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10 things you wish you'd known at the start of
your career
Also: Your
Career Gets Better When You Make It Better,
Reach
Outside Yourself to Advance Your Career, Throw
Your Career a Change Up in Mid-Stride
Trust
in your own intuition or gut instinct.
Sometimes it’s good to rely on facts, but sometimes
you also need to trust your gut instinct of what the
right decision is. At the least, take your gut instinct
into account when you are making decisions. This is
especially true when you have laid the groundwork and
you have two decisions that seem to have the same costs
and benefits. What feels the right thing to do?
2. The grass is not always greener on the other side
of the fence
How often have you made a move in your career or your
job, and then spent time bemoaning the fact that
actually, it’s just the same as the job that you have
just come from? Weighing up the pro’s and cons before
you make a move will help you be certain that it is the
right move, right now, for you.
3. Being happy in a job is at least as important as
having more money
There is a point where this may not be true – if you
are genuinely having financial issues and you need to
work in a certain job to get yourself out of that
situation. At the same time, think how great it would be
if you could earn the money you need and still feel
happy in your work? How much more productive would you
be? Another way to look at this is that you may be given
a choice. You can go for a promotion, but it will mean
relocating, or working more hours, or something else
that doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle. Which is most
important to you? If you had to truly trade off between
one and the other, which could you not live without
(once your basic needs have been taken into account,
we’re talking the luxuries and extra’s in life here!)
4. Be confident in your own abilities and be genuine
in celebrating the abilities of others
It’s easy to talk down the work that you do – and
this has a knock on effect on the way other people
perceive your work. If you’ve ever said “It was nothing”
or, “Any one could do this” you could be guilty of not
recognizing your own strengths. Writing yourself a list
of all the things you are really great at will help you
to keep these in mind, and then you can establish
yourself as an expert in these areas.
In the same way, if you love to hear that you’ve done
a good job – so do others! We’re so quick these days to
rush to people (or their manager!) when they have done a
job poorly, or not to the way that you expected, that
it’s great to stop, take a minute and tell them (and
their manager!) How you appreciated some of the work
they did, and what benefit it brought to you in
particular.
5. Focus
This is about setting goals, gaining clarity for
yourself, and setting boundaries and relationships with
others to tell them what you need from them, and what you
will do yourself. Think about if you had known the power of
focus when you were setting out in your career, and had the
ability to have sessions on what your career goals were, and
what path you were on – how powerful would that have been?
Well, it’s not too late to do that – open a piece of paper
right now and write down the things you’d like to achieve in
the next year, five years and ten years. Suddenly you’ve got
a 10-year career plan – now you can start taking action by
focusing on those goals to achieve it.
Next 1 2
Also: Your
Career Gets Better When You Make It Better, Reach
Outside Yourself to Advance Your Career, Throw
Your Career a Change Up in Mid-Stride
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