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Secrets of levelling up and boosting your success

To date, we have examined the creation of the values that will guide your life’s direction. We have uncovered your burning desire, set goals and created a plan of attack. We have looked at the importance of the right mindset in attaining your goals and the habits you need to instil into your life to get you on the right track. Do I have success yet?

Not yet. Now we look at the factors that will help you excel up the corporate ladder or within your own business.

This topic is the stuff of PhDs and thousands of books. I haven’t read them all, but I search for the top books in the field and focus on what is well regarded and not the fad of the day.

Please understand that these articles are a guide in the right direction. It is up to you to then further your knowledge in the areas of interest. Otherwise, every article would be a 30,000-word thesis and would be too hard to get through, for me and for you!

Gaining new skills throughout life can be thought of as leveling up in a video game. To get to the next level, you need to have figured something out, gained new skills or increased your experience points.

To successfully progress through life, doesn’t it seem reasonable that you need to do the same things?

The apprenticeship – the foundation of your career

In Robert Greene’s “Mastery”, he discusses the Apprenticeship Phase when you enter a new career. For most of you reading this post, you will be fresh out of school or university, or you have been in employment for a short time.

Greene describes the goal of Apprenticeship phase as not being about money, a good position or a qualification but rather the transformation of your mind and character. This means that you must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning.

“Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come – far more than the paltry increase in pay you might receive at some seemingly lucrative position that offers fewer learning opportunities.”

What he is saying here is don’t chase the easy dollar. At 25 you may earn more than your friends, but at 45 you will be well behind them.

He advises not to choose an apprenticeship that is easy and comfortable. You can’t grow if your boundaries are not stretched into uncharted territory.

Greene’s three phases of the Apprenticeship are:

1. Deep Observation – The passive phase
   • Don’t worry about impressing people and getting attention. Watch and learn. Observe and absorb.
   • Observe the high-flyers in the company, observe those who have been reprimanded or fired.
   • Learn the rules of how this world (the company) works. The observation mode will help you avoid costly mistakes. Observation is essential in any unfamiliar environment.
   • This phase may last a few months.
2. Skills Acquisition – The Practice Mode
   • Learn the skills of your field.
   • Practice and repetition.
   • Focus on one skill at a time.
   • Accept and embrace boredom. Push through the tedium until the skill becomes automatic. The skills are now hard-wired into your brain.
   • Cycle of accelerated returns – the practice becomes easier and more interesting, leading to the ability to practice for longer hours, which increases your skill level, which in turn makes practise even more interesting.
   • 10,000 hours seems to be the amount of quality practise time that is needed for someone to reach a high level of skill. The actual time frame of 10,000 hours is debatable, but the key point is “quality practice time”. This doesn’t mean that I’ve been doing my job for 5 years, therefore, I must be really good at it. It means spending focused time crafting your skills. Some people can do a job for 10 years and be as just as good as they were after the first year. No improvement. (Research topic – deliberate practice)
3. Experimentation – The Active Mode
   • The aim of this phase is to gauge your progress and see whether there are still gaps in your knowledge. You are observing yourself in action and seeing how you respond to the judgement from others.
   • This may mean taking on more responsibility at work or initiating a project of some sort.
   • This phase prepares you for the constant scrutiny and criticism that you will face in the next stage of your career.
   • You’ll know when your apprenticeship phase is over by the feeling that you have nothing left to learn in this environment. It is time to move on for a greater challenge.

If you wish to excel and master your chosen field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Additionally, you are more likely to succeed if you do what comes naturally.

Therefore, you should already know what your interests are and your natural tendencies (people oriented, great with numbers etc) which links to your career goals.

The key concept of success (in your career or business)

You get paid for the value you bring to the marketplace.

Therefore, the key to your success is to constantly increase your value to your employer, your manager, your next employer or your customer/client.

This is achieved by:

• Knowing your field inside and out.
• Reading.
• Doing the right courses.
• Doing more than what is required.
• Being mentored.
• Understanding what your target market (manager or customer/client) wants.
• Identifying the knowledge, skills and experience you need to get to the next level. Click here for my post on boosting your income.
• Constant self-improvement.

