The journey to success is never an easy one. But there are dependable strategies that you may deploy to achieve your goals. Here are some:
Personal and professional road map: Where are you going? If you have not clearly articulated this, have been on the move for a while and are still not getting to your destination. It is time you reworked your journey. Don’t change the goal, especially if it seems too ambitious. Your goal, whether personal or professional, provides you with clarity of purpose.
Activity: What are you doing with the time at your disposal? No, this is not about time management. It is about the activities that you are involved in on a daily basis. If your consistent daily actions do not support the attainment of the milestones on your road map, your expected time of arrival at your destination is left to guesswork.
Thought process: Being armed with a map and action are not enough. Is your action based on getting there or trying to get there? If every step you take is not powered by a winning mindset, it does not matter how many steps you take. You simply won’t get there.
Habit: There is good and not-so-good habit. Good habits are the small daily dots of achievement that when joined must lead to greater achievement. What are your work, eating and even personal presentation habits? Your daily habits are the building blocks that create the vicious cycles that block achievement for you. To break an undesirable cycle, break the habit that it feeds on.
Unending intelligence: Look, so you scored a ‘D’ or were rated very poorly at your last evaluation. Whatever the score, it only serves to tell you about your past performance — history. It does not in any way indicate to you just how much capability is woven into every fibre of your being. Your capability is so much that no one has the ability to grade it. It is this unlimited capability that you want to hang onto especially when facing hoops and hurdles on your way.
Your environment: Look it doesn’t matter where you physically are. It is your internal environment that is reflected to you by your external environment. You do great work, you get great results, period. If all you want is impressive results, knowing that you and you alone influence them from within must form the guiding principle of each action that you’re engaged in at any given time. It is not about other people, things and places. It is about you and what you do or fail to do.
Stagnation: We stay in the false safety of our cocoons because we do not know what to do, or factors in our environment are not enabling or we second-guess our capabilities at every turn or we prefer not to take risks or we simply are yet to find our passion. All these factors keep us too fearful to make any moves resulting in stagnation. To tackle stagnation, tackle your fears. To tackle your fears, learn more about the things you are fearful about. Fear can only thrive in ignorance. By gaining knowledge on anything that paralyses you into stagnation, you beat the fear and advance.
Authenticity: If we all did what we promise to do as professionals, the whole Human Resource industry would not exist. We are not the most authentic of beings. You no doubt have been a victim of this. The new and impressive executive you hired three months ago no longer seems as impressive as they did at the interview. That’s a pity. Only those who actually walk their talk gain the trust and confidence of others who willingly follow them thus thrusting them into leadership. Aligning your walk with your talk delivers a guaranteed win for you.
Magic?: I am yet to meet a single person who is not drawn to people who exhibit calmness of mind, people who are cool and collected even in the most trying of situations, people who are pleasant and positive as standard modus operandi. These are people with fantastic attitudes. Nothing can stop a person with a great attitude from achieving his or her goals
Lead: Decide right now that the buck stops with you. The moment you take that decision is the moment you don your leadership crown no matter what designation you are in at this time. This decision means that you do not need anyone to ask you to do the right thing with the right people at the right time. It means that you take other decisions as well; even the difficult, unpopular and ugly ones.
Article originally published in The Citizen.
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