Empowerment
Are Limiting Beliefs Sabotaging Your Career Development?
So many of the people that come to me are suppressing some part of themselves and letting their limiting beliefs sabotage their career development. As a fee for service mentor, the people I see are highly motivated and prepared to invest in themselves financially, and invest their time and energy. At the outset they don’t realise that they are the only thing holding back the best version of themselves. So stop and refelct. What is stopping you from achieving your career goals? What are your limiting beliefs that you either aren’t aware of, or if you are can’t find a way to way break through them?
Or should it be: Who is stopping you achieving your career goals? Who is standing in your way, giving you negative messages, or creating barriers that you are unable to break through? Mentors can help you breakthrough these roadblocks and have the career you want.
Read MoreYour Priorities are Important
The fastest way to lose respect is to allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option. It rings of neediness, even though we may think we are doing it to be helpful. Initially you may get accolades for being such a “good person”, so co-operative, great to have around, willing and able to do and be everything for everyone. It is unlikely, however, that this behaviour will take you from where you are to where you want to be. So what can you do about it? Become assertive.
Read MoreMaking Decisions and Committing to Them
I’m sure all of us can to relate to making decisions but then not committing to making them happen. There is a very real difference between a decision and a commitment.
I certainly have made many decisions in my life time but never followed through to making them happen. In fact making decisions is very easy. It’s just words. But making a commitment is very hard. It requires action and it often means stepping out of our comfort zone into a place where we feel very unsure of ourselves.
Read MoreEmpowered Adults Take Back The Control COVID-19 Has Taken From Us.
This was an article I sent out as part of my Self-Care newsletters early in this pandemic. Given we are about to go into very demanding restrictions and lockdowns here in Victoria, Australia, I thought it was worth re-visiting it. What kind of people do we want to BE in these next six weeks? And what skills, strategies and inner resources are we going to need to BE that kind of person? We need to believe that we can be empowered adults and take back the control that COVID-19 has taken from us. In a very real sense only we can do it.
Read MoreCreate The Future Rather Than Fear It!
Who would try and predict the future at the moment? So why try? Why not do what the late management expert Peter Drucker said many years ago and create the future we want and desire?
Is that a fantasy dream, a pie in the sky hope? It doesn’t have to be.
From day to day our reality changes. Yet we so often think that if we can’t predict our future with some degree of certainty we are in big trouble. We are now living in a very different world and uncertainty and change are its middle names. Any future we might have lies in being able to live with those two realities, in fact embrace them and make them work FOR us not AGAINST us.
It’s all about the mindset we bring to our lives and work, whether we have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.
Read MoreControl The Impact Of COVID-19 On You – Checklist.
Controlling what we can control, and letting go of what we can’t, can make us feel we are making a difference. What we can control is what is happening in our own lives, making the practical decisions that reduce our stress and empower us.
I’ve created a checklist of decisions we all need to make and/or consider, especially if we are experiencing great stress, worry and anxiety at this present time. They are decisions around our finances, our work, our health and well-being, our housing, our overall life-style and around our businesses if we have one.
Some of these decisions may well be difficult because they are usually the areas of our lives which we don’t want to change. They are where we are most settled and comfortable.
These are considerations that were not even on our agenda before this pandemic hit. In other words they weren’t on our agenda even 6 months ago.
Step Into Your Adult Self and Take Back Control in COVID-19 Times
How our lives have been turned upside down in a very short period of time! In fact, as I write this today, we can expect that tomorrow more change will envelop us that we can’t even foreshadow right now. As for next week and the week after that…….. that is so unforeseeable.
As I have already said in an earlier article, we have lost control of most of the parts of our life that gave us a sense of security and stability. We have to take back control over what we can control. That is not just our physical reality but also our emotional lives.
Tony Schwartz and Emily Pines, in an article titled “Coping with Fatigue, Fear and Panic During a Crisis”, called on us to move out of our Overwhelmed and Survival Self and into our Adult Self as the way to take back control in this challenging time.
Read MoreSetting Up Systems Can Empower Your Productivity
“Setting up systems”, you say. “How would that empower my productivity?” It can. Let me tell you more. How much time do we waste every day at work telling people the same thing time after time? The next day we do it all over again. We explain procedures to our clients over the phone twenty times a week. We explain to at least 2-3 of our colleagues every week how to do something that is integral to our business.
Why haven’t we got a system that does that to which we can refer our colleagues and clients? We could have a flyer or brochure on it – online and hard copy – to which we could refer them. We could have a video on the intranet to which we could direct our colleagues when they don’t understand that issue or situation. Sure it takes time to set up systems, but it also takes enormous time – if we add it up over a day, a week or a year – to explain the same things over and over.
Read MoreAre You Valued in Your Workplace?
Do you feel valued in your workplace? If not, why do you stay there? Why wouldn’t you move to where your expertise is valued?
In my work, especially as a mentor, I constantly talk with people who don’t feel valued at work. What keeps them there, however, is a doubt about their own ability. Part of them believes they are making a valuable contribution, but because no one actually acknowledges it, they then feel that maybe they are not as valuable as they think. They rely on the people around them to validate them. Because that doesn’t happen, they then fear to go elsewhere, feeling they have nothing to offer.
That’s one of the great things about mentoring. It validates you even while it challenges. If it is one-on-one mentoring, the mentor does that, but if it is group mentoring, a whole group of like-minded, equally motivated people share their experience with you and you find it validating yours.
So if you want to discover your real value, ask the right people. A mentor is one of those people.
Read MoreDon’t Wait! The Time Will Never Be Right.
How often have you waited for the time to be right and in retrospect missed out on a great opportunity?
How many years have you actually been waiting for the time to be right to do what you really want to do, knowing it will change your life? But the time will never be right. There are no guarantees either that any decision you make will be right, that any action you take will be successful. What you can guarantee is your own absolute commitment to it. I can do this. I will do this. I can make this happen no matter what gets in the way. Now is the right time. I will make this the right time.
Empower yourself for success. Take action now!