10 Steps to Succeed in Your Career

Previously we shared with you the 6 fundamental steps to achieve success in your career. In case you missed them we’ll recap them below as well as outline the next 4 steps to catalyse your ideal career path.

It happens often every year, so often we just go through the motions and hope the next will be different, we get excited about our ‘New Year’s resolutions’ but two weeks later they often fizzle out. Well in today’s article we are aiming to sow some seeds that will inspire you to do things a bit differently…

As ever if you have any questions or would like any guidance feel free to get in touch with us here.

Here’s a brief recap of the first 6 steps to achieving your ideal career…

1. Get a Clear Idea About Your Current Situation

Gain a grounded and objective understanding of where you currently are in your career and what is in your way of moving forward.

2. Step Up & Take Charge of Your Career & Your Life

Take responsibility for making the changes you want to make; ultimately your career progress is down to you.

3. Know What You Want For Your Career

Identify where you want to be by the end of the year, we outlined some questions to spark your creativity here…

4. Know How to Get Your Ideal Career

Craft a career plan while making sure it’s in line with your passions, your desires and what matters most to you in your life…

5. Know Who to Get It With

Begin to strategically identify and connect with the right network of great people to open up doors for you.

6. Relate With Who You Know

Find ways to add value to those people and nurture these relationships over the long term. Look at what you can give, as well as what you want for yourself.

Here are the next 4 steps along the road to truly sustainable career success…

7. Bring Everything Together to Succeed!

By bringing the previous 6 steps together powerfully – having a grounded take on reality, clarifying the career you want, having a powerful plan to achieve it, meeting people who can open up job opportunities for you and nurturing those relationships will ultimately inspire you to achieve your career goals.

If we only apply some of the previous steps but not the others it will be like a table with only a couple of legs, inevitably it will fall down. Meeting a recruiter is great, but it’s mainly by nurturing the relationship that you will differentiate yourself and true opportunities will open up for you. However, this is only part of the way through the journey as maintaining that success is crucial and can often be the hardest part…

8. Maintain and Continually Improve

Did you know that 70% of people who win the lottery lose all that money in 7 years! Why? Because they achieve ‘success’ but aren’t able to maintain it, they haven’t yet adapted their mindset so they fail to maintain their wealth and use it in intelligent ways. Most end up spending it all or worse, getting into serious debt. Take for example looking after a high-performance car. If you drove it everywhere but never serviced it what would happen? It would break down! It’s the same with our careers or in any area of our lives really.

Once you get to a certain level, you need to work just as hard, if not harder to maintain it and continually learn how to get better and better.

9. Influence Others to Become Successful

To excel in your career you have got to be good with people, everything will boil down to how well you can understand, relate to, empower and inspire people. Whether that’s your clients, your team or your bosses. Your success in a career will be down to your ability to influence others to achieve their own career success.

Whether you strive for top positions in your career or not, the best and most revered CEOs have got there by valuing other people’s success and effectiveness as highly, if not higher than their own.

J.P. Morgan used this principle to great effect during the great depression of the 1920s. When he was asked by the Federal Reserve to help other financiers re-capitalise their banks and in turn became one of the wealthiest men in America.

10. Leading Others to Mutual Success

As your influence and professional network grows you will find yourself in more and more positions of leadership and responsibility. You will have to take decisions and rely on others to get the job done. This is where your ability to relate with and understand people will really be tested. The best leaders actually surround themselves with the smartest and wisest teams as they know they cannot do everything so need to empower others. This applies just as much in a family and a business as well as it does in a career.

Practical Next Steps…

This is just a very brief overview of the steps to achieving sustainable success in any endeavour, not just in a career. We will be exploring these steps more over the coming weeks and months but for now here is some guidance to be getting on with over the holiday period…

1. Identify 4 goals you want to achieve this year – 2 personal ones and 2 professional ones – perhaps even draw them on a mind map…
2. Under each goal begin to jot down some of the steps to achieving them, don’t worry if you can’t think of them all right now. It’s making a start that counts.
3. Write down what you feel your major gaps are under each goal.
4. If you get stuck give your Lighthouse introducer or mentor a call, we’re here to help!

Canary Wharf station courtesy of tttaaaooo @ Flickr, Canary Wharf bridge courtesy of David D’Amico @ Flickr