioning. The book I wrote is called You — According to Them: Uncovering the Blind Spots that Impact Your Reputation and Career. And it was really for any professional who is working with and through others, who may have some things that are holding them back.

And the Lynda.com course is focused and honed in on leadership blind spots. So there’s a distinction between the two. And if you’d like I can show you sort of some common blind spots or categories and then maybe one or two that are more common to preventing leaders from being most successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Sure thing. I guess I would just like to hear, in terms of the damage blind spots do, and if you could triage, if you will, the ones that, “Oh, man, they’re taking out a lot of people and they’re taking them out good.”

Sara Canaday
Yeah. Well, I think one that’s pretty common is this idea that, I think in my book I call it “there’s no crying in baseball,” and it’s probably counterintuitive. You’re going to think I’m saying that people are too emotional at work and, in fact, that is not what the case is with this particular blind spot. People that have what I call “no crying in baseball” syndrome is when they actually lack bringing who they are to work. They lack emotion in their daily grind. It’s all about transactions and a lot less about relations.

And I think those of us who grew up, if you will, and a certain times in the business world, we’re somewhat taught that you don’t bring who you are to work, that you leave your personal business at home, that you come to do a job and then that’s it. And what happens in today’s society is we spend so much of our time at work, people want to know more about us.

They want to know what’s behind our rationale, our thinking, and if you remain completely closed off and one-dimensional at work then people are going to potentially mislabel you as somebody who doesn’t care about others, that puts results above anything or anyone else and/or that you care more about your professional success than you do the people you work with.

So that’s a potentially multiplying damaging effect and what I find is it’s, nine times out of ten, completely unintended. That was not the intent but that’s the belief system that somebody was trained under, brought up in, or believes themselves that work is a place to do work and nothing more.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So then could you share with us what are some of the key behaviors that are overlooked or neglected by those suffering from this blind spot? Like what are some of the little things that they’re failing to do that cover the humanity?

Sara Canaday
Well, what’s funny is I can tell you that, as a leader in particular, I had some of this in terms of a belief that I was my to-do list, if you will, and I would be judged and valued based on my production and on results. And I really saw the chitchat or the connections or the touch points as something that got in the way of doing my to-do list, right? It felt inefficient to me.

So, I, like others, have had to, back then I had to rethink, adjust my belief system to see that actually the more we connect with others, the more rapport we build, the more they understand who we are and what we’re about, the more likely we are to get work done with and through them.

So, whether you’re a leader or colleague, that’s true. And so it seems to duplicitous, right? And it could almost even sound manipulative but the more you care about people, the more you open up to them and share, and the more you want to hear about them, the more you’ll be able to get what you need to get done as a colleague or a leader or a consultant even.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then can you share some of the mechanisms by which that translates into the results, the output, the accomplishments occurring? So I guess in some ways those who love chatting with people but feel they’ve got too much on their plate, this could be music to their ears. So convince us, Sara, how does that really work out in practice?

Sara Canaday
Well, it is borne and steep in science. This is behavioral psychology that really tells us that people will give us discretionary effort, right? In other words, they’ll go the extra step for people that they know like and trust. And how does that happen? You don’t know, like and trust somebody because they deliver incredible pivot tables on Excel, right? You begin to know, like and trust them because you start to build rapport, and you can’t build that rapport until you start to plug into each other.

The way I like to describe it is, “Are you an outlet or a power strip? Have you kept so little about yourself or have you played it so close to the vest that people know so little?” There’s very few ways they can plug in and find commonality and find what helps them relate to you. If people don’t feel they can relate to you then they’re not likely to support you or give you discretionary effort. So those are the results.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, just there, it’s about the discretionary effort because, especially in complex organizations there’s a lot of competing demands and you kind of have to choose, “Okay, who gets the stuff that they’ve asked for and who doesn’t this week?” at times when there’s just sort of overwhelm, running amok, as well as, “Who am I willing to stay a little late for, or shorten the lunch for, or just shut down the email program for a little while in order to give a fuller attention to the task at hand?”

Sara Canaday
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So that’s great. So a handy blind spot called “there’s no crying in baseball,” and some solutions are to open it up, to share, to show that you are interested and you care about folks. Any other kind of particular quick best practices for overcoming this one?

