5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Career | Personal Coaching

A job is a building block. A career is what we build. When starting out, we’re never quite sure what we’re actually building, if anything. We could end up with a useless pile of sticks or a really cool house on a mountaintop.

Careers are not built by ourselves alone. So we need to understand the roles we play (including how we play them) and the potential impact of the supporting cast.

All eyes are on you.

It’s often said: “My career should grow because I do really good work.”

But good work is only one part of it. Well-chosen and savvy professional relationships are another. Without a cadre of colleagues at all levels who attest to your competence, value, and ability to “get along,” your career will likely advance slowly, if at all.

The quality and effectiveness of your workplace relationships are noticed and become part of your personal brand. You can shoot your career in the foot easily by saying or doing things at work that  paint the wrong picture of who you are.

5 cautionary steps

These five steps can help you avoid sabotaging your career along the way: 

1. Don’t get ahead of yourself

The way employees move up is different in every company. Start by figuring out what the leadership sees in those who have been given more responsibility. Be alert to what is said about those who have been promoted. You need to know but don’t have to agree.

Advancement is not about when you think you’re ready. It’s about what the decision-makers think. Until you know, for sure, that you have regularly met the company’s performance standards, defer asking to be promoted or given plumb assignment. 

1. Keep your wants close to your chest

Managers are generally the ones who create opportunities or obstacles to your growth. You may want to assume that your boss is on your side, but that isn’t always the case. So it’s important to build a strong, credible performance portfolio.

Once you tell your boss what you want from your career, s/he has the leverage to help or hinder. So be prudent about how much you let on and when. Timing can be very important.

I once had a client who, at each job change, told his boss that he was “title sensitive” which was also code for wanting to be a big player. In each case, his career stalled.

          Don’t screen yourself out of opportunities

Too often, I’ve heard job seekers and careerists express an interest in positions and job challenges that are a notch up. They say, “I read the duties but I don’t meet  all of them, so I don’t think I should apply.”

It’s not your decision to (de)select yourself. That’s what management’s paid to do. It’s rare to find anyone fitting all the requirements of a job or assignment. What companies are looking for is the one who brings the best blend of knowledge and experience to the role. That may very well be you.

1. Don’t follow someone else’s plan

The most important person to please with your career is you.

Lots of careerists pursue paths that well-meaning others have suggested or chosen for them. Then they wonder why the work doesn’t make them happy.

The first sign of self-leadership is our willingness to identify a life plan and then to start putting the  building blocks together, including those that construct our careers. When you don’t follow your own plan, it’s easy to go adrift.

 

1. Don’t get seduced by the glitz

 

The trappings of better pay, high-sounding titles, greater authority, and any number of perks have a price. I’ve seen many people chase those things without seeing the personal and professional tolls that go with them.

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Personal Coaching - Set Goals for 2013 You Can Achieve

Set Goals for 2013 You Can Achieve

You have big goals next year. Make sure you set out to achieve them in a way that works for your brain.

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If you're a left-brained thinker who behaves in a calm, focused manner, read another article. You already think rationally, schedule fastidiously, document your objectives clearly, and check them off your list. So stop reading this already.

For the rest of you--the right-brainers, the multi-modal people, who are known to be gregarious and abstract thinkers--pay attention.

You need to set big goals in 2013. You already know that. The challenge for you is to turn those big goals into action, keep yourself accountable, and do what you say you're going to do.

You have the ability to do this, but, the truth is, when it comes to setting goals, especially in business, it's a left-brained and logical, process-oriented, structured world.

Your challenge is that you're not going about goal setting and goal attainment in a way that aligns with the way your brain works. 

You've been coached on goals the old way: 

1. Write down your goals.

The stats even back up how important this is. People who write down goals are 33% more likely to achieve them!

2. Cull a detailed, organized list.

Tie your goals to specific dates with smaller deliverables every step along the way.

3. Make each goal SMART.

SMART goals are specific, meaningful, achievable, relevant, and timely.

These steps are useful--for left-brainers. They won't work for you. You probably wrote down a careful list of SMART goals, but how many times did you look at it? Are you still even working on the same goals you wrote at the beginning of the year (or even the day)? I doubt it.

The key for you--an outgoing right-brainer--is to look deeper at what your goals are about. Give yourself manageable and actionable deliverables that will result in productivity. And tap into your brain. 

Here's how:

If you're a social thinker, record your goals on paper, but also in conversations and interactions with other people. Have others keep you on task. It's amazing how well this works and you'll actually enjoy it!

