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Fresh start

by Michelle Chapman

The arrival of 2008 is a perfect time to rethink your career and set new challenges for the year ahead. Maybe you’re thinking about getting a promotion or taking the next step in your career, so what can you do to ensure you get the position you want? Applying five simple techniques will give you a new set of skills for achieving results and creating success.

Focus on what you want. If you’re looking for a new position, it’s important that you know what you want and focus on it. People often know exactly what they don’t want; (“I don’t want to be bored,” or “I don’t want to work here any more”), but if you haven’t identified what you do want, how are you going to make it happen? The more specific you get about what you want in a job, the more aware you’ll become of the opportunities that surround you. You’ll begin to notice positions that meet your criteria and your motivation for the role will be clear to the person doing the recruiting.

Manage your state. How you feel has a significant impact on your career success. Have you ever missed out on an opportunity or not achieved something because you didn’t feel good that day and didn’t give your best performance? Or maybe you can remember a day when you woke up feeling great, the birds were singing, it was a beautiful sunny day and you just knew you were going to have a successful day? By realising that you’re in control of your emotions, you can consistently deliver your best performance and get the results you want.

Focus your mind. The thoughts in your mind moment by moment affect your success. What will you think as you enter an interview or a meeting with your boss to discuss a career opportunity? If you’re thinking to yourself, “I really hope I don’t mess this up”, you’ll be holding in your mind an internal thought of messing up.

Your mind cannot process a negative without a positive. This means that when you think about not messing up a job interview, you have to think about messing it up to think about not messing it up. There will be a detrimental effect on your performance when you hold in your mind an internal representation of messing it up. Instead, if you walk into an interview holding a thought about being confident, powerful and successful, it will have a positive impact on your performance.

The mind processes information through four main representational systems – feelings, pictures, sounds and self-talk (what you say to yourself in your head). You need to pay attention to all these things to get control over your thoughts, behaviour and, therefore, success. For example, are you saying to yourself “I don’t think I’m good enough to get this job”, or are you motivating yourself, giving yourself focus, confidence and pride?

Act as if you’re already there. Don’t wait until you’ve got the job to demonstrate the skill, drive and accountability required for the role. If you want a new job act as if you’re in the role already and behave accordingly. Consider your physiology, including your body posture. How would a future leader or manager walk into the room and sit in the chair? Should you sit straight with your head upright and shoulders back? Imagine yourself in five years’ time and tell yourself how you should be sitting in the interview to be successful and bring those future skills into the present.

Do whatever it takes. As long as you act ethically, do whatever it takes to achieve success and never give up. After many attempts at creating the electric light bulb, Thomas Edison was asked how he felt about his failure. He replied: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” See any mistake as an opportunity to learn. If an event doesn’t go your way, learn from it, understand what you can do differently next time and keep going.

Michelle Chapman, director of Inspired Change, is a member of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (info@coachinghk.org)