In her 24-year corporate career May Busch* can recount many situations which she would have approached differently if she had known better so offers some advice from those experiences.
When you’re in the thick of things at work, it’s easy to neglect the fundamentals that can make a big difference to your career and life.
By ‘fundamentals’, I’m referring to how you approach everyday activities.
Your mindset and behaviour, and the way you spend your time and energy.
These are powerful forces that can propel you forward or hold you back.
If you’re aware of them, you have a much better chance of making them work for you.
That’s why I’m sharing with you some of the key fundamentals that I’ve learned over my 24-year corporate career.
These are things I wish I’d done sooner
Stopped Worrying:
Worrying takes a lot of energy and I let it drain my batteries for too long.
Last year, I hired a mindset coach.
The mental tools and strategies she shared have helped me feel less anxious and better able to get out of my own way.
Of course, this meant making an investment in myself both financially and time-wise, but investment in yourself is always worth it.
Started Believing in Myself:
A natural extension of worrying is doubting yourself.
What if I’m wrong? What if nobody wants to work for me? What if I blow it at the client meeting?
These kinds of fears prevented me from speaking up at times.
At other times, it led me to defer to others so I wouldn’t have the opportunity to fail.
What I didn’t appreciate is that when you pass up the chance to take the lead, you lose out on opportunities to be visible.
Over time, that loss of opportunity can be a career killer.
I’ve made improvements over the years by coming up with a mantra and learning to change my self-talk.
Exercise Regularly:
I find there’s a correlation between my physical state and my mental state.
When I finally found a fitness routine that worked for me, I felt calmer and more confident.
I became more patient and less judgmental. I was even more creative.
For me, exercise is a way to expend and gain energy while connecting with people in my community and getting stronger.
The key is to find a regular routine that fits in your life.
Take Time to Strategise and Plan:
For achievers, there are few things more rewarding than getting things done.
I love that satisfaction of checking things off my ‘to do’ list and knowing that I’ve accomplished something.
The trouble is, it’s all too easy to get hooked on doing at the expense of thinking and planning what you should be doing in the first place.
I do three things to ensure that I keep my focus on the big picture.
First, short, medium and long-term planning once a quarter to set the stage for what I want to accomplish and why.
Second, set aside an hour every week (usually on a Sunday evening) to plan out the following week to 10 days.
Finally, write down my intention and next actions for each project before I start doing it.
Learn to Say “No”:
To be successful in your career and life, it’s important to have time and energy to invest in the right things.
The only way to have that time and energy is to learn to create boundaries so you can focus on your priorities.
This means saying “no” when something doesn’t fit with your mission and game plan.
It’s not always easy to say “no”, the key is to do it in a graceful way that doesn’t offend people.
Stop Being a Perfectionist:
As achievers, putting out perfect work is drilled into us.
In grade school, I prided myself on getting straight A’s on my report card.
At work, I was expected to proofread documents without missing any typos so that the finished project was perfect.
Perfection is overrated.
It can slow down a project and prevent you from producing results.
At times, my focus on perfection made me a terrible boss, keeping people working late to get things perfect when what we needed was ‘good enough’.
While it still takes conscious effort, I can now let go of the need to be perfect and right about everything.
Delegate More Often:
When there’s a task or project to do, my first instinct is to do it myself.
This means I end up doing things that are necessary, but that I’m not necessarily best-placed to do.
Like trying to create PowerPoint slides myself when my analyst can do it faster and better.
This inability to delegate also has a negative impact on your team.
If you’re handling every client conversation, your team doesn’t have the opportunity to contribute, grow and learn.
The thing about fundamentals is that they’re easy to ignore, especially in the busy-ness of our daily lives.
Yet it’s precisely the way we go about each and every day that determines how successful we will be in our careers and lives.
It’s worth identifying the elements that might be standing in the way of you fulfilling your potential.
When you do, you can challenge yourself to experiment with ways to change your approach for the better.
*May Busch helps leaders and their organisations achieve their potential. She can be contacted at [email protected].
This article first appeared on May’s blogsite
