Showcase your key skills to influence people you need

You seemed to have mapped out your year very well, but your life seems to reflect a perfect depiction of inverse proportion because your to-do list seems to grow wildly while your action-plan looks barely worked on.

Perhaps you are on your seventh year of employment with the company without any promise of upward movement.

Worse still, there are team members whose behinds you would like to give a good walloping if you could get away with it because they seem to work more at you than with you.

Maybe you are undeniably a top performer, have a wealth of valuable experience, coupled with years of organisational history yet you remain on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder.

You have a somewhat impressive designation on your business card but you are less than impressed with your pay package and you are not moving on up even though you know you deserve it. You might have the polar opposite of that scenario — the company finally recognises your value and elevates you. You’re a director, have a better pay package, a lot of visibility but you have absolutely no idea how to manage your new position.

Worse still, you would rather die than admit it to anyone. All you need is a committed person working with you to help you tie it together and exceed yourself.

Perhaps you’ve been dreaming of entrepreneurship for too long.

All your talk of going out on your own has become a song whose lyrics everyone around you knows by heart. You have been running your mouth about it more than acting on it because the prospect of leaving a paycheck for the entrepreneurial world is scary.

Maybe you’re at that certain stage in your life — unmarried, divorced, the children have left home and you simply do not understand what it is that you are supposed to do with yourself. Oh, and it does not help that your ex seems to be having the time of his/her life while you have taken to plodding along taking it “one day at a time” wearing that lost, faraway look.

With all this, you forget to take care of yourself. You wake up, take a bath (hopefully), apply petroleum jelly on the visible parts of your skin, throw on a garment or two and unleash yourself onto the world. You are not work ready this way.

Listen, if heads do not turn and eyes roll in awe when you walk into a room, go back home and get properly washed up, groomed and clothed. It means that your appearance is nothing to write home about. I know this stings but you are not getting a chance to showcase any strength or skill if you cannot grab anyone’s attention on their first look at you. Like it or not, the world loves to look at and be associated with great-looking people, things and places.

No matter what else is going on in your life, if any part of the world is your market, look the part.

Whatever else you do during the remainder of the year, you owe it to yourself to accomplish your action plan. Get your body working at optimum and power up your wheels to dig out of that rut.

Learn how to influence those you need by show­casing more of your skills. Live life from the powerful, unlimited and intangible side as well as an arrestingly impressive and authoritative side of you.

Here’s to a more fruitful rest of the year.