Full Transcription for the video lesson below:
Welcome, I’m Farnoosh Brock. I’m a career expert and I help people get promoted and build their dream careers. Today, I want to talk to you about four major pieces missing from building a successful career. I see this all the time, and I want to make sure you include this in your career strategy.
Just Why Hard Work Is Not Enough By Itself
I want to start by telling you my story. When I started working at a Fortune 100 company, when I was in my early to mid twenties, I did not have a career strategy. I didn’t have any mentors or coaches, or any idea of approach to a successful career. All I knew is that I’m supposed to work hard; really, really hard, and so I went in with that mindset. And, I also had this attitude that I can work so hard, I could be the most hardworking person, and I can show them what I’m made it. That was the beginning of long evenings, weekends, working overtime, and missing out on a lot of my life as I was trying to build a successful career. And you know what? That’s not all it takes.
I soon realized that’s not the whole strategy- that’s not the whole picture, and it was the beginning of many disappointments until I figured out what it really takes to build a successful career. Now, I’m not saying working hard isn’t important, I’m not saying that you don’t have to work hard in order to build a successful career, but there’s more- there’s more pieces to the puzzle.
Four Major Missing Pieces to a Successful Career
I want to cover four of these pieces with you today, so you make sure you think about this and you include them as you approach your own career.
1. Building Awareness
The first piece of the puzzle is building awareness.
Awareness means you are aware of what’s going on around you. So, for instance, you are aware of what’s happening with your management, what’s going on in your bosses agenda, what’s going on with CEO and what kind of headaches do these people have, and how can you become more involved in that bigger picture.
So, it’s beyond yourself. You start to look outside and become more observational. You’re still not doing anything about it, but that’s the first step. Building awareness around the company, around your organization, and understanding what’s happening.
2. Creating your Circle of Influence
The second piece to the puzzle is circle of influence.
I remember when a director first came into my little cubicle and he actually drew these circles. There’s me in the middle of the circle, and then he drew a little bigger circle, and he said, “That’s your team,” and then a bigger circle, and said, “That’s your organization,” and another bigger circle, “That’s the whole company.”
What does that mean? When unfortunately, I didn’t really understand it that then, but what that means is you build a circle of influence and your influence affects not just yourself and the people immediately around you, but it affects everyone. It can affect as much as the whole company.
That’s why you see people who are big influencers, who are making a name for themselves, who are movers and shakers in your company- they understand the circle of influence. And you start by, again, you have the awareness now, by looking round and seeing what are these circles of influence in your company and how can you start to touch the bigger circle outside of yourself.
3. Understanding your Value
And then, there is a third component to that, and that is understanding your value.
You hear this all the time in the corporate terminology- you need to bring value, you need to deliver value- but what does it mean? Well, value means you are doing things that are beyond your day-to-day job. For instance, imagine your are an executive admin, and you are doing a fantastic job by working really, really hard. You would be a really good performer, and you would be a good and/or excellent executive admin, but when you are delivering big value, you go from being a great executive admin to becoming an indispensable asset to your company.
That’s what we mean when we say “bigger and bigger value”- it’s the transition to being great at what you do, and then becoming important and indispensable to your company. So, the higher the value that you bring by understanding what is deemed valuable at your company, the bigger your influence and the bigger your compensation down the road.
4. Positioning Yourself just Right
And the fourth component of that is that you have to understand how to position yourself.
So now that you have awareness, now that you understand the circle of influence, now that you are understanding the value better and better, you need to understand hot to pull all of this together to position yourself for that success. That means you need to understand how to present yourself to different people.
You present yourself to your boss a certain way and to your CEO a different way, and to your IT yet a different way, because everyone speaks a different language. You need to help people understand your value by positioning yourself just right.
A Recap and then Action
We talked about these four missing pieces in building a successful career that most people forget about:
- Building your awareness
- Building your circle of influence
- Delivering as much value as possible to your organization and your company
- And last but not least, positioning yourself in such a way that you become that indispensable asset.
And so, if you want to put this into practice, one simple thing you can do is ask yourself: what is one thing I can do tomorrow to deliver more value? Or, to build more authority and position myself better. Try to think about things you can do immediately, small, tiny things that can get you closer and closer to that successful career. And one more thing, you can do it! So, have faith in yourself. Have trust and confidence in yourself.
What’s Next?
If you want to invest in yourself and take a step-by-step program that tells you how to go through this process then check out “Crack the Code to Get Promoted”. It is a comprehensive program that helps you figure out exactly what steps to take to get ahead and get promoted at your job.
