Expediting Your Career Success – a Necessary Blueprint

Consider your career success as a worklife journey.  To embark on a major journey, you should first have a real idea of your destination.

This way, you’ll be able to plan adequately for your journey – directions, mode of transport, estimated costs, time, etc.

Skip that, and you’d end up wandering aimlessly. Or find yourself lost somewhere in middle of Timbuktu. Sure, you’re on a journey alright…but where?

Similarly, when it comes to planning for your career success, you will need a “destination” and a “roadmap”. That would be a clear vision of what you want, and specific goals to help you on your way to achieve your idea of success.

Creating A Vision of Your Career Success

To be truly effective in your pursuit of career success, you should first be able to visualize your “destination” – a clear vision of where you want to be in the future. It’s what you desire, your passion, your purpose in doing something.

Creating a vision is important. That gives you direction, a compass to direct you in making the best decisions, and taking the right actions that will propel you towards success. It’s what gets you excited and motivated to push beyond your self-imposed boundaries. It’s what keeps you focused and on top of the game.

At the start, take some time to envision how you see your career in your ideal future. Reflect on your passions, core principles and values you live by, and your purpose in working.

Remember to define your vision – make sure your vision is specific and clear. That becomes your starting point – the very foundation you will be building on. It is the ideal you will be striving for, to get close to.

It should be something that is in line with your values and principles, as well as your view of the future. Simply coming up with a vague vision of wanting to be “promoted” or “get ahead in your career” is not enough; it should be something more solid, tangible, and specific.

Examples of Your Career Success and tie to Mentorship

An example here would be:

Get financially free by age 30.

To work only 30 hours a week.

Become a healthier individual – both mentally and physically.

You can also think of the people in your company or in your industry that you admire and look up to – the kind of characteristics or habits you wish to emulate yourself. In fact, you can even ask them to be your mentor, to help you think things through on certain areas and advise you on what has worked for them.

Again, don’t restrain yourself too much when creating your own vision. Your vision is personal and unique – there is no right or wrong. It’s something that only you can decide for yourself, and this also is dependent on what you want to achieve in your career.

Remember, the point of creating a vision is to know your reason for doing something, and to help you be more focused and motivated.

Setting Your Goals for Your Career Success

But simply envisioning the future is not enough – that just reduces your vision to little more than a pleasant wish or dream.

Visions will remain unattainable when not coupled with goals. And this is where goals come in.

Goals are more specific and quantifiable targets – it’s the “roadmap” to your journey of career success. They act as benchmarks or milestones, aiding you in laying the path for the proper achievement of your vision. This also includes the tactics as well as strategies you use to work towards your vision.

To explain it simply, goals are a tool to help you take conscious steps each day to help you realize your vision of your career success.

Again, we have to emphasize here that a solid, clear vision first is important. The goals you set and work towards achieving should be in line with your vision. This keeps you focused on the big picture as to why you should complete your goals.

And a good approach to use when it comes to setting your work goals is the S.M.A.R.T.E.R approach to goal setting.  We will review the S.M.A.R.T.E.R. approach to goal setting in the next article.

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