Professional success involves mastering the skills, mindset and competencies required to construct a meaningful career.
Mastery shows itself in many ways – a thorough knowledge of a subject or expertise, demonstrating a great skill, or the ability to achieve a significant accomplishment. Professional mastery is at the heart of every great product and service offering in our society today. Mastery is important – we all have a preference for being surrounded and served by people who know what they are doing; when getting our cars repaired we prefer a “master mechanic” to someone still learning about fixing cars; we want some assurances that our medical professionals have “mastered” their chosen discipline or specialty before we put ourselves in their hands. Most of us like to be around people who demonstrate some level of personal mastery — who have great health, a great attitude and are actively learning and continually stretching themselves to reach their goals.
Mastering professional success combines two basic elements – a specific mindset and also a related set of skill sets. Your own mindset can be measured and with discipline and training, it can be exercised over time to stretch and evolve into a more accommodating mindset. The mastery mindset might best be described as what we have come to think of as entrepreneurial thinking and approach.
- Mindset elements: “growth” vs “fixed” mindset; curiosity; willingness to explore, question, challenge; openness to learning by doing, and learning from mistakes and missteps (the definitive study on mindset is Carol Dweck’s bestselling book);
- Skill set elements: these are all teachable and form the instruction sets, exercises, checklists and other artifacts that exist within each of the 3 building blocks for professional success:
Disciplined Opportunity Networking
Learn to network effectively and dramatically improve your opportunity pipeline, which over time you will convert to meaningful and fulfilling work projects.
read more...To build a viable opportunity pipeline that is meaningful for you, you need to engage in ongoing, disciplined networking. Disciplined networking is all about your willingness and ability to “put yourself out there” on a regular basis — through networking events, seeking information meetings, conducting associated research, and the like.
Once you learn some of the science behind effective networking, you’ll discover that just a few things done well will dramatically improve the results — and personal confidence — you gain from your networking activities. And, active ongoing purposeful networking will help you to build a meaningful opportunity pipeline that over time you will convert to meaningful and fulfilling work projects.
A Compelling Value Story
Ultimately your “value story” is a strong, compelling, and concise statement about how you add value to others and under what kind of environmental/work conditions.
read more...Once you’re comfortable with the “who I truly am and what my purpose is” part, what comes next? Now you have to develop and hone your story about how you add value — ultimately your “value story” is a strong, compelling, and concise statement about how you go about adding values to others and under what kind of environmental/work conditions.
Whilst you need to develop ONE overarching value story, this story gets presented to the world in multiple ways — your CV, cover letters, LinkedIn profile, your social media activities, and your visual and verbal presentation cues. Despite being a straightforward step, it involves a lot of work to get your value story crisp and compelling.
One place most of us need to stand out better is on LinkedIn since this is where everyone – recruiters, employers, employees and job seekers — come together to begin their professional networking and search activities.
A Foundation on Bedrock
We’re all wired a bit differently. Personal and professional mastery begins by understanding how you are wired, developing an accurate inventory of who you are and what you care about, and building on that foundation.
read more...First, you need to develop a deep understanding of what you are truly gifted at doing and your own internal motivations for doing it. We’re all wired a bit differently, and personal and professional mastery begins by understanding how you are wired and developing an accurate inventory of who you are and what you care about. Your own positional sweet-spot lies at the intersection of your personal wiring, your interests, and your work and life experiences.
Through a systematic probing of this intersection you can develop your “authentic story”, choosing the words and phrases that best express your attributes, capabilities and work personality. We may refer to this as our “superpower” or our defining purpose.
