5 Tips for Achieving Your Career, Your Way!

Achieving success requires more than luck, more than hard work – it requires a plan. The
fastest way to take control of your career and steer yourself to destinations of your choice is to treat your career as a business and treat yourself as a competitive product, using the
same strategic planning steps that businesses use to position themselves competitively.

1. Review your assets and liabilities, determine your differentiators, and obtain
customer feedback. Define yourself as a competitive product, challenge yourself by facing any weaknesses, and commit yourself to systematic improvement and upgrades. Identify those things that you do better than other people and seek to understand the perception others have of you.

2. Identify and evaluate your competitors. Competition is a fact of life. You need to compete for what you want. Competition and what you can learn from it should be viewed positively and embraced. Strive to be your best by understanding yourself and your competitors.

3. Determine your goals and create your strategic plan. Goals reflect what you want to accomplish to improve yourself. They will lead you to a greater sense of commitment and motivation as you pursue your aspirations. Like using a roadmap to arrive at a destination, having a clear strategic plan in place helps ensure you achieve your aspirations efficiently and quickly.

4. Implement your strategic plan and check your progress. Strategic plans, like ideas, are effective only if you implement them. Having and implementing a personal strategic plan requires that you review and demonstrate progress. Make immediate corrections to unproductive or unsuccessful plans as soon as they become apparent. Do not procrastinate!

5. Stay focused and be sure to celebrate and reward achievements. Tenacity, courage and commitment are essential to achieving your career aspirations. Focus on the positive, but be prepared to overcome obstacles. Most important, give yourself encouragement and rewards that will help provide motivation and pleasure as you continue achieving your goals.

You truly can manage your career, your way. You can put yourself in the driver’s seat, steering yourself toward destinations of your choice. Take control and be proactive! Never doubt that your dreams are worthy of your best efforts. It’s hard work and you’re worth the investment!

Source: Lisa Quast (http://www.careerwomanic.com/)

How to Motivate Employees,Create a Motivational Workplace

Every person is motivated. The challenge at work is to create an environment in which people are motivated about work priorities. Too often, organizations fail to pay attention to the employee relations, communication, recognition, and involvement issues that are most important to people.

The first step in creating a motivating work environment is to stop taking actions that are guaranteed to demotivate people. Identify and take the actions that will motivate people. It’s a balancing act. Employers walk a fine line between meeting the needs of the organization and its customers and meeting the needs of its internal staff. Do both well and thrive.

When you think of motivation, then, you first expect that every individual has motivation, the will to become motivation each person has. Third, motivation is often induced with recognition and rewards that appeal to an individual. The key with recognition is to provide motivational resources that match what motivates your employees. An unmotivated staff will cost you dearly.

An attention-getting Gallup Poll about disengaged employees was highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal. Gallup found 19 percent of 1,000 people interviewed "actively disengaged" at work. These workers complain that they don't have the tools they need to do their jobs. They don't know what is expected of them. Their bosses don't listen to them. Based on these interviews and survey data from its consulting practice, Gallup says actively disengaged workers cost employers $292 billion to $355 billion a year. Furthermore, Gallup concluded that disengaged workers miss more days of work and are less loyal to employers.

Source: Susan M. Heathfield

8 Ways to Be Happy at Work

These are the factors that will help You find happiness at work

1. Choose to be happy at work
Happiness is largely a choice. I wish all of You had the best employer in the world,
but face it, You may not. So, think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work You like. Avoid negative people and gossip, find coworkers You like
and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can choose to be happy at work.

2. Do something You love every single day
You may or may not love your current job and You may or may not believe that You
can find something in your current job to love, but You can. Trust me. Take a look
at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that You can enjoy doing
every day. If You do something You love every single day, your current job won’t
seem so bad.

3. Take charge your own professional personal development
Sometimes your boss was not doing enough to help You develop professionally.
You are your own person take charge of your own growth, specific and meaningful
help from your boss You are the one to gain losses if You stand still.

4. Take responsibility for knowing what is happening at work
Seek out the information You need to work effectively. Develop an information
network and use it, because your boss is busy doing His or Her job so the knowledge
rarely comes.

5. Ask for feedback frequently
If your not positive about your work think about improving and making a sincere
contribution. Then ask your boss you like to hear His or Her assessment of your
work, if You have customer their feedback are meaningful to your job.

6. make only commitments you can keep
many employees making excuse for failing to keep commitment and worry about
the consequence rather than completing the job. So create a system of organization
and planning that enable You to assess your ability to completed the job.

7. Make friends and avoid negativity
If You are like most people, You don’t like conflict and the reason why is simple.
You’ve never been trained to participate in meaningful conflict, so You likely think
of conflict as scary, harmful, and hurtful. So to liking and enjoying your coworker
You must take time to get to know them. You might actually like and enjoy them.

8. If all else fails, job searching will make You smile
If all of these ideas aren’t making You happy at work, it’s time to reevaluate your
employer, your job or your entire career. You don’t want to spend your life doing
work that You hate in an unfriendly environment.

Source: Susan M. Heathfield

Work Tricks: Impress a New Boss

For you ladies....who want to have a good career, this trick might help you a lot...

Check out this quick list of tips on how to boost your work life

Tune in to her working style
Schedule a meeting to find out how she likes to run things. “That way, you’ll be better able to cater to her needs,” says Allison Hemming, author of Work It!

Show some passion
“As soon as you finish a project, ask if there are other things you can get started on. She’ll see you as ambitious,” adds Hemming.Get early feedback.

“Check in with your superior halfway through the first assignment to make sure you’re on the right track,” notes Hemming.

Mirror her habits
If your new boss reads an industry paper or spends her lunch hour prepping for team meetings, do the same. “You’ll be seen as someone who ‘gets it,’” explains Hemming.

Good luck.


Adopted from: www.cosmopolitan.com