Skip to main content

How Can I Be More Successful In My Career? Part 1 of 4


Everyone has their own experiences and advice around what it means to have a successful career, but only one person can define what they want to achieve and determine their success: You.



Too often we’re in a state of comparing ourselves to others and using this as a way to recognise our own success (or lack of) which is hugely obstructive to our own career paths.

Change this approach and focus on YOU. Not only will you be measuring your success based on what you set out to achieve, but you’re also encouraging a much more positive mindset.

Part 1 of 4: Goal Setting

How to use it to achieve more success in your career

1
Tried it before? Set a new year’s resolution just to test if you last a day longer than the previous year? It’s probably a safe bet that we’ve all been there, but this isn’t about resolutions and waiting for failure to knock on the door; this is about getting clarity on what you want to achieve in the short and long term, with the help of some decent goals.

What makes a decent goal? You may have heard of the old school ‘SMART’ goals which, yes, if all boxes are ticked it’s likely to be attained, but that’s not stretching yourself. 

Being ‘Achievable’ and ‘Realistic’ is all well and good but where is that really going to get you… add a different A in there – Ambitious – or a C – Challenging – and now you’re onto something. SMACT.

If you’re not thinking bigger in terms of your goals, challenging yourself in some way or getting out of your comfort zone then the success you’ll reach might be something like a ‘meh’ moment (blog coming soon on these very moments).

Start thinking of your ambitions and go long with your goals and then you can start to break them down into smaller, dare I say the word, ‘achievable’ chunks.

Here’s an example to put it into context:

I always like to go up to a year with my goals to start with and set quarterly targets to hit that will get me there.

So, let’s say you want to pivot in your career and go down a different route. Your 1-year goal might be to land a job that’s much more relevant to the career you’re pivoting to. 

You might recognise that you need an additional skill or qualification under your belt to boost your chances of success. You also realise you don’t have many connections in this new field and you’re not sure where to start.

Your quarterly goals could look like this:

  •          In 3-months’ time: I would have completed research into courses that are relevant to the qualification(s) I need and have started an evening / weekend course
  •          In 6-months’ time: I would have made 12 new connections (2 per month) in the field I’m looking to get into by attending networking events and being more proactive with my time
  •        In 9-months’ time: I would have completed my evening / weekend course and in a routine of writing a weekly blog to track my career pivot journey
  •        In 12-months’ time: I would have been offered a job that is more relevant to this new career I set out to pivot into

This is a very general example but should give you an idea of how a longer-term goal that might seem a challenge and a tad ambitious at the time, can be broken down and turned into a very attainable goal. 

Thus, you may measure this as a successful step in your career simply by putting some decent goals in action.


Look out for Part 2 for another key action towards greater success in your career!

@theiamhub

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Turning Job Hunting on its Head

Everyone has those memories of aimlessly trawling through job sites and careers pages hoping for something to jump out at them and literally say, “Hey! This is the perfect job for you!” And on the rare occasions when that does happen, we then have the trauma of putting together a flawless application that will guarantee us an invite to meet someone that might like us and decide to offer us the job. Job hunting is no walk in the park, and it feels like a full-time job on its own by the time you rack up the hours on the following process:          Searching          Researching         Writing         Editing          Sending         Praying. Usually it comes in that order. When you do reach the moment of hitting submit, confident you have crafted an excellent application, you then have the waiting game of finding out if it was good enough to reach the next stage. But often you’re not just up against other individuals who have applied online i
Post a Comment
Read more

How Can I Be More Successful In My Career? Part 3 of 4

You can probably remember a time when an opportunity presented itself to you and you ran with it; maybe a new job, a promotion, a new hobby or some sort of adventure.  We are often on the ‘lookout’ for something to come our way and a chance for us to seize the moment. Carpe Diem and all. But why do we often wait for these things to crop up?  Part 3 of 4:  Create Your Own Opportunities Everything moves so fast and before we know it someone else might have seized that moment before us and we’re back to playing the waiting game for the next opportunity to arise. It’s time we created opportunities ourselves and made progress happen, rather than wait for it to potentially pop up in front of our faces. Continuing with the series of top tips to bring more success to your career, creating your own opportunities is key to making the progress you want. Here are some ideas that might bring about new opportunities with you in the driving seat:                       I
Post a Comment
Read more

Conversation ‘outs’ for Successful Networking

Before we get started on the topic of conversation ‘outs’, it’s worth perusing the Networking article first to get in the zone of networking success. Now that you’ve done just that, this is a key part of successful networking: knowing how to move on from conversations without offending your fellow conversationalist or making things awkward. You can picture the scene: you’re at an event and it’s the ‘networking over refreshments’ part after the main speech or activity, you’ve got about half an hour until you want to be on your way home but there a few connections you need to make before you can go – maybe this was your goal for the evening. You spy a professional and friendly looking person perched by a table looking thoughtfully around and there’s your next chat victim. You introduce yourselves and find out they are nothing to do with the industry you’re in, but you politely continue the talk with a series of questions that are met with short answers equivalent to
Post a Comment
Read more