Sara Canaday
Again I think it starts with, “What’s your mindset? What has you believing that doing and taking part in more relational activity at work is inefficient?” And sometimes I have discovered with people that they make the assumption that people don’t care, “I don’t share because I’m just assuming that people really don’t… they’d be bored by my stories, or they really don’t care.”

And, again, that was their reason. It wasn’t necessarily because they found it inefficient, or they didn’t like others, or were shy. It’s really, well, sometimes just a matter of, “Wow, okay. So people do care that I grew up in the military and I moved to eight different countries before I settled here.”

Yes, absolutely. People want to hear stories. They don’t want to hear about data. We get enough of that all day. So that’s kind of just a common blind spot with the general population. I would say with leaders, in particular, I don’t necessarily name them like I did in my book, but I think one of the most common blind spots are the ones that will prevent a leader from having the impact, more than anything, is lack of impulse control.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Sara Canaday
Yup, and this is about…

Pete Mockaitis
“What do you mean, Sara?”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, exactly. This is about not being able to remain calm and pause. For example, if you’re challenged in a meeting and you’ve got people that are watching, and that’s the reason some of these are more important is because they are being most observable in a leader. When you are leading, you are center stage. So when you have lack of impulse control, all eyes are on you, right?

We are highly impressed with people who can be uber-composed in the face of adversity when they’re told that their project that they’ve been working on for weeks has been tabled, because subconsciously we know how difficult that is. So we assign these people this higher competency level or some people like to call it executive presence, because it’s very hard for us to do.

We’re under a lot of stress and a lot of pressure. We are navigating a lot of uncertainty. There’s no five-year or even one-year planning anymore. So those people who can remain calm, who can recover from setbacks and remain resilient, that’s a key in leadership but that is the first blind spot that will derail a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, it’s intriguing. This impulse control I think it applies to everyone. Leaders, there’s certainly a magnifying glass on it because everyone is looking. But I’m also thinking about just staff-level folks if they receive some feedback, are they defensive in terms of like, “Well, what do you mean?”

Sara Canaday
Right. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or is that, “Thank you. Tell me, could you share an example?” So very different replies in terms of the impulse. So, now, it seems like there’s a distinction to be made here because for the “there’s no crying in baseball” it seems like part of the answer is to open up, reveal some more of yourself, some vulnerability and stories and how you feel about things. And then lack of impulse control, it’s kind of the other side of the coin which is, well, you don’t want to just let her rip in terms of what you think and feel, full tilt, unfiltered. So how should we think about that potential distinction or tension?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think it’s interesting because for people who aspire to move ahead in their career, the higher we go the more the expectation is that we show two sides of the same coin, right? They want leaders to be confident yet humble in the right situation. They want leaders to be decisive yet fair. So in your case, with these two examples, we want people who aspire to leadership to be both relational, transparent and vulnerable but also controlled, right? Knowing when it’s time to be vulnerable versus when it’s time to be controlled.

And so I think you’ll find that with a lot of these blind spots, it’s like anything else. Sometimes it’s our strengths taken too far, sometimes it’s just about knowing what circumstances will warrant the pendulum one way or the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And so I’d like to get your perspective. Like let’s just say you did get some bad news in terms of you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into something and then it’s all scrapped, and it’s like, “Oh, that feels like a waste of dozens of hours of my life. It has been dropped upon me publicly.” What’s your take in terms of the ideal reaction? It’s not probably robotic, like, “That is fine. Proceed.”

Sara Canaday
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So what would you say?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think absolutely appropriate to show a certain level of disappointment. In fact, I think people might be a little skeptical if we didn’t show some disappointment. They would wonder, I guess, about how committed we were to the project to begin with if we didn’t show some disappointment. I think that’s okay. But I think what people are going to watch for is how quickly you can recover, right? Is it something that you will hold on to?

If you leave for the day, and it didn’t sat right with you but you left for the day, you ruminated over it at night but then you put it in perspective. You were able to get distance between your emotional and your rational mind and come to terms with some of the rational reasons that your project may have been tabled, and come in the next day with kind of a different sense and not continuing to reflect and/or even expound on the fact that it happened.

