What do people say about you when you're not in the room?

Do you know? If you had to guess what would you say?

I thought I knew what people thought of me (my guess was focused, results-driven, team-oriented) until I learned I had a nickname I was not happy about!

It was at my leaving party from LloydsTSB, a firm I’d been with for 10 years when I learnt that I’d earned the nickname of ‘Ice Maiden’ during my time there. This came as a complete surprise and I was disappointed. This was certainly not how I viewed myself and not how I thought I would be described. I went home from the party feeling upset and deflated. Despite the warm ‘send off’ I’d received from my team I couldn’t shake this revelation of my nickname.

‘Ice Maiden' was just so far off how I viewed myself. If anything I would have considered myself to be too emotional, too connected to my work and my team and thought people saw that.

A few days after my leaving party I got in touch with a couple of colleagues at the business and asked them what was behind the nickname. They told me that people who knew me well saw the ‘real me’. They saw the Elise who cared, who put people first, who let them into my world and generously shared everything I had.  

This was a comfort, at least not everyone saw me as cold and wicked!

However, this wasn't the impression that everyone had of me. For those who were outside of my close circle, I came across as cold, aloof and unapproachable. I was seen as relentlessly single-minded in my pursuit of goals and obsessed with metrics of success. 

Given these descriptors the nickname ‘Ice Maiden’ suddenly seemed apt!

As difficult as it was to hear, I was grateful for this insight. During the time I spent at home to have my second child Cassie, I had time to ponder how and why I’d created this impression. I realised I'd created a persona to emulate what I thought a 'successful career woman' needed to look, sound and act like, in order to have an impact in a male-dominated environment. 

And I was determined to be successful - this ambition had been triggered by fear and necessity 9 years earlier.

Growing up as a young woman, I'd always viewed work as something I would do until I didn’t need to do it anymore. I thought I'd give up my career when I had children. I assumed my husband would be the breadwinner and as a shy introvert, I preferred to ‘cheer my (then) husband on’ from the sidelines. This was a familiar family pattern. I thought I would tread a similar path to my Mum, having a 'side hustle' that contributed to the family finances and kept me from getting bored.

This plan evaporated at age 26 when I was pregnant with my first child Amy and my husband walked out. Suddenly I was alone, in debt and a single mother.  

And so I found my own ambition!  

I HAD to get financially stable and secure for the sake of my baby daughter and I HAD to find something to focus on so I didn’t drown in the quicksand of rejection and failure.  I could no longer rely on someone else for financial and emotional support. As a result of this new motivation, I quickly climbed the corporate ladder at LloydsTSB. By the time I was 30, I was Director level, responsible for a team of 600+ and part of the senior leadership team.

Beneath the surface, I was still a shy introvert. I thought I'd learned what it took to be successful in a tough, male-dominated environment and I adopted this approach with all but my close allies. What I projected was a laser-focused, results-oriented and determined version of myself, but this only told a fraction of the full story. 

It was only the people who knew me well, who saw my whole, real self - the Elise I was at home with my daughter Amy. I had two distinct personas and I thought this was serving me well until I learned about my nickname at that leaving party. I didn’t like the me that some people saw at work. She was cold, calculated and prepared to sacrifice others for her success. 

This just wasn’t me

A few years after this leaving party, Maxine, my first business coach asked me ‘what do you want to be known for?’ and I knew for certain that I didn’t want to be known as the Ice Maiden! I also knew myself well enough by then, to recognise that I would need to be intentional in building a different approach because the combination of my ambition and shy introversion led me to behave in a certain way at work.

I knew I needed to get clear on my intentions. I had to get clear on what I would love people to say about me when I wasn’t in the room. And this is when I started to get really interested in creating my own personal and professional reputation.  

Over time I developed a practical approach to curating my reputation in a way that's authentic, that leans into my strengths and depicts a true version of me, but me at my best - and you can do this too.

As I did this work on my own personal brand I found a way of showing the real, 'kinder' me at work, without losing the edge that had helped me be so successful. 

I now use this framework to help my coaching clients to build their reputation, so they benefit from the clarity that comes with knowing who they really are and being able to lean into that at work, in a way that amplifies their strengths and feels authentic.

If you’d like to hear more about this and to use my 3 step process to creating your own professional reputation check out episode 6 of Her Career, Her Life podcast. You can find it on any podcast app and also here on my website.

Do you think you show the ‘real you’ at work? I'd love to see your thoughts in the comments below 👇👇👇