Sometimes it feels like everyone is finding success and satisfaction except us.
If you are feeling a little down on your luck and are looking for a way to turn your situation around, here are the four key ingredients of a more successful life.
Show Initiative
Showing initiative is a skill that any employer will value. Demonstrating that you have initiative is one thing, but you need to demonstrate it in the right way. After all, anyone can take the initiative and do things their own way. You will only be rewarded for your initiative if you are making well-reasoned and sensible decisions. Initiative must go hand in hand with restraint, otherwise, you are nothing but a loose cannon and a liability.
Another way you can show initiative in taking the lead with your own self-improvement is by electing to learn valuable skills and knowledge on your own. Have a look at the full range of courses you can receive tutoring in through Superprof’s private tutors (an online site for finding private tutors in a range of subjects) and see how many of them would provide you with knowledge relevant to your career. They could even form the basis of an entirely new professional pursuit. Businesses love an employee who will train and improve themselves without costing the company a penny!
Develop a Work Ethic
Developing a strong work ethic will make a bigger difference to your success level than any other change you can make. With a better work ethic, you will be working smarter, and being considerably more productive. You have probably heard the old adage that you should “work smarter, not harder”. This is an important rule to remember, but it should not be an excuse to actively avoid hard work.
Developing a work ethic is not simple. Well, developing the ethic, in theory, is easy, but implementing it and sticking to it until it becomes your default behavior will take a little more work on your part. However, as long as you are willing, and you don’t become disheartened when you slip, any of us has the power within us to make lasting, positive changes to our lifestyles.
A strong work ethic will obviously benefit you enormously as an individual, but it will also make you much more valuable to any future employers. When employers see that you are willing to work hard and that you intend on making hard work your default behavior, they will take note. If you want to progress through the ranks of any organization as fast as possible, demonstrating your commitment is a great place to start.
Learn to Prioritise Your Time
Prioritising and managing your time effectively is an essential skill in the world of business, but it is also a surprisingly difficult skill for many of us to nail down. If you have been to university, or even college, you will have at least some experience with organizing yourself and prioritizing your time appropriately. However, in order to seriously pursue the highest echelons of the corporate world, you will need to take these skills to the next level.
Prioritizing your time properly is about more than just making and sticking to a schedule. In many jobs, you will be constantly dealing with fluid situations and unexpected occurrences. Under such conditions, and within most high-pressure environments, you will need to be able to make decisions about how to prioritize your time on-the-fly.
You cannot always count on having the luxury of time to make important decisions. If you hope to lead a team of other workers, it is doubly important that you are able to make these decisions, as well as delegating them.
Break Your Lazy Habits
All of us are guilty of some level of laziness in our daily lives. And who can blame us? The world we live in seems to be designed with lazy people in mind. Technology continues to encourage us to zone-out, to sit-down, and to have the world come to us. This doesn’t mean that we are lazy people, but so common is this behavior that we often don’t even think about ourselves doing it. Once you start to think about your daily activities, and how many of them we are either not giving our due attention to, you begin to realize how easy it is to take the lazier road.
The best way of breaking your worst lazy habits is to tackle the smallest and easiest ones first. As you go about your day, just take a moment to consider each activity you do, and the way that you do it. When you identify areas where you are being lazier than you need to be, you should think about how you can most easily change this behavior. Once you have corrected yourself in a few small areas, everything else will fall into place much more easily.
Success is one of those things that seems to be unnaturally ethereal and elusive until we earn it that is within our reach. There are few feelings as satisfying as knowing that we have achieved the successes that we have long pursued. Anyone can obtain success, and as long as you are willing to put the effort in, anyone can turn themselves from zero to hero.
