Welcome back to the Pivots podcast. In today's episode, you're going to listen to a snippet of our marketing training. In this training, we provide you some advice. How to reach out to people, how to build up your portfolio, basically, how to position yourself better as a developer. Enjoy. And the full training is linked below. Hello and welcome to the Py Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. All right, now become more proactive. And this is very closely tailored to that last pillar there. This one with becoming more proactive, it's more about your action. What action are you taking? What can you do today? So your goal was thinking long term, but now being proactive is thinking about short term. What are you going to do now to help you get to where you want to be? So again, this is where people fall into a trap of waiting for someone to tell them what to do. No, never wait. You need to take that control and you need to make some decisions about what you can do. Do some research, dive deep and really think about what you can do now to help you get you where you want to be. Yeah. And one example could be in your current job. Start looking for ways to add more value. Because at the end of the day, if you add value, you build up expertise, you build up goodwill. And it's very weird. It would be if you would then not be considered for promotions or new opportunities. So see what you can do in your current role. First, become very good at it and new opportunities will open. And the best way that you can actually do this is to anticipate what your stakeholders want. So your stakeholders might be your customers, they might be your manager, they might be your teammates, whoever it might be. When you're about to do something, think about how it's going to affect everyone, not just yourself or the project that you're working on, but think about what they want. Therefore, when you go into these meetings, when you go to talk to these people about your project or present an idea, you've already anticipated their needs and their wants. And then when you talk to them, you already have an answer. And that is going to make you look spectacular and it's going to earn some trust with your manager, with your stakeholders, and you're going to be able to do bigger and better things. The key is to really provide that value by anticipating what they want. Do you want to give some examples? Sure. So one such example would be in one of the jobs that I've had over the years, I won't go into too much detail on who and when there was someone who was leaving, someone was leaving the team, and one of the things they didn't consider was the wide ranging impact that would happen when that person left and this specific project that they looked after was no longer maintained. So by calling that out, by anticipating the lack of support that our customers were going to face as a result of this individual leaving, I was able to have meetings, I was able to present, and I was able to talk with people and about that exact problem, and they hadn't really considered it, that it was going to be a problem. And I was able to educate them on exactly what the impact would be. And as a result, things got taken care of and there was pretty much no impact to the customer base for that project. And that earned me a fair bit of goodwill with the company and the. With my manager. That is awesome, man. Yeah. I have an example here where I nourished a contact with another department for a long time, and that eventually led to a cool python project with global company visibility. But it all started from having that contact years ago and keep in touch, and it was a pretty influential contact, so I just kept in touch. Every month or so an opportunity came up, a tool they needed. It's all about adding value and see what the stakeholders really need, and I could build it in python. And one thing leads to the other. That was a great example and way to marry the two pillars together, man. I love it. Just before we move on, I'll quickly touch on this last point. Push yourself out of your comfort zone as well. Ask for tasks that require more responsibility. This is. It could be something out of the scope of your role. It could be just additional responsibility to what you already take care of, but push the boundaries. There is nothing wrong with asking for more. It's always impressive for managers to see that. It's also a wake up call to the people around you that here is someone who wants more, they're hungry, they want to do more, they want more responsibility, they want to perform and they want to overachieve. And it's an amazing thing. And that enthusiasm and passion will earn you spades of respect and trust and will help you get to more of a senior position. So, as with what you hinted at before, Bob, you need to grow that network. You need to inspire people, you need to reach out to people. So where is the best place to do that? We found a couple of things. So when it comes to social LinkedIn and Twitter is really where the career and technical people are. So those are networks you want to hop on and connect to people and push content. And when it comes to content, of course you should have your blog and your GitHub. People need to see what you can do, right? You can be brilliant, but if you're not constantly putting your work out for display, it almost doesn't exist. Exactly. And, you know, the beauty of LinkedIn is when you go to connect with someone, you can send them a custom message, almost like an introductory message at the same time. And it's fantastic. It's a great way of just leaving your first impression without that face to face. So here's an example. If you're a student listening to this, you could essentially reach out to someone in a field that inspires you and just tell them that. Say, hey, you know, Bob, you are an amazing Python programmer. I've seen you on LinkedIn and on Twitter. I just thought I'd connect because I'm learning Python in my computer science degree and I'd love to just follow you and see what's up. And you will have success with a line like that. There is. I can't imagine a single person not accepting that request. And if you do that enough, you build up that profile, builds up your profile, profile in that network of Python, because you are then therefore connected with all of these Python listers. Right. And that's a wonderful way to build up that profile. Build up that network. Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a minute. What if it's like a super well established Pythonista and you're just scared to reach out? Well, you just do. It doesn't matter if you're scared. This is the thing that people need to remember, is we all put our pants on the same way. We all wake up in the morning, hate Mondays. And, you know, some of us have kids, and our kids don't care who we are, they don't care what we do. So it's a nice reminder that you are just like the person next to you. So there is nothing wrong with reaching out to someone. And at the end of the day, it actually makes them feel good. To have someone reach out to them. Say, you inspire me, will make them feel good, and it's probably something that they need to hear. You'd be surprised how often people in those positions don't hear that because people are too afraid to reach out to them. Yep. Leaders need to have lunches as well. And bio breaks. Yeah, especially the bio breaks. But don't just reach out like, hey, you're great. That's not going to work. There needs to be some sort of value in your message. So do your homework and try to contribute something to the conversation, and then people will open up. These experts have been newbies at some point as well, so they really will be appreciative about it. But try to add some value to the conversation. Exactly. And that leads into this next point perfectly. So reaching out to people in your workplace, cross department or in senior roles, whatever, it doesn't matter. They're people as well. Now, the catch is they're busy people. And this is what some of your responses said, is that, you know, you're afraid of reaching out to people who seem super busy all the time. Well, that's okay. They're busy, that's fine. But they check their email and they need to respond to people. So what I would encourage you to do is reach out to these people. Don't expect them to stop what they're doing and talk to you at that moment. If you go up to the desk, for example, you can politely interrupt them, just say, excuse me, and then just say, look, I am in this role. I love what you do. When you have some time, could we chat? You could also say something like, can I get your calendar and add an event in? Yeah. But again, don't just ask one, hey, can you be my mentor? That's not going to work. That will be annoying. So try to see what those folks are up to and provide them with some value, some context so you make it worth their while as well. Here's a book for you to read so good they can't ignore you. That book really blew me away, being proactive. It talks about a lot of stuff we discussed, and yeah, it's a great, inspiring read. Also debunks the myth that you have to follow your passion. You have to be a bit more scientific than just following your heart. And we hope our training made that clear. Yeah, the idea here is that, yeah, you have a passion, but if you don't have the skills to back it up, well, what's the point, right? How are you going to make that a career or something that sustains you and your family? So have a read of this book so good, they can't ignore you. It's one of our favorites and we absolutely wholeheartedly recommend that you read that we're not affiliated with Cal Newport in any way. Just saying. We just love his stuff. Yeah, we also love his deep work, but that's another discussion. It has great stories about people adding more value in the workplace and how that led to more opportunities, more flexibility, more pay, etcetera. All the good stuff. At the end of the day, what we really want, right? Exactly right. We hope you enjoyed this snippet of the marketing training. And if you want to get weekly career tips, head over to coach challenges tips. That's coachallenge es tips. And subscribe to get weekly tips. Not only do we send weekly career tips, you can also opt in for a Monday mindset tip and two python tips. Good luck and see you in the next episode.