An interview with…
Janet Davies, Medical Information Consultant, Writer, & Coach
1. Can you share a brief overview of your professional journey and background?
I recently retired after a four decade career in large corporate organisations at a national, regional and global level. I am a registered pharmacist and started my career in the NHS before transitioning into the pharmaceutical industry. So my working life has been spent working in large organisations.
Going through the process of deciding to retire was a journey of self-discovery. Apart from expert guidance on financial planning and management, I had no support from my employer in preparing for retirement and had to find my own path. I drew on what I had learned through my career and from an interest in self-development.
After taking a year off to enjoy the freedom of no longer working, I started to explore ideas for the future. I have realised that I want to become a coach and to specialise in helping people in their 50’s and 60’s to prepare for retirement from corporate organisations and to plan for a fulfilling future. I am now studying a professional coaching diploma and I am also writing the retirement planning book that I wish I had had when I started thinking about retirement.
2. In what ways has being an introvert influenced your career path and professional experiences?
I have always had a good understanding of myself and my strengths and interests. That helped me to make career decisions that led to roles that played to those strengths. Despite being an introvert and quite reserved in groups and social settings, I always had a quiet confidence in my abilities.
I was drawn to roles that involved providing information about medicines to healthcare professionals and patients. These customer service roles used my strengths of helping and supporting others, analysing data and communicating it, solving problems and being calm in stressful or crisis situations.
My focus on the needs of other people also led me to enjoy managing people and leading teams. I particularly enjoy coaching and mentoring people and seeing them flourish and succeed in their careers.
My curiosity about people and what motivates them, combined with learning about different cultures from travel experiences, made me interested to work on global and international projects. Those opportunities then opened up roles in managing regional and global teams.
Be curious – about yourself, about others
3. What specific introvert traits have you leveraged to achieve success in your field?
Having strong self-awareness has helped me to make choices that make the most of my skills. Being aware of character traits that can be perceived as weaknesses gave me the power to learn, to improve and to become a better version of myself. For example, being reflective and a deep thinker allowed me to learn from feedback and to work out how to take action to become more effective and influential.
Being a good listener, having empathy and being tuned in to others needs all helped me as a people manager. I learned how to flex my communication style to best suit each person, which helped me to get the best out of my team members and to build effective and successful teams.
My ability to create meaningful connections led to working within professional associations and membership organisations. Committee working and leadership in those associations and organisations accelerated my personal development and also led to having a very supportive professional network that provided me with career opportunities and global recognition.
4. What valuable lessons have you learned about embracing your introversion throughout your career?
I was recently sorting through a file of psychometric evaluations and exercises that I had completed during team building and training events throughout my career. It was a fascinating experience to relive some of those events and to remember what I learned from them.
The consistent feedback that I used to get was that I needed to speak up more, to be more vocal and to participate more fully in meetings and discussions. I remember that I used to think in response “well, if other people gave me the chance to get a word in, then I would.”
One of the most valuable pieces of feedback that I also got was that other people valued what I had to say and that they wanted to hear my views. This feedback gave me the confidence to make myself heard and to push myself out of my comfort zone and to make sure that I did speak up.
I learned that people valued my opinions because they knew that I listened, I observed and I could draw insightful summaries and conclusions. This knowledge really boosted my self-confidence and helped me to grow and develop as I was able to focus on the positive aspects of myself, instead of criticising myself for not being more outgoing and visible.
Facing my fears and pushing myself out of my comfort zone was a very important lesson to learn. The discovery of how much I learned through being out of my comfort zone gave me a desire for self-development and to want to become a better version of myself.
5. What practical advice or strategies would you offer to other introverts aiming to thrive in their careers?
The biggest piece of advice I can give is to have the courage to be yourself. But along with that, be curious and make sure that you want to learn and grow. Listen to feedback and respond to it in a way that feels authentic to who you are and that helps you to become a better version of yourself.
Change the story that you tell yourself so that you focus on your strengths instead of dwelling on what you need to improve. Embrace your unique strengths and be proud of them. Remember that confident, outgoing people can be unconfident in certain circumstances – and that they may not be as self-confident as you assume they are.
As a leader, make sure to lead through listening. By creating space for people and listening to what they have to say, you learn so much as a manager about how to motivate people and how to build an effective team.