by George Helou – Author and Life Coach
These 7 steps will ensure you are conscious of the state of mind and skills you need to develop if you want to soar up the corporate ladder, improve your work environment and feel more satisfied in your career.
Step 1 – Empowered Identity
Every successfully performed role in any organisation can be deconstructed to expose certain character traits responsible for delivering consistent success. The personality traits underpinning every role are based on Empowering Principles. These principles lead to confident and assertive behaviour allowing the role to benefit from your experience.
Feeling confident and secure also means you are open to learning and adapting, as well as acknowledging and inspiring the best from your colleagues. Every person has literally the same potential. We all have 100 billion brain cells (neurons) and with them, we make infinite connections so we can think in any way and like anyone.
Albert Einstein has a smaller brain than the average, however, his glial cell count was very high. Glial cells are responsible for making associations across endless contexts. In other words, they allow us to detect life patterns and anticipate effective solutions.
We all have 50-100 trillion cells with 1.7 volts of potential. The power has always been within! Our brains operate at 10-23W when we are awake that can either be focused like a laser on our purpose and goals, or be scattered into fearful and doubting thoughts. So what do you think is possible with the potential within you? Anything!
What role would you like to be doing next? Whether its an expanded version of your existing role, an internal promotion or something completely different, empowering yourself will dramatically increase your chances of not only being better suited and successful in the role, but also of being more easily noticed to be given the opportunity in the first place. To be empowered, becoming intimate with the principles that empower is vital.
These principles are not exclusively available to the gifted. They allow anyone to become gifted in their chosen field. Evolving sabotaging beliefs so confidence and self esteem can be increased is an important part of stepping up to the plate to allow your gift to develop so you can accelerate the advancement of your career.
Step 2 – Personal Audit
There are reasons why you may not have been promoted recently, even if you have been willing and able for a long time. People ahead of you on the corporate ladder may appear to be the reason, but there are fundamentally more compelling reasons. Organisations have an insatiable appetite for leaders. The moment they discover one in action, measures are taken to align that leader into a position of responsibility to maximize profits and maintain staff retention.
Learning how to increase your confidence and performance must first begin with understanding exactly where your attitude and skills are today. Acknowledging your natural skills, experience and wisdom, is as important to your confidence as identifying what aspects of yourself are in need of personal development.
Step 3 – Imagination
Our imagination feeds our creative and lateral thinking. It also plays a vital role in nurturing a can do attitude as we willingly and easily embrace possibilities. As children, this was a natural part of our being. We would turn dirt and water into the fantasy of delicious pies. We knew they were not real pies, yet we enjoyed suspending our belief for the possibilities. It is this very talent that is responsible for invention, innovation and creative problem solving today.
If we knew its importance, society would have resisted belittling its relevance in our children’s lives as they grew into adults, opting instead to educate them about the significance of this creativity as a necessary dimension of quality thinking. In the workplace, the more the creative process is applied to problem solving, the less costly and more effective and efficient it is.
Initiative and out of the box thinking are invaluable assets to any organisation. They inspire colleagues, management, customers and, not least, us. It is everyone’s responsibility to reclaim the level of imagination and creative prowess that came naturally as a child. Add a creative, artistic hobby to your life and engage in creative mind games.
Research Edward De Bono’s work and exercises and look for the shapes in clouds again. Practicing making creative associations through brainstorms, games and puzzles is a common way to increase your ability to identify possibilities.
Step 4 – Intuition
When the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs admit to making 80% of their decisions on gut feel, it ought to spark our curiosity. Besides our 100 billion neurons in the brain, did you know we have 100 million neurons in the gut and 40,000 in the heart?
So when our gut tightens or our heart heavies when exposed to the burden of an obligation that does not serve our purpose, our intelligence is moving way beyond analysis and into heightened senses that afford us handy information which most of us routinely dismiss.
High stress also reduces our intuition. By perceiving a threat based on our insecurities, we are predetermined to defend and in most case overreact to a situation. As we are meant to see many possibilities from a creative mindset, intuition is our guiding compass, helping us tune into what ideas deserve our attention and the allocation of the organisation’s resources.
Modern types of brainwave entrainment and ancient disciplines like meditation, yoga and candle focus can help us develop the ability to be present and concentrate better. By having daily insights, realizations and a strong sense of knowing, we can feel confident in our actions.
It is indeed a powerful dimension to our decision-making. Having a promotion in mind, our ability to think and act on opportunities, as well as to react in ways that promote our credentials and suitability for the role, are more effectively guided by intuition than the best strategy.