Again, people are going to observe that. And subconsciously we know how difficult it is which is why if you’re able to do it you are seen as somebody who is ready for higher-level work because it’s not easy. This stuff isn’t easy. But it’s about resilience. That right there is about resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Thank you. Well, now, I’d like to maybe zoom out a bit and to maybe go meta, if you will. What are some approaches we should utilize in order to identify our blind spots in the first place, or how others are seeing us and whether we can be afflicted by either these two or any number of things that are applied to us kind of personally, individually?

Sara Canaday
Sure. I think the first step is really reflection. We are so used to being doers and we don’t slow down enough to really reflect on our impact. And that may sound kind of airy fairy but I think it’s really important to think back to either general comments that have been made, either personally and professionally, about your habits, your quirks, your approach, perhaps those comments were even disguised as humor, and they may be worth looking at a little closer.

But beyond that, I think, in order to get a real sense of what we don’t know about ourselves – that’s why they’re called a blind spot – we have to ask. We have to ask. And I think the critical thing is, “How do we do that?” How do we do that in a way that gets us rich information and something we can do with? And what I often advise people to do is to come up with a very simple profile.

Pick two or three adjectives that you want others to use to describe you whether it’s innovative, whether it’s customer-centric, whether it’s global-minded. There’s all kinds of adjectives, right? This is beyond friendly, genuine, action-oriented. To me those are basis. You got to have those as a basis. Think about next level adjectives. Think about what you want others to say that it’s like to work with you. Do they want people to say, “Oh, yes, that person knows, in meetings, when it’s the right time to push his or her idea, and they know when to hold back”? Think of some specific ideas.

And then, once you have this profile of both how you want people to describe you and what they want you to say about how you do you work and the quality of your work, then you can take that to a trusted colleague, a former or current boss that you believe is supportive of your progress and say to them, “Can you tell me if what I’m doing is either adding or detracting from this profile?” That’s, to me, the best way to get feedback and to discover nuances, because a lot of times they’re nuances.

If you open my book you wouldn’t see a blind spot as “the blow hard in the room.” That’s just an obvious thing. I like the more subtle blind spots that people aren’t necessarily aware of. They’re well-meaning, well-intentioned, very smart individuals that just have these subtleties that somebody needs to help them see.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. And so when you talk about this profile, I’m wondering, do you actually sort of have that written up or how do you sort of have that conversation in practice?

Sara Canaday
You can. You can do it either way. You can have it written up or you can just kind of mentally have a conversation. Be prepared. Write a few things down but mentally know what you want to convey to this person that you want feedback from. What you want to avoid is what people do which is, “So, what would you say about me? What do you think?” That’s just too broad. They’re either going to tell you what you want to hear or they’re going to have trouble dwindling it down to something that you can do with. These are much more goal-oriented descriptors which are going to give you much more specific feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think that is so dead-on because when there’s a huge open-ended question in terms of, “Do you have any feedback for me?” or, “How can I be helpful to you?” sometimes I think, “Oh, I don’t know. There are so many things. Where do I fixate? My mind is sort of starts roving back and forth over our recent interactions or what I’m up to, and I have trouble kind of landing on something frequently.” So it’s nice to give some boundary, some anchoring context to that.

Sara Canaday
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so you’re putting out a profile, you’re asking what recent behaviors have contributed to or detracted from that, and it sounds like there’s only a few key words then in terms of you mentioned innovator, customer-focused, so this isn’t so much a mission statement type operation or a series of a dozen values. But maybe just what would you say the sweet spot, two, three or four words or…?

Sara Canaday
I would say three or four words, and what would help people come up with those words is look at their industry, look at their company. What is it that their company needs from them to get to the next level? And that helps you, right? And that’s why I bring up the word innovative. Companies right now they’re looking for design thinkers. They’re looking for people who can connect seemingly disconnected things. They are looking for, we’ve already talked about it, people who are uber-resilient. That will help you, right?