If you're conceptual, writing down goals probably seems pointless. Instead, dream big and trick your brain by thinking of your goals as a vision for the future. Draw a metaphor of your goals and revisit those images frequently.

If you tend to think in a multi-faceted way, you'll find many different goal-setting models helpful. Don't be constrained to one; instead experiment with many to find the best (or a few strong) fits.

In addition to how you think, know your natural behavior propensity, and set goals that match it, to help you succeed at your goals.

If you're quiet, you're probably perfectly comfortable writing down your list and personally checking it. But if you're more on the gregarious end of the spectrum, you should use that fact to your advantage--get others involved with your goals, and ask for their help. Be loud about what you want to achieve.

If, however, you have a competitive and driving personality, try not to push objectives purely for the sake of it. Or if you're more of an amiable person, create goals that will make a difference, and commit to doing them even if you rock the boat.

When it comes to flexibility, if you prefer clearly-defined situations, you probably already know that goal setting comes naturally--just make sure you revisit goals frequently to know if and when you need to change something to achieve them. If, on the other hand, you're comfortable with flux and welcome change, goal-setting probably seems tough. Use your adaptability as a strength; since you're open to new things, try out different goal-setting styles to hone in on the right path.

Goals are made to propel you to be successful. Use your brain to achieve big things in 2013! Geil Browning via inc.com

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1. Learn to say yes when all you really want to do is say/shout no?
2. Never hand your power over to someone or something.
3. Be courageous. Never say “I can’t. I’m not strong enough. I’m not worthy enough to be all that I desire to be.”
4. Claim your most courageous and confident self and give yourself the life you deserve.
5. Allow courage and confidence to alter every area of your life when you engage in healing self talk that manifest itself into reality.
6. Discover that the culprit robbing you of your best life is fear cloaked in many different disguises and speaking in many different voices.
7. Make peace with your little fearful coward self.
8. Learn to love and use every aspect of yourself, from your fear to your magnificence. Unleash the power of your most courageous self, an inner warrior of love who is deserving.
9. Recognize that as you develop the courage to discard your fears a spiritual warrior appears. Jim

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How to Eliminate Disempowering Mental Clutter - John Demartini

Here’s an exercise I call “distraction resolution.” It helps you stay focused on what’s important while heightening your congruency between activities and values, as well as goals.

Here’s how you do it:

• Make a list of every single thing that’s taking up space and time in your mind, whether it’s personal, business, physical, or financial; anything you did and feel guilty about; or something you need to do a day, week, month, or year from now. Jot down anything that’s distracting you from being present in the here and now.  Follow your stream of consciousness and clear it out of your mind by writing it down.

• Once you’re done—not while you’re writing, but after you’ve spent about ten minutes getting it all out—look at the list you’ve created and see if there’s anything in there that’s junk. Ask yourself. Is there anything here that I can’t do anything about? Is there anything in my head that I can just get rid of?

• Now consider if there’s anyone whom you can delegate the remainder to. Or are you holding yourself back because you haven’t been exercising the skill of delegation (whether that’s because you’re unskilled or you don’t think there’s anyone who can handle this for you)? You’ll be surprised by how many things you’re doing that are actually low priority—and that you could be delegating to someone else. Who could do this instead? Put that person’s initials next to the item.

• If there are things there for you to do—things that you know would be best done by you, and you know that you can do something about them—write your initials beside them and assign a date for beginning that item. Be realistic, and if it’s a long-term project, go ahead and chunk it down into smaller pieces, and decide to delegate or date those pieces for yourself.

The follow-up is simple: Once you’ve noticed the things that can be dumped, it’s easy to just “take them out” of your mind. And if you find yourself thinking about them again, you can remind yourself: Oh yeah, that was one of those things that I’m not going to do anything about. Next! Then you can delegate those items you’ve chosen to, and you can integrate your own tasks and projects into whatever scheduling system you already use. Then you can forget about all those items and focus on what’s important to do today.
This is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness: Efficiency means getting everything done that needs doing in a timely and professional manner, and effectiveness means doing only those things that are important enough to get done. You can have both if you (1) align your activities, values, and goals; (2) delegate everything that wouldn’t wisely be done by you; and (3) dump anything that’s just “junk.” With this exercise, you identify distractions, dumps, delegations, do’s, and dates. You clear your mind and create congruency between your actions and dreams.

Excerpted from The Riches Within: Your Seven Secret Treasures by Dr. John F. Demartini. Copyright ©2008 (Hay House)

Dr. John Demartini is a human behavioural specialist, educator, author and founder of the Demartini Institute, a private research and education institute.

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