Step 5 – Purpose
Unless you discover your true essence and allow it to be expressed in all that you do, you will struggle to achieve sustainable success. What kind of employee, manager or executive do you want to be? What principles, values, beliefs and traits are aligned with what you truly enjoy?
Can you relate to your personal purpose as a colleague, leader, manager and community member? Can you perceive the details of each and articulate them, so you are truly conscious of what your purpose actually is on the path to being promoted and beyond?
Creating purpose-based goals is only possible once your purpose is adequately defined. Creating a purpose menu that caters for all the roles and occasions in your life is a great way to bring to the surface the inspiring and driving forces of your essence. Your purpose to gain a particular position in an organisation will be easier to achieve, more gratifying to perform and lead to ongoing opportunities if that position is aligned with and being fed by your essence.
However, the balance and momentum gained by knowing your purpose in all aspects of your life means you will not be lacking when it comes to the full demands of the role. Your purpose towards your health, relationships and personal interests contribute directly to your confidence, perspective and inner balance in all that you do.
Given you may spend 8-10 hours per day, 5-6 days a week, working or being occupied by the demands of your position, you can see the vital role of aligning your responsibilities to your purpose. Ultimately, no goal should ever be given your attention and resources unless it is purpose-based. Including the courses, media and mentors you choose, every goal and action must have your purpose as your top priority.
Step 6 – Living On Purpose
Knowing your purpose intimately and clarifying your purpose-based goals affords you the opportunity to allow it to direct everything you do. The brain’s associative thinking means whatever we hold as important in any given time becomes the focal point driving all associated ideas. Our default priority is survival, meaning our Reticular Activating System (RAS) ensures we identify threats to our safety before opportunities.
However, in the event where survival is not an issue, our purpose-based goals connect with emotion to allow the RAS to identify obstacles, opportunities and solutions to ensure that our goal’s realisation is going to be inevitable.
For example, imagine your purpose is to live the principle of delivering on all your promises. In the context of managing a project, you are likely to decide that your purpose-based goal is to deliver the project on or before the due date. Your conviction makes it a non-negotiable commitment in your mind.
As a result all ideas and problem solving will be directly related back to that focal point. The power to have the ingredients in your purpose infecting your agendas and permeating through your tasks, conversations and decision making, is indeed a profound and driving force behind leadership, effectiveness and efficiency.
Step 7 – Environmental Alignment
At the point of embracing an empowered way of relating, our emotions and habits are going to clash. The comfort zone of remaining the same is the reason why we don’t tend to change easily, even when we intellectually know better.
Our relationship to all colleagues and things must undergo the necessary audit to ensure the alignment with our empowerment and purpose is achieved. The desired promotion is going to happen when we evolve beyond wanting and into becoming the worthy candidate. Whatever photos and objects challenge this transformation must be replaced or our relationship with them must be evolved into an affirmation that gleans wisdom and empowers our purpose.
Every relationship with colleagues and management must also be reviewed. How do you relate to them? Do they inspire and engender trust, respect and confidence in you? Are you being the person they can envision in that role? If not, then conceptualizing how to inject your purpose into consistent actions that will achieve that outcome becomes the focus and another way to accelerate your career path.
George Helou is an experienced life coach who lives the success you seek to emulate. He is a two-time bestselling author and founder of www.mindpowercoach.com. George has successfully lived a range of roles in Perth and around Australia within small business to corporate enterprises. His coaching is highly relevant to life coaching that addresses career or business skill advancement.
From extensive research and personal application of personal development principles, MindPower expert, George Helou has developed a powerful and proven 7 Step Coaching System to ensure you become empowered to live your purpose based goals.
Testimonials
Thank you again for allowing me to participate in your course. I've been able to actively apply so many of the concepts with astonishingly positive results Some examples: I am in three art shows this month, and am moving to a beautiful location in two weeks. The new place has room for some personal creative space for me…hurray! (For the last few years I have been painting in the kitchen) My relationship with my husband has improved, new friends and contacts are being made, old bad habits are being put permanently to rest etc. etc. etc. Thank you again for everything George.
Susanne Iles, Artist and Writer
To arrange a complimentary session, more information including testimonials, email George at george@lifecoachperth.net or call him on 0400 277 200. Alternatively, visit his life coach website at www.lifecoachperth.net or his personal development site; www.mindpowercoach.com
First published in Perth's Recruitment Publication, The Nifnex Review: http://www.nifnex.com.au/7_steps_to_accelerate_your_career_path
