Make Career Success Your Personal Mission (Featured On The Straits Times – 19 July 2018)
Take control of the direction you want to go in and the milestones you want to achieve, for career development and success should be a personal responsibility.
Gone are the days where you expect your employer to lay out a career path for you. Today, employees and their employers are encouraged to work together to facilitate one another’s success journey.
Plan to Succeed
A simple way is for every employee to design his career blueprint and enable an open conversation with the managers and leaders who are trained to facilitate and coach the people to success.
Here are three cornerstones that shift the paradigm of career success.
1. Invest in yourself early
Most people tend to wait to be sent to workshop and skills upgrading.
Don’t’ wait for things to happen. If we believe in compounding interest, then we should also believe we should start investing in ourselves early.
Chasing for an opportunity is, in fact, easier rather than waiting for one. When you invest in yourself early, you will open up opportunities that are easier for you to “chase” and achieve.
2. Take control of your blueprint
Know what you want and find out how to achieve it.
By doing so, you effectively manager your emotion, creativity, purpose and the meaning in what you do. In turn, you get to enjoy your work.
People can only have fun in work provided if their Growth Indicator (GI) – a term that I coined – increases. The more you increase your GI, the more fun you will have.
3. Calibrate your mental bandwidth.
“The more money I earn, the more successful I am” is an adage no longer so relevant today.
In fact, for some people, the more money they make, the more debts they have. If this happens, the person will only be in survival mode at work.
He will only do the very minimum because no matter how hardworking he is, he will only get the same salary every month. Thus, he will have no bandwidth to think about growth.
Finding meaning
We work for money, but we live for meaning.
If you can manage our money well, you can invest more time in creating meaning and growth in your work by building a relationship with people and making a difference.
My favourite saying: “Happy people increase their chance of a promotion.”
By just watching their financial baseline, happy people have the mental bandwidth to adopt a thriving mindset, and can afford to attend courses and invest in themselves because they have the resources to do so.
These people will also be more confident and upbeat amid uncertainties because they have created a psychological safety net for themselves. Consequently, they consciously avoid the surviving mentality.
In short, money is not the issue – you need that psychological safety net so that you can thrive. Career Success is a personal mission. Starting today, invest, control and calibrate for greater success.
Article by:
Joseph Wong, multiple award-winning talent development and behavioral transformation coach of TrainingGearAsia Pte Ltd, and mind-provoking speaker on game-changing leadership and influence. Email him at ignite@traininggearasia.com
