Did you know this one easy career advancement tip? It’s so easy, most people ignore it:
Stop feeling trapped in your job and start feeling empowered instead.
You know, the thing about feeling trapped is how it makes you feel, and how you feel will dictate what you do – or don’t do – with your time and energy. So it’s pretty darn important to not feel trapped in the first place.
Case in point, when you feel good and appreciated, you are productive, energized, and alive. Right? As a result, you feel confident and validated in your skills and abilities. And then you feel even better. And you get even more productive! See? The positive cycle repeats, not to mention how much it helps your career advancement by positioning you well for success.
But what about the times you don’t feel so good? How about the times you feel trapped in your job? You cannot possibly feel confident and ready to take on your world when you feel trapped. The two feelings don’t co-exist, honey! We both know that. Maybe it’s because of a terrible boss or an awful management. Maybe it’s the way your co-workers treat you and the way your hard work goes unnoticed.
You feel awful. You feel low on energy. You look depressed. You are not even yourself. You may say things and do things you don’t mean. And do you even know how this affects your career advancement?
This is the stuff that your upper management secretly looks for.
Think about it. It makes sense. They prefer the confident and empowered employees to the helpless victims who feel trapped and depressed. Your inward attitude will actually affect your outward chances for promotion. This is one of the secrets to getting noticed by your upper management. There are more that I’ll spill over in our future strategies but for now, be on alert: How you feel sends a signal to the boss!
Of course, you and I both know that you are not really trapped as you would be say in a prison cell. You can get out and walk away; no one will eat you or shoot you and yet it feels like entrapment. But you still feel like you have been put in a box.
I get it, I know how you feel. I was where you are for far too long. It’s easy to even fall into a self-loathing cycle, even if you make good money. But you gotta pay attention to the self-misery! It blocks the door to clarity and it blocks our vision to reality.
Secret Strategies to Stop Feeling Trapped in Your Job
So here’s are the 3 secret strategies for stopping this terrible cycle of feeling trapped and starting a new one that really helps your career advancement:
Number 1: You have got to believe in yourself.
If you can’t believe in yourself, nobody else can believe in you. It starts with you. You have got to be confident that you are an expert in your area, that there are things you do very well and there are ways you serve the world that nobody else can. This is the reason that you can build success even from the ashes of a burnt career.
So first things first: stand up a little taller, step back and look at your career with fresh new eyes, and just believe in your own self as you are.
Number 2: You have to stop the self-pity and start self-empowering.
Getting into the right and empowering mindset rather than a debilitating one requires that you take an active role in undoing the social conditioning. List all the beliefs that make you feel this state of self-pity, such as “they don’t care about me!”, “I am trapped here!”, “I am a loser!”, “Nobody will help me!”, and then go through your list, finding one reason to stop believing the story you tell yourself.
Then replace each statement of self-pity with a statement of self-empowerment, such as “I care about me” and “I’m free and can do whatever I need to do.”
Number 3: You are not trapped and you have options.
There. I said it. No matter what your situation, repeat this to yourself: “I Have Options!” Even if you don’t take them, you have them. The option to leave, the option to negotiate for more, the option to ask for something, or the option to care less. As long as you are a free human being, you have options. If need be, exercise them but for now, just remember them.
Your first step is to change what you believe. Stop lying to yourself: you are not trapped. You are choosing to go to work. You are choosing to be in that job. And you are powerful and in a position that you can affect your career.
When you tell yourself that, your mind can think again and ideas can flow again. It is a funny thing, our mind, but when you learn to control it, you can manifest any reality you desire.
And in case I didn’t say it enough, You Have Choices. You make those choices every day. That knowledge alone will empower you to get out of the “trapped” mindset and move toward the “freedom” and “abundance” mindset.
Be careful about how you show up at work because management is eyeing you. Show up confident, empowered, and happier using the three secret strategies here.
