Secrets of Success

With the right skills and a positive mindset, you can climb high up the career ladder

As a career management professional, I am often asked: “How can I ensure career success?”

While there is no single method to achieve this objective, here are some things you can do to get on the right path:

1. Regular activity
Successful career planning is not a one-time activity but a lifelong process. Mapping your career will help you to track your progress. Your interests, hobbies, transferable skills and past accomplishments are all clues to opportunities that may be awaiting you in the future.

Defining your career goals clearly will help you to align them to career trends. Once you regularly review and plan your career, you will be better prepared for whatever lies ahead.

2. Winning attitude
The happiest and most successful people see themselves as winners and maintain an optimistic outlook as they move toward their goals.

Unhappy and unsuccessful people often have a pessimistic outlook on life. They lack confidence and have a deep-rooted belief that they cannot do much or do it well. They do not realise they are advertising themselves as losers.

So develop a winning mindset and you will be on the path to a successful career.

3. Move on
Never become too comfortable in your current job. If you have been in the same job for three years or more and you are doing similar, if not the same, work, then ask yourself whether you are learning new skills or enhancing your competency?

To experience the best of life, seize opportunities as they arise. Never get stuck in your “comfort zone”. If opportunity comes knocking, grab it.

4. Positive values
True winners live by the virtues of fairness and decency. To succeed in the long term, you must know what’s right and wrong, and you must use these standards of behaviour every day in your business and personal life.

Adhering to a strong code of positive values will make your life productive, fulfilling and profitable. These are also traits that employers value.

5. Turn pain into gain
No life is free from suffering. When hard times cause anguish, there is no point in becoming bitter. Winners face suffering head-on and try to turn the pain into gain.

Develop your career resilience. If you are retrenched or made redundant, use the time to learn new skills while looking for a job.

Offer to do voluntary work while waiting for a job offer to come through. Don’t look at the door that was shut. Focus on opening new doors.

6. Learn to laugh
Cultivate and maintain a sense of humour. Humour cleanses the spirit, lightens your burdens and keeps you from taking yourself too seriously. Learn to smile and laugh more.

Find happiness in doing the tasks assigned to you, no matter how difficult, demanding or challenging. Developing this ability to smile will help others to see your “can do” attitude, a commodity employers treasure.

7. Help others
The most satisfied people are those who help others. Offer to mentor your juniors or new hires.

Find time to do something for the community or a voluntary organisation. By working in the community, you not only hone some of your work skills but also may be noticed by those who can influence your career advancement and success.

Career success involves many ingredients. Getting the right mix is not easy. Be positive and optimistic, diligent and dedicated at work, offer to go the extra mile and help the community, remain cheerful in the face of challenging tasks and maintain a winner’s mindset, and career success will find you.

– Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article by Dr Kamal Kant, a career management professional and an adjunct lecturer.