Therefore, the secret to increasing your value, and therefore your income, “is to work harder on yourself than you do on your job” (Jim Rohn).

At an absolute minimum you need to do really well at your job. Not just turn up, but do your best. Excellence is a habit.

Then after hours, or if you have professional development opportunities at work, be very selective of the knowledge and skills you wish to acquire.

Self-development must be a goal that is treated with utmost seriousness and focus. You have either sat down with your manager and created a professional development plan with your next career goal in mind or looked at job advertisements of your desired role and identified what knowledge, skills or experience you need.

Your professional development plan will be an evolving document as your rise up the ladder.

Are you Invaluable?

Maya Grossman, author of “Invaluable”, defines an invaluable employee as someone who delivers staggering results that have a real impact on the company for which they work.

Grossman outlines ten key skills in becoming invaluable to your employer.

#1. Develop an owner mentality.

• When you have an owner mentality, you take everything you’re meant to do and go a step further. Your work isn’t limited to merely your job description, you step in and do whatever is needed, whenever you identify an opportunity to help.
• Accepting the notion that you are going to go above and beyond without immediate compensation is the biggest mental hurdle you will need to cross, in order to adopt an owner mentality.
• Ask yourself how you can be a better employee, what you can do to help the company grow and succeed.
• An important part of the owner mentality is identifying the right company to work for. You need to be excited by what the company does.
• Then find your purpose in the company.
• If you can’t care about the company, care about your career.

# 2. Become a lifelong learner.

• If you are 100% ready for the position in which you are about to apply, you are looking at the wrong opportunity.
• This doesn’t just mean more degrees or certificates, it can be searching on the Internet about your topic, talking to people who have the skills you’re interested in or reading a book.
• Maya recommends automating the learning process so it is easier and less time consuming. For example, having appropriate articles delivered to your inbox so you don’t have to constantly search for the right material.

# 3. Focus on making an impact.

• Focus on doing things that drive real impact in the business.
• Focus on outcomes, not outputs. Meaning – focus on getting results, not just being busy.
• Prioritise your work To Do List. Ask yourself: “is this going to have an impact that will move me towards my main goal?”
• Focus on things that make a difference. Spend most of your time on these activities.

# 4. Be an opportunity digger.

• The most successful employees are proactive. Decide what you want to achieve and then create the opportunities to make it happen.
• Clearly, you must first be able to identify your work goals. This you should have already done.
• Networking, either within your department or your whole organisation is an important part of looking for and identifying growth opportunities.

# 5. Become a fixer.

• Solving problems is a great way to be noticed.
• Don’t go to your boss with a problem without having tried to come up with a few solutions.
• Even more importantly, be able to identify problems and provide solutions.
  • You can identify pain points in a particular process. Things that you hear people regularly complaining about.
  • Or find ways to do things more efficiently.
  • Don’t be afraid to collaborate with others to find solutions.

# 6. Become a master influencer.

• The story you tell people is the key to successfully influencing them. Understanding people and where they’re coming from is the secret for getting buy in, collaborating, and leading without authority.

# 7. Master the art of managing up and across.

• Learn to manage your manager. Managers look for people who make them look like rock stars, not people who require micromanagement and end up dragging them down.
• Therefore, you need to get to know your manager and understand what they want and what drives them. Get to know your manager’s goals, objectives, and desired outcomes.
• Successfully managing up means managing your own work by prioritising your work so it supports your manager’s goals, focusing on making an impact and over delivering.
• Managing across: to succeed in an organisation, you need resources, information, and expertise from people across the company. Therefore, learning how to influence people at approximately your level or outside your department is important for making true impact in the organisation.

# 8. Extreme accountability.

• Accountability it’s not just about what you commit to doing yourself, it’s also about your commitment to your team and your colleagues.
• Accountability is an internal commitment or willingness to take ownership, accept responsibility, and follow through on what you promised yourself and others that you would do.

# 9. Become a planner.

• A career road map is a strategic plan that helps you identify what to focus on and how to deliver the skills you need to get to the next level in your career.

