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This is Part 2 of a 2-part article on career planning success. After
exploring a positive mental attitude, a sense of purpose and joyful effort, what
other factors for career success are there?
The 7 Essential Principles of Career Success
4. Focus
You can be doing many things with joyous effort and yet fail because you do not
focus. Being focused means to train your mind not to wander. Do not focus on one
goal now only to switch goals before you even do enough for the previous one.
Be mindful and aware of everything that you do is also being focused. Detach
from your ego. There is no need to be right all the time and argue for the sake
of wanting to be right. Concentrate on the task at hand and single-mindedly
pursue it. When you focus, you gain clarity to situations that are confusing and
insights into misconceptions that feed negative thoughts to your mind. Then your
career planning success has a higher chance of coming to fruition.
What does this mean? For example, if you have a project that everyone has
agreed to pursue but half way someone outside the group criticizes it. Focus.
Those comments only bring confusion to you if you do not focus and allow your
ego to get into that situation. You will become
confused and distracted. Gain clarity by focusing and you will know those
comments aren’t important to the pursuit of your
goals. Focus is an important factor for
career success.
5. Right Ethics
Big words but it really just means in the things that we say or do – we abstain
from lying, abstain from using harsh words, abstain from
gossiping, abstain from using divisive speech and abstain from being
malicious.
Always think win-win at work (and in life). You have to believe that there is
such a thing as win-win. Do not scheme and plot your career success. There are
no such things. Even if it happens by such means, it wouldn’t last. If you put
in the right effort, good things will happen to your career soon enough. Your
career planning success is really as simple as that.
Of course it is tough practicing this principle, but the more you are able to
do it the more freedom you will feel. The more
self-discipline you have in doing it, the less you will be caught up in
confusing situations and it frees you from malice and wrong views. Being nice is
really just that easy. Practice the right ethics.
There are no failures in life. Only setbacks. In your career planning success do
not ever believe in failures. And you truly only fail when you give up. So long
as you continue to try and do and focus on your goals, you will still be in the
running for success. Learn to embrace setbacks. They teach you what not do the
next time and they
test your patience. It is also a test of your resolve.
You are not born to know how to do such and such. Hence, everything is a
learning process. As with all learning process, there are bound to be setbacks.
Even if you know how to do something there is no guarantee of
success, as we are prone to forget. Setbacks can be just that. A reminder of
what we have forgotten. Include this factor in your career planning success.
When faced with setbacks, know that they are just that – setbacks. You can
still spring forward. Learn from it, plan and activate what you have learned.
You need not beat yourself over it. Cut yourself some slack, so to speak.
Minimize the
anger and sadness and move on.
7. Teamwork and Support Group
No one can teach you everything. No one can know everything. No one can do
everything. You need to know the value of teamwork and the process to forge
teamwork. You increase your own success when you help the team succeed. The
team’s goals are intrinsically weaved into your own goals. Just as your goals at
work are weaved into your personal goals. The more people you help succeed, the
faster you succeed. Include others in your career planning success and you will
succeed faster and easier.
Create a support group of positive people in the office and outside to
motivate, encourage or just to slap some senses into you when you need it.
This support group can be made up of individuals who are your friends whom you
meet often. It need not and is not meant to be a formal meeting. The important
thing to remember is to have
POSITIVE people. When you are down and negative you do not need more
negative energy infused into you.
You need to remember not to be a positive energy drainer as well in such
situations. Do not go to your friends and expect to be convinced to be positive.
You must allow others to make you positive. Positive people have a tendency to
avoid negative people who drain them too often.
This is Part 2 of a 2-part article. If you haven’t read about the first 3
insights, click
here.