And then combine that with what you really want in terms of for yourself, depending on what position you want. Not only what the company needs from you but what is it that a next-level position would demand of you and how do you want to come across, for example, as a leader? Some people, they want different things. They want to have a lasting impact, they want to grow others, they want to be one that’s the go-to person for strategy. So it’s a combination of what is it that your company and your industry demands and what is it that you want for yourself. That will help you come up with your words.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. And so that’s a great approach to accelerating that closing of the gap there in the blind spots or even growing into that whole direction that you’re after. Do you have any other top best practices for making that happen?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think that sometimes people ask me, “Okay, so what if I’m aware of the blind spot, and I’m not sure the quickest way to close that blind spot?” I always use a silly kind of analogy. Let’s say, for example, that you find out that people see you as having very low energy, and that transfers to all kinds of things, perhaps being not passionate about what you do, or not taking it serious enough, right?

So people want immediate results. If they discover that they want to close that gap, I’m not going to advise them to go out at lunch and drink five Red Bulls. One, they’ll come back and people will wonder what’s wrong. It’s insincere and, to some degree, it’s counter to who they are, right? It’s not about changing who you are. It’s just simply about making subtle shifts to better influence and impact other people, right?

There are things that I learned about myself early on in my career. One is that I was always very serious, very focused, which is why people find it funny that I want to be a backup dancer in a hip hop video. Those two things just don’t line up. But I learned that very early on and I learned it from somebody making kind of an off comment to me. To this day, I know I’m wired that way. If you saw me in the grocery store, I am still focused on my bananas. That’s just who I am. But I’m much more conscious now, so I work in little ways to take myself less serious and be less serious because I see the impact it has and that it’s more attractive to others.

So the other way that you can do this is simply tell people. If you have a group of colleagues and you’re working on something, sometimes the best way to say to those you’re working with is, “Hey, I’ve discovered I have a little bit of a blind spot or an area that I think I want to be more effective in, and so I’m asking for your patience, something that I’m going to work on. I’m looking at some development ideas now. If you have any – great. But in the interim I just want you to know that.”

Well, you’d be amazed at how responsive people are to your graciousness and your vulnerability, and they go out of their way to try to give you ideas on how to close the gap in whatever nuance or blind spot you’re dealing with.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Certainly that level of vulnerability in that and honesty is powerful. And I’ve always loved it when I’m working for someone and we sort of talk about our… I share my personal development goals and then someone who is more senior leading me, so, “Okay, great. Thank you. Oh, here’s what I’m working on.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. Thank you.” And it’s just sort of opens up the whole relationship and it’s powerful.

Sara Canaday
Yeah. The only other thing I would say, too, is I think that people would be surprised to learn that there are a whole host of resources that are available to everybody. The more I talk to leaders and success in the professionals, they seem to think that it’s getting a success or an executive coach that has all the answers to development suggestions. But really those answers are out there. And the same books that some of the executive coaches use are actually available to anyone. There’s two in particular that I can think of. One is called For Your Improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, the textbook.

Sara Canaday
And it’s huge. It’s huge. And it’s full of development suggestions. And then there’s one also called, I think it’s called The Executive Handbook, but it’s not just for executives. It, too, categorizes different areas. Sure, some of them are more elevated like maybe your weakness or area is in strategic thinking. But it’ll have a host of development suggestions either on-the-job suggestions or simple tasks that you can do or resources that you can access. So I’m a big proponent of do-it-yourself improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. And a fun fact, the birth of this podcast began with a spin through For Your Improvement references in terms of why the books they recommended. So it’s like, “Alright, they’re citing about 1200 books as sources for universal skills. Let’s put that all onto a spreadsheet and find some of these authors and invite away.” And so that’s sort of a healthy component of Episodes 10 through 80.

Sara Canaday
Oh, that is great. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Getting off the ground there because it’s like, yeah, you name a skill here and it’s something that applies to most people.

Sara Canaday
Absolutely, yeah. This podcast itself, as people listen to it, again it’s accessible. It’s ways you can tap into and learn about how to better yourself and how to make subtle changes that can make a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Sara, I would ask such a dorky question, but I’m going to go here since you’re an enthusiast. Now, For Your Improvement has been through several versions.

Sara Canaday
Iterations, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And one of the later ones has 38 categories of competencies, whereas previous versions have a bigger number.

Sara Canaday
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
How do you like it segmented?

