Make your success happen – Now!

In the beginning everything in your life went to plan, you finished your course at university, you found a job and then the next one and so on, but somewhere along the way you got stuck. It happens to the best of us. We get caught up in other things and suddenly wake up and realise that we have ended up in a career slump. Sometimes it happens out of convenience, sometimes we just got lost along the way. But don’t worry help is on its way!

Personal development is the key

So you feel like you have come to a dead end but that is just one way of looking at it. Because in reality the window of opportunity is wide open. And you are just getting started – so get started! “Your personal development is your own responsibility, something that you make happen,” says Bookboon author Patrick Forsyth in his ebook “Towards Career Fitness”. In a job context this in turn implies the aim of improving specific job performance and thus incorporating or extending the skills that make that possible.

In order to be effective the process of personal development needs to be:

Consciously entered into: “I am doing this now!”

Well planned: “What do I want to achieve until the end of the year?”

Systematically executed: “What steps do I have to take?”

Focused on clear objectives: “What short term goals are reasonable?”

Your job could be fun?!

“Good self-development can make your job more interesting, satisfying and fun,” believes Patrick Forsyth. And it can also help your longer-term career progress and help your overall advancement. Even in a busy life an activity like self-development must not be a chore, especially not an impossible one. Certainly in today’s work environment spending time on self-development is not a nice option, something to do a little of if time permits: it is a necessity, and, as Lord Young of Graffham said God helps those who train themselves. Your success and future prosperity depends on it; the only question is how much activity is necessary and what should this be?

TIP: Make some self-development an ongoing thread to your work life. It need not take too long, but dedicating regular attention to it will pay off.

What to do first?

Here we begin to examine the “what you do” and “how you do it” of self-development. There is no magic formula, many different things can contribute to successful self-development and it is in deciding on the mix of what you do that you first influence your ultimate success.

How will this help me?

First, remember that development can only ever do three things:

• Impart knowledge: so you can learn about whatever is necessary in your job from background knowledge to how your company’s product works; both the span and depth of your knowledge matters
• Develop skills: introducing you to new skills, maintaining, improving or refining your abilities in everything from core techniques in something like negotiation to specialist computer skills you may need to deploy
• Change attitudes: study can change the way you think about things, although this may take longer than adopting some new skills. For example, something like managing your time effectively is as much a question of the attitude you take to it (and the habits this develops) as to slavishly following rules.

What steps do I need to take?

Personal development doesn’t come over night and takes some effort. But it can still be fun and seeing the results and finally your dream come true will certainly be worth the time you put in. There are two things that are crucial to your self-deployment:

• Time: You must set aside some time for self-development. This need not be excessive or unmanageable, but it needs to be there and it needs to be made available on a regular basis.

• Application is equally important. There is all the difference in the world between skimming through a book, to take a simple example, so that you can say that you have done so, and reading it carefully, studying it over a little longer period, making some notes and perhaps also resolving to take some action as a result.

Make a schedule and find out how much time you can dedicate to your self-development on a daily or weekly basis. Establish also which time would be good to get some personal work done. You might not want to spend every evening after work studying but maybe you can set aside one or two evenings during the week and some day on the weekend. Make sure you still have enough time to relax and unwind so don’t get frustrated in the early stages!

These tips and more can be found in the new ebook “Towards Career Fitness” by Patrick Forsyth. Download the ebook on bookboon.com!