No organization or person will succeed for long without a strategy; be part of a company with a strategic objective. Furthermore, you must develop your own overall strategic objectives for you life and career. Create daily to-do lists that will bring you closer to your goals; such tools keep you focused and enable you to accomplish far more than those without a strategy.
One of the most important aspects of the people around you is their definition of the “norm”; norms of acceptable behavior exist everywhere. Your own definitions of normal and acceptable will determine your success in life, as will those of the groups with whom you interact. Develop an understanding of the norms for the many groups in your life.
In this article Harrison discusses the importance of having open lines of communication. According to him this will consistently keep you employed. You need to be friends with everyone you meet in business and stop competing and seeing differences. You need to understand that you have no opponents. Your success will largely be determined by your ability to go into the world, find commonality and make friends with the people around you. You must abolish from your mind the idea that the people you are dealing with in your career and in business are your competition. You must get rid of the thought of competition. Be friendly with everyone you meet. Stop looking for differences, and do everything within your power to find affinity with other people. This will change your career permanently.
Change is the most beneficial thing that can happen to you; starting from scratch gives you the opportunity rebuild your life and career in the manner you see fit. You must find where there is upward movement and opportunities are being created, and ensure that your own structures and ways of operating are effective and relevant to you. Orient your life towards happiness and growth in everything you do.
Your mental toughness and the way in which you organize your mind are the two biggest determinants of everything that happens to you and whether or not you attain your full potential. Mental toughness can prevent any conceivable article from hindering you. Developing mental toughness changes everything for you, and once you have it you will believe in yourself and what you are doing, and you will greatly diminish your risk of failure.
You can never become too comfortable if you wish to be successful. Your success will largely depend on your ability to become dissatisfied with your current position. Successful people are never satisfied with the status quo, and constantly push beyond their comfort zone. When do you this and succeed, you set a new standard for normality in your life. Be continually dissatisfied, and always pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
When you are a commodity, you can be replaced on a whim and have no value beyond anyone else in the market. Do something that differentiates you from others. When you are unique, you are no longer someone whom employers can easily find on the open market and your value will increase. Establish yourself as irreplaceable due to your unique skills. Understand your employers’ needs and desired direction in order to create value for them.
Come to terms with how you feel and be open about it, and you will be much less likely to be affected by your dark side. Acknowledge your deepest and most profound feelings in order to improve your career and life. Your career will never reach its full potential unless you gain control of the personal matters that are negatively affecting your life. Allow your unconscious to be conscious and face what you are avoiding deep down to achieve your potential.
Information sharing, as exemplified by the internet, is changing the world for the better and is the way of the future. You must also become a force for sharing information in order to experience progress and achieve your goals.
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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