Sara Canaday
I like the collapsed of down to 38. It gets overwhelming. I think that could be another reason people shy away from it. And I think if you make this too difficult, if I’ve got to close one eye and turn upside down in order to figure the book out, no, thank you. Again, we’re just too busy. You give somebody more of a dashboard, gosh, if they really wanted to do something good they would turn those 38 into a dashboard of some sort and then it would really be consumed. So I like the smaller version myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Cool. Well, tell me, is there anything you want to share before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Sara Canaday
I think that’s it. I think we’ve covered it. I think the only other thing that I think would be remiss if I didn’t cover or reveal is that getting feedback is not easy. And I personally know what that’s like. I mentioned earlier getting feedback kind of disguised as humor but I also, as a leader, was put through a 360-degree assessment.

If your listeners know what that is, that’s when your colleagues, your direct reports and your boss, all in an anonymous report answer a series of questions on some competencies as a leader, as communication, and I didn’t get bad results but it was still eye-opening. And there’s a place for people to write comments anonymously, and what we do, we can have 10 great comments. But if we have one negative, we’re going to focus on that negative, aren’t we?

And then as a speaker. In other words, it has not left me. I am constantly getting feedback. And I wish I could tell you that I learned to not let it affect me but that in of itself is a skill. To take the feedback and be able to be as resilient with that as you were being told you’re not on a project, and try to put distance between your emotional reaction, and then think about, “What can I learn from it and what can I do differently or better?” That is a task in and of itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very good. Thank you, Sara.

Sara Canaday
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sara Canaday
Well, it’s funny, I’ve got several but I think there’s one that probably makes sense based on what I just said, and that was… and I can’t even attribute to it, I read it somewhere. But it is, “To take things purposely, not personally.” And I think that’s just a good moniker and one that helps in this process of constantly growing and evolution of where we want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Sara Canaday
Yeah, I think one of my favorite, again, it’s because where I live and I’m always talking about how we see ourselves versus how others see us, is one that was called the better than average effect. And the phenomenon in that study is referred to as a self-serving bias where essentially most people have almost an unwarranted optimism in relation to their own behavior.

And pretty consistently this study showed that people seem themselves as better at anything, better drivers than they are, better at writing than they are, better at communicating or interpersonal relationships as they are, and that’s called a self-serving bias. So we start from that place which is why I think blind spots really flourish because we already start from that self-serving bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that makes sense. Thank you.

Sara Canaday
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you also share a favorite tool, something you use frequently?

Sara Canaday
Favorite tool. You know, I got to tell you, I think I tend to go to mostly is my application, there are several of them, it’s called Tiny Scanner where you can take your phone and just take a photo of a document and it turns it into a PDF. And it doesn’t matter where I am, if I’m at the airport, anywhere else, it’s a perfect solution for me because I’m constantly having to send documents back and forth. So that and DocuSign, or electronic signatures, I think are my go-tos.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours?

Sara Canaday
Favorite habit. Well, I don’t know that I would call it a habit as much as, well, practice, absolutely. I am a yoga person and I try to do yoga at least every other day, and/or walk. And I found that yoga has really been helpful for mindfulness and intentionality and thinking both head and heart at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Sara Canaday
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a particular nugget or articulation of your message that you share that tends to really resonate with folks that gets them nodding their heads, they’re taking notes? What would be a favorite Sara original?

Sara Canaday
The one I tend to come back to is this idea of taking full responsibility for the experiences you give others. And the end of that is because that’s how they will judge you. They will judge you based on a combination of experiences that you give them just like customers judge companies.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And, Sara, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Sara Canaday
My website would be great, SaraCanaday, and there’s no H on that Sara, SaraCanaday.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m an author on Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning. But would be happy to connect with any of your listeners through any of those means.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent. And do you have a final parting call to action or challenge for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sara Canaday
I guess I would say think in terms of matching your intentions with your impact, and move from being a doer to a driver. Think about being as influential as you are informed, and try to be as much of a coach and developer of others in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, perfect. Thank you. Well, Sara, this has been so much fun. Thank you for taking the time and good luck in identifying and overcoming any blind spots in your world and all those you serve.

Sara Canaday
It’s a work in progress for all of us but I appreciate being here, and thank you for having me.

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