# 10 Develop the habit of tracking your success.

• Make sure you keep a log of your achievements.
• Be specific. For example, don’t say you were responsible for customer service. Say, you decreased client response time by 2 days by improving how you communicated with them. You decreased the time to onboard a new client by 3 hours by making a range of process improvements (then list those changes). Attach numbers to your achievements.
• This is useful for job reviews and also when you apply for new positions (CV material).

In summary: You are in complete control and you have the power to design the career of your dreams and make it a reality.

Rise to the top with these skills

Your ability to deal with people will determine (in most instances) how successful you become in employment or in business.

Influence, persuasion and leadership all require great people skills. If you are technically great, but socially poor, you are unlikely to be a good manager of people. Therefore, if you wish to rise through the ranks of your chosen field learning how to effectively deal with people is essential.

Those with great people skills may not be the most technically competent, but they will generally go further in their careers because they know how to get people to help them achieve their goals. A technically proficient person will try to do it all themselves. And doing it all yourself is the hardest path of all.

A problem occurs when a technically proficient person starts their own business. When you don’t know how to build rapport and relate to people you end up giving them what you think they should have as opposed to giving them what they actually want.

These skills only come with practice. Getting out there and dealing with people. This takes time.

Reading books on building rapport, emotional intelligence, empathy, communication styles will accelerate your learning. However, given that people don’t come from a cookie cutter, there is no one size fits all approach.

Be prepared to not get it right all the time. Just make sure you identify the things you are doing right and things that aren’t working for you.

I won’t go into depth on people skills as it is such a large field to examine. The references I have provided and the topics to dive into will help guide you.

Make no mistake – How you deal with people will determine your level of success.

In my field, financial planning, the people who make the big bucks are the financial planners. Administration is important, technical skills are important but the skills that bring in the $$$$ are the people skills.

People buy from those they like and trust. Quickly building rapport, understanding different communication styles and adapting appropriately, influencing prospects to agree with your recommendations, seeing the value you provide and be moved to purchase, are skills that are of high value.

Whether you realise it or not, people are either constantly buying something from you or they are not. By this I mean, ideas, your recommendations, your suggestions. It could be your boss, your workmates, your friends or family.

What movie do we all want to see, what restaurant? I deserve a pay rise because I understood the problems the department was having and implemented various solutions which have helped you achieve greater sales than last year.

Notice they are called people SKILLS. This means that they can be learned. By anyone.

If you think you don’t have good people skills, you need to reprogram your beliefs to realise that you can learn to be good with people.

With effort you can do it.

The key to being good with people is to care about them.

That’s step one. The most important step.

The rest you can learn.

If you don’t really care about other people, then that ladder (the success ladder) becomes significantly harder to climb.

The Razor’s Edge

In Bob Proctor’s book You Were Born Rich, he discusses the concept of the razor’s edge. The razor’s edge concept is that small important actions can lead to exponentially bigger results.

For example, a salesperson works to get that one extra sale per week, going from 3 to 4 sales per week (on a high value item). One extra sale might not seem much but done persistently across a career of 40 years that could result in the equivalent of an extras 10 years’ income. That would definitely take your career from good to great.

Bob Proctor cites examples in sports and business of how doing that “something” extra can take you to the next level of income or whatever you want in life.

Now that “something” is very individual, meaning your “something” may be very different to someone else’s “something”. However, you MUST find out what your “something” is.

Is it doing 30-60 minutes of career related reading everyday? Imagine the impact of this tactic after 3, 5, 10 years on your level of success.

Is it spending 1-2 hours a day practicing your sales pitch or presentation skills if you’re trying to win business?

Is it doing the boring but essential things that no one really wants to do yet could make a significant difference in your career?

With regards to your job or business, ask yourself, “How good am I at doing it?” and “How much better could I be?”

Often, your success may just come down to persistence (discussed in a later post). Continuing on when everyone else has given up or not even bothered to start. Persisting with your career reading, persisting with self improvement, persisting with goal setting.

Discover two or three “one percenters” that can elevate your career or business beyond your wildest dreams.

Pivot or jump ship?

If you find yourself in the wrong job or maybe even the wrong career, do you need to throw your past knowledge, skills and experience out the window and start something completely new?

Starting something totally from the beginning can hit your income hard and require tremendous effort to learn a new area. This of course depends on the complexity of the field you wish to move into. If you are an accountant and you wish to move into medicine, that’s a massive undertaking.

