Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
Early in my career, I have been burnt by office politics but not in the way you think. I didn’t feel burnt because someone else sabotaged my job. On the contrary, I concluded, I burnt myself because I didn’t understand or appreciate office politics and the importance of using it fairly and skillfully to protect and build my career advantage. ...
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Here are some examples of salary requirement answers that have worked for me or my clients.
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In a previous post I wrote "Hard Work Does Not Guarantee Success." I still believe it but it begs the question - Then what else do you need to do to guarantee success? One answer that many people would agree with is - self promotion - make sure important people (like your boss and their boss) know what a top performer you are. That's easier said then done. How to finesse self-promotion without coming off too boastful or self-centered is tricky.
I don't have to tell you that not everything at work is always smooth sailing. Sometime things are delayed, mistakes are made, wrong numbers are published. It may be your fault, it may be a bad circumstance, or a combination of both. What do you say when your boss wants a progress report and things are not going so well?
Immediate, Practical To-Dos.
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“Acknowledge your effort for showing up.” That is what a Bikram teacher used to say to us at the end of every class. To this day, I still repeat this phrase to myself during class. It reminds me to appreciate myself for simply making the class, regardless of how inflexible I was, or how imperfectly I was able to do the postures during that particular class.
It’s a simple concept, but we often forget it, especially if we are overachievers. We tend to judge our achievements by results and results alone, and not appreciate the efforts we took along the way sometimes. In a way, it’s counter-productive, as 95% of the achievement process is the journey to the goal, and achieving the goal is only 5% of the process. Yet for man of us, we are down on ourselves for the first 95%, since we still haven’t achieved the results, and only feel satisfied with the last 5%.
Wouldn’t it be great to feel good about ourselves all of the time? Well, this sentence reminds me to do that. It takes effort to do anything new or difficult in a job search, on the job, or in life. It’s important to acknowledge yourself when you take that first step also and the second step, and not just that last step. We may not always succeed after the first step, or the eighth step. The fact you took 1 step or 8 steps in a new or difficult direction takes effort, guts, and openness to learning new things. That is to be appreciated in itself.
This phrase also helps me overcome my fears of trying new or challenging things. I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more timid I become to try new things. “What if I suck at it?” is my instinctive response. Believe me, when I first started this blog a few years back, I often had these thoughts. I still do sometimes as I write these articles. However, I have learned to take the pressure off myself by looking at things with a different perspective – “I acknowledge myself for showing up” and writing these posts. Whether one person reads it or 100K people read it is secondary. I write because I love sharing my struggles and my learnings with the world. It helps me grow, and if it helps anyone else, that is icing on the cake.
You can do the same. Half of the battle in trying anything new or challenging is taking the first action. So I urge you to take the first action, and to recognize that it’s such an accomplishment when you do so. For example:
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