Your mood is a major determinant of success in anything you do. You should never enter an interview or any other high-stakes situation in a negative frame of mind. You can needlessly lose many opportunities simply because you haven’t been “up”. For example, job seekers find considerably greater success when interviewing on Fridays, perhaps due to the fact that people tend to be in a better mood towards the end of the week. When people are relaxed, they are in a better “buying mood”.
Address your weaknesses, and offset them complementary strengths when they become an issue. You want to be trusted and your weaknesses to be overlooked. When interviewing, you must bring up and address your weaknesses to your employers before bringing up your strengths. Employers are more likely to pay attention to your strengths if they have already been made aware of your weaknesses, and you in turn will have more credibility. You must always be sure to follow up a discussion of your weaknesses with complementary strengths.
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In order for you to be effective in your position and successfully obtain new ones, you must express gratitude, and appreciate both what you have achieved and what you are becoming. Believe in positive things. Your career has great potential and so do you, and only by realizing this can you perceive the world around you as supporting your belief system.
In this article Harrison explains how your beliefs are controlling what is happening to you. Due to our early life experiences, almost all of us develop beliefs about who we are and our relationship to the world. These beliefs end up controlling how we evaluate ourselves in relation to the world. Most of us are acting and going through life largely unconscious to what we believe about ourselves. People want their experience of the world to be consistent with what they believe. The drive for this is so strong that people will do almost everything to be right about their beliefs. The key to a successful career and life is to start choosing what to believe about the world and about yourself. You need to manage your mind and understand how your beliefs about yourself, the world and the people around you are controlling your destiny.
People all around you prey on common fantasies of wealth, jobs, health, and other things; the prospect of instant gratification is naturally appealing to people frustrated with life’s difficulties. The only proven route to success, however, is through personally taking actions and building momentum over time. The idea over instant change is an attractive fantasy, but only that; a fantasy perpetuated by others preying on your desires rather than helping you.
One of the benefits of being an outsider is not being weighed down by the same social mores, rules, customs, and other restraints as the dominant group. Throughout history it has often been outsiders who have made the greatest inventions, innovations, and breakthroughs and achieved the most in their lives. In business, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates were both outsiders. In Germany, Albert Einstein was an outsider. Barack Obama was an outsider. Each of these people operated by their own set of rules.
Avoid the envy of others. Successful individuals know envy can lead others to undermine them; in order to remain powerful, you must paradoxically minimize the appearance of power. Avoiding envy will put you in a much better position to succeed and effectively compete.
In this article Harrison discusses the importance of concentrating on your work and not getting distracted. The true value of the best executives comes from their ability to concentrate and get things done. If you can concentrate for a long period of time on a single issue, you will improve the quality of the work that you do. The qualitative aspects of your work are incredibly important because they end up determining your outcome. Good companies and employers value people who are organized and think through issues when they are working on something. You need to concentrate. You need to give everything you are doing your full attention. You need to work hard and be focused.
In this article Harrison explains how you can ensure success in your career by externalizing your opponents. Your job is like a game; if you work hard, play by the rules of the company and are seen as part of the team you will be viewed as a valuable player for the company. The most significant part of any game is the presence of an opponent. Don’t look for an opponent among your co-workers. Never speak negatively of your team members. Instead, concentrate on the external opponents. External opponents bring you and the team closer as you work towards a common goal. In order for you and your company to succeed it is important to have an external opponent. Harrison advises people to consistently work hard and not participate in the politics. This is a sure way to score big in your career.
True self-esteem comes from within, not from the acceptance of others. When your sense of worth comes from within, you free yourself from comparisons with others and will enjoy a greater sense of internal security. You will no longer be bogged down by the experiences of others and can become much more self-reliant.
Your greatest successes will come from some of the smallest actions in terms of meeting people. You will cause a “stacking effect” the more you meet and connect with people; conversely, people cannot connect with you when you are withdrawn and nothing will happen. You must do everything in your power to connect with as many people as possible.
A powerful sense of self will make all the difference in your life. You must understand that your sense of yourself and your capabilities come from inside of you, not from the external forces that have brought you to your current place in life. What you feel internally might be completely different from what the world is telling you, and you must learn to focus on the former rather than the latter.
Adopting a positive attitude will always bring you closer to success, as nobody wants to be associated with a losing side. Everyone wants to associate with and hire winners, and avoids losers. Nothing is more important than maintaining a positive attitude, as many employers hire people based primarily on attitude; with the right attitude, everything else will fall into place. You must look like you are on the winning team, even if times are tough; nobody wants to hire a loser.
Everyone tries to maintain a certain emotional state, and learning to control your own emotions will have a profound impact on your career. While everyone allows their emotional states to be influenced by outside events, there is no advantage in basing your own emotions on things that you cannot control. Allow yourself to discover happiness and fulfillment naturally, rather than making your emotions dependant on external circumstances. Your outlook will have a tremendous impact on your psychological health, as well as that of those around you.
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