Even if you wish to quit your job and start a business, that’s also a massive undertaking.

 In Jenny Blake’s book “Pivot: The only move that matters is your next one” outlines how you can make shifts in your career by following four steps:

1. Plant
2. Scan
3. Pilot
4. Launch

Using this method can help to reduce the time, cost and pain in making your move. The key is to thoroughly plan.

Plant – start with the bigger picture. You need to establish your vision and identify your values (Does this sound familiar?).

You will need to identify your strengths and understand your financial situation. Look to your knowledge, skills and experience and identify the attributes that can help you make your move. You will also need to assess your savings to see what is possible. Is this move something I can do now, or will I have to save before I act? Can I start it as a side hustle first?

This step involves clarifying your values, clearly defining where you want to move to and the creation of a plan to get you there. You will need to ensure that you have the right mindset (your set of beliefs) to action your goals and have the right habits in place to make your change stick effectively. Finally, ensure you have the right knowledge and skills to boost your chances of ongoing success. Hopefully, you are leveraging your existing knowledge, skills and experience to make the transition easier.

Scan – for opportunities. Be proactive and use your network (the topic of my next post). You may be looking to pivot within your current organisation. In this instance, reaching out to managers of other departments or even discussing your intentions with your current manager can assist in a move across. You may need to create your own opportunities through cross department projects that get you involved in projects are more meaningful for you.

This may also mean looking for partnerships or other opportunities to gain traction on your desired move.

Pilot – test your idea by starting small and determining what works and what doesn’t. If you are doing something new and different, don’t expect things to turn out perfectly the first time. This might result in a change of plan, which is totally fine and usually expected, to a path which you didn’t originally envision.

This is especially true for starting a new business or self-employment venture.

Launch – fear of failure can stop you in your tracks. If you have done the first 3 steps right, Plant, Scan, Pilot, you will have a greater chance of success in the launch phase. But nothing is guaranteed. Again, identify what’s working and what isn’t. Re-pivot if necessary and go back through the steps. Failure only truly occurs if you don’t learn from your mistakes and give up.

Career dissatisfaction is common. However, given that you spend so much of your life working, it’s a great idea to try a design your work life to get the outcome you desire.

Going into business

Many skilled people start a new business after leaving an employer. A chef starts a new restaurant, a technician becomes a self-employed consultant or a business is created off the back of a hobby.

Many of these ventures fail or fail to take off because, although they have technical proficiency, there are no business skills or experience to accompany the technical skills.

When you open a business, you must have the relevant business skills. If you can, get these at your current workplace. For example, a chef can get involved in the other aspects of the business. Or get a business consultant to help you.

If you wish to open a business, you must consider yourself a business person first and a technical expert second. Because with out the business, you have nothing. How skilful you are is irrelevant.

The wrap

To excel in whatever it is you want to do in life, you first must like what you are doing. Trying to forge ahead in a line of work that doesn’t interest or excite you is like trying to swim upstream.

It will be a miserable journey with an unpleasant ending! Or you will just continue to be miserable at the lower levels of your field.

If you wish to excel and master your chosen field, you must be interested in the subject and feel a profound connection to it. That connection may be how your field of interest contributes to the world.

Just like you can design the life you want, so too can you design the career you want.

Being passionate about developing your career is easier to do when you like what you do and who you do it for.

Decide on the important values in your life, define goals that excite you and plan your path, create an unstoppable mindset and instil habits that move you towards success.

Your plan will evolve as you evolve.

What are the 2 or 3 “one percenters” that can elevate your income 10x, 20x or 100x?

And never forget …… the importance of people skills.

References

Invaluable – by Maya Grossman

Mastery – by Robert Greene

You Were Born Rich – by Bob Proctor

Pivot – by Jenny Blake

Give and Take – by Adam Grant

7 secrets of persuasion – by James C. Crimmins

Getting More – by Stuart Diamond

Recommended reading topics:

Emotional intelligence

Empathy

Understanding different communication styles

Rapport building

Influence/persuasion

Leadership

Deliberate practice

Up next …..

How to magnify your success through the right connections

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