Got any good advice to be successful at work?
Tell me, what’s the best career advice you ever got? And do you remember who gave it to you?
Did you learn this brilliant career advice on the job, at MBA school, from a good boss or through a mentorship program?
The best career advice is naturally advice that actually works by giving you tangible success at work – or in personal life – after you apply it.
The best career advice is often simple, easy to understand and to apply, and at times so obvious when you first learn it that you wonder why you didn’t think of it earlier! Don’t beat yourself up.
Hindsight is 20/20 for all and now that you know the advice, you know better so you do better for the future of your career.
We do the best we can with what we have and when we know better, we do better. ~Maya Angelou
The challenge is to discern between generic career advice that gets thrown around and rehashed over and over, and golden nuggets that have been tested and validated and proven by real professionals.
To give you a personal example, when I was finally creating some serious momentum in my corporate career – years before the entrepreneurship bug caught me – I decided to reflect on what career advice eventually got me out of the 5-year rut and brought me so much success in less than half the time.
Ummm. Yes, I was very much stuck for a good part of five years despite being “an excellent employee” according to my company, and five years is very long time for a Type-A driven ambitious young corporate gal with a ton of energy! Not a time I reflect on fondly but those are the times that teach us the lessons we need to learn.
Reminder: Did you know we have a step-by-step course here to teach you everything you need for getting recognized, getting promoted and creating your dream career at your job?
The career advice that got me unstuck, landed me my dream position at the company, earned me my overdue promotion and doubled my salary was not about excelling at school, being a hard worker, or a constant yes-person. In fact, some of that can do more harm than good.
The career advice that catapulted my career success is the reason I wrote this article for you today.
See below these 5 nuggets of the best career advice that, when applied the right way, can explode your success too.
5 Nuggets of Uncommon Career Advice to Explode Your Success
1. Develop your emotional maturity to the highest level.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is one of the best skills you can develop to survive, thrive and do extremely well in any job and any industry. Human being are not robots and companies set aside even the smartest people in favor of emotionally intelligent and mature people. Why? Because business is run through human interaction and human understanding, not through numbers and spreadsheets. Emotional maturity means you understand and manage your emotions as an adult especially in times of disagreement, stress and even chaos.
Examples of how to get started using this: Never lose your temper when things go wrong or unexpected at work, even if it’s in favor of your boss or company. Always remain professional and in control. Also learn what to say but extremely more important, what not to say, in a sensitive conversation and during critical work meetings. You can’t take back words and the wrong ones will label you for long!
2. Negotiate everything as if you and the other person are on the same side.
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word negotiate? A state of conflict? Disagreements? Being pushy or getting cheated? You are trained to see negotiation as two people sitting across the table and each trying to win over the other with their position. This only means that one person has to lose, therefore creating a lose-win situation. Now what if you thought about negotiation in such a way that it created a state of collaboration, mutual gains and a win-win result every single time.
Example of how to get started on this: Start seeing yourself at the same side of the table as the person you are negotiating with, whether it’s your salary or your flexibility or your position on a project
3. Learn the company owner mindset and drop the selfish me-me approach.
This is going to sound ironic. If you stop thinking and worrying and focusing on your career success all the time, and start focusing and thinking about the career success of your boss, of his or her boss, of your organization and of the company at large, everything changes. Including your own career. Developing a company owner mindset means that you treat your work and your projects and your decisions as though you are an owner at the company and not just an employee that shows up for paycheck in exchange for some work.
Your decisions and your actions will start to come from the best place possible, because when you make your company successful, your own success is eventual. If you have done this and it hasn’t worked, I assure you that you’re just not doing it right. If you need more help on this, I cover it in depth in Crack the Code course.
Example of how to get started on this: Next time you have to make a decision, just ask yourself, would a company owner make that same decision? Would he take the day off, would she hire extra workers, would he ask for that budget, would she go get that training certification and so on?
4. Prove your value and connect the dots instead of just showing results.
At first, you thought you might just work hard and you’ll be okay. You’ll get tapped for raise and promotion when the time arrives. Then you were told that you need to show results and spell out the hard work that apparently, your boss or management was too busy to realize you were doing.
So you started speaking to your work, which is great progress but now I have more news for you.
You can’t just show results. You have got to connect the dots to show the value of those results to your management.
If you don’t connect those dots and prove your long-term value – not just your value at the moment – then you’re missing out on a key component of career advancement. You deserve better than that!
It’s time to connect the dots and prove the value.
Examples of how to get started with this: If you’re already speaking to your work, you’re a step ahead of the game. Next time you are speaking to the results you got, throw one value component in your conversation. Do this by connecting the dots between your work and what your boss, team, company deems important.
5. Be extremely coachable when someone – anyone – gives you feedback.
Okay I admit, I wasn’t very coachable when I first started my corporate career. In fact, I was not coachable at all. Constructive feedback was always hard to hear because I attached my personal self-worth and value to it, and therefore felt small and insignificant. Don’t do what I did!
Learn how to become extremely coachable, so much so that you have vice presidents and senior company staff seeking you out and giving you invaluable advice in private.
Coachable means you are a mature professional, you are grateful for the opportunity to improve yourself and your work. This tells your company you are someone worth investing in. That translates to raise and promotions for you, my dear! Everybody wins.
Examples of how to get started with this: Next time you get even the hint that someone has feedback for you, make it easy for them. Seek it out. Set up a private meeting and request the feedback and be open and grateful for it. Sometimes, bosses are not very good at giving feedback but you can still be good at receiving it. The best way to show someone that you are coachable is by active listening when you are getting coached, by putting their feedback into action and by sharing your results from their coaching with them.
Forgive yourself for what you didn’t know until you learned it. ~Zig Ziglar
Show your company you’re a great future bet. Here’s how.
The first time I heard this career advice to be successful at work, I was angry that I didn’t know it sooner. I had to forgive myself and start applying the advice going forward.
It’s natural to want to feel that you’re on the right path and the recognition will happen “eventually”. That’s sadly the type of thinking that keeps the best talent from rising and getting recognized.
So what do you have to lose? Apply this career advice to be successful at work and in less than a month, you’ll show your company that you are someone worth betting on and investing in. If you take the right steps, they will immediately see you as the best future bet they can make. And that’s the only type of person that gets ahead. Let it be you.
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