Your Professional Image with Mary Colette

October 27, 2018

Mary Colette grew up in Ventura, CA one hour North of Los Angeles. She earned her Liberal Arts Degree at Thomas Aquinas College. After graduating, she continued her passion for education serving as an Admissions Officer for Montrose, an all girls college prep school in Boston, MA. After two years she returned to California and joined a Management Consulting firm in Los Angeles. She served as the Project Manager in Executive Coaching and Development for two years before transitioning into her current role as Head of Executive Search at her company. Mary Colette collaborates with company leaders to bring in executive talent to fill key leadership roles.

At her Montemare talk on Professional Image, Mary Colette completely changed my perspective on caring about what people think about me. I’ve always thought that it doesn’t matter what people think or say about me as long as I am living in a way that I am proud of.

We should care about how people view us, because like it or not, we already have a reputation, and it already influences both our professional and personal life. We might as well make sure it is a good one.

But Mary Colette challenged this idea: your reputation matters! People judge you or trust you, hire you or fire you, based on your reputation. We should care about how people view us, because like it or not, we already have a reputation, and it already influences both our professional and personal life. We might as well make sure it is a good one. At the same time, however, our reputation ought to be based on reality. We can give off insincere impressions of ourselves in order to develop a ‘good reputation’ to get hired for that job, but if that reputation is not based on real habits of character, people will quickly see through it. In fact, they will be even more disappointed in us because they will see that we were selling what we didn’t actually have. I learned that caring about having a good reputation, therefore, need not reflect either a lack of confidence nor insincere trickery.

Member Stephanie practices networking firsthand with Mary Colette!

Mary Colette then gave us some practical tips on how to discover our current reputation and how to (sincerely!) improve it. First, reflect on two or three people who know you very well and would be frank with you. It could be a teacher, coworker, or good friend; ideally, you have people who know you from across environments: personal, professional, etc. Then, brace yourself for the truth and ask them what your reputation is. It might surprise you! You may be unintentionally giving off an impression that does not reflect your true self at all. Or perhaps they point out a strength of fault that you had not realized was true about you. Once you understand what your reputation is currently, you can begin to work on improving it. Ask yourself: Who do I want to be? What qualities do I want to have? Then make very small, practical resolutions that begin your struggle to get there. For instance, I want to be a lawyer and therefore some of the qualities I want to have are good listening skills, public speaking, and writing. In order to grow in these areas, I can make the specific goals of asking my friends about their day before talking about mine, enrolling in a speech class at school next quarter, and taking every school paper to the writing center at least once. By making small goals like these, I begin to improve my professional reputation in ways that actually represent who I am.

Thank you, Mary Colette, and thank you, Montemare!