Login / Signup
“Skills” is the all-encompassing word that can feel quite intimidating but you need to teach yourself this. You need various skills in order to thrive in all industries.
Whether it’s something concentrated like marketing skills, communication skills, or just the basic soft skills every employee needs now, if you’re trying to climb up that career mountain or ladder, it’s not just about acquiring skills that enable you to do the job.
With career progression means a lot of competition, not just from your peers, but from above and below you, not to mention your own internal battles.
In short, progressing up a career ladder is stressful, and if you are wholeheartedly diving into this career progression, it can be to the detriment of many areas of your life.
This could be from your personal life to your friendships, relationships, as well as your own health, physically and mentally. So, to survive a stressful career progression, what are the skills that you need to teach yourself?
Building Your Resilience Stores
The ability to cope with constant changes in any environment is something many human beings struggle with. The equivalent is being outside your comfort zone.
Lots of people struggle to operate outside of any comfort zone, but if you are truly ready for what happens when you get to the top of the career ladder, this is going to be a constant for you.
It’s best for you to understand the skill of being resilient in an ever-changing environment now. Developing resilience is firstly about understanding what your own level of comfort is, and then moving outside of that.
Of course, this is easier said than done, as our stress levels will go through the roof, and anxiety or depression could kick in. But the idea of developing resilience and tolerating the area outside of your comfort zone is all about pushing it a little bit further every time.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your resilience stores can take a long time to find you. So, understanding what your comfort zone is, and then moving a bit outside of that each time until you look back and see a vast difference between what your comfort zone used to be and what it is now is what you need to teach yourself. This is the skill of resilience.
Being An Autodidact
An autodidact is someone who just teaches themselves. For any person looking to acquire that edge, and have something about the other person hasn’t got, pushing yourself as far as your own education is concerned is an essential component.
For anybody climbing up the career ladder, it’s handy to have skills courses in the workplace, but you have to learn something extra to make you a bit more invaluable than the other person.
This is where learning how to learn will serve you well. If you struggled in school, it might have just been the case of your mind not being suited for academics; this is where you can come into your own and learn a subject in a method that you can retain the information.
To begin with, it’s about making sure that your brain is primed ready for the task of learning. If, for example, you struggle with focus and concentration, you can learn how to develop this skill bit by bit. Also make sure that your body and brain are finely tuned, and have the tools they need, will help make this task infinitely easier.
Make sure you have a health check-up, but also, make sure that your eyes and ears are as finely tuned as they can possibly be. It might be that you have to stay up late regularly for a cram session, but are struggling with those last couple of pages because your eyes are glazing over.
You can browse Spektrum Glasses for more information on the best type of glasses for your eyes, and if you already wear glasses, it could be that you need a stronger prescription.
We don’t think about our brain being like a muscle, but it is. And if you want it to work better, you need to feed it the right things, not just making sure that you are focused, and have the necessary tools at your disposal, but also, that you are exercising it adequately, and feeding it the right things.
This means making sure that you warm your brain up in the morning, either by doing Sudoku or finding a way for you to ease into the day, so your brain is primed and ready. But you need to learn how to learn before you can acquire all the skills you need.
Becoming A Chameleon
While progressing up any career ladder is all about networking and who you know, if you want to attain your goals without any deviousness or dishonesty, it’s about being all things to all people.
People can tell when you’re putting on a fake personality for their benefit, but you’re secretly looking over their shoulders to see if there’s someone better you can speak to.
If you want to be a chameleon in the business sense, and nurture relationships with people from all industries and all levels, it’s about developing these different personalities that you want to slot into their culture, but this is all relating to developing your own networking style. But it’s not about playing a role, it’s about being yourself.
Look at leaders like Bill Clinton, or Abraham Lincoln and learn from what they teach. They always made the one person they were talking to in a room full of people their focus. From this one little nugget of information, it teaches us so much about how to deal with everyone.
We spend so long in these business meetings or networking events looking for the one person with the biggest influence, or the most important, that we automatically neglect everyone that is classed as beneath them. This type of attitude will come back to bite you in the end.
So it’s much better for you to learn what your inherent qualities are as a person, and make them transferable. This is what will make people come to you in the end, and this is what will help you to climb the career ladder. Not dishonesty and backstabbing.
Surviving a successful career progression can be a trial, but the true ability to cope with career progressions and all the mess that comes with it is about these three skills. Teach yourself these, and you will be the master of your domain.
Did you find this article useful? Let us know in the comment section and best of luck in your job search. Subscribe to the blog for more information.
