If you’re like most professionals, every day brings a new set of challenges – new assignments, shifting market conditions, changing customer needs. No matter what your specific role or industry, one of the constants in your career is change. There are decisions to be made moment-to-moment and day-to-day, that require your consideration. That can be completely overwhelming. When there are so many shifting circumstances, it can be difficult to know what to do.
That’s where having a consistent set of guiding principles can help.
Guiding principles are a set of ideas or theories about how the world works. They give you a lens through which you can understand and address the circumstances coming your way. They provide a way of thinking about the situations you’re in and generating solutions for them.
As a consultant and coach, I’ve developed my own set of guiding principles over the years that drive the work I do with my clients. They are core ideas – ways of looking at the world – that have helped my clients achieve their career goals.
Having them means that I can provide consistently effective coaching, regardless of my clients’ circumstances. I’ve used them with CEOs and with first-time managers and everyone in between. With clients from sales, marketing, manufacturing, engineering, technology, and many other fields.
Following these principles, clients have gotten promoted, they’ve successfully landed new jobs, and they’ve become more effective as leaders in their own organizations.
For example, I’ve worked with several clients who were recently promoted. Any time you start a new job, there is a tremendous amount of work to take on. You need to onboard to your new role and responsibilities, build relationships, and often make decisions you’re not ready to make. That can be quite overwhelming. You can end up feeling like you’re scrambling around, flying blind. In those situations, applying these guiding principles gives my clients a place to start. Using them, they see where they need to focus their efforts. From there, they can do the work that matters most. That sets them up for success in their new role – which then leads to their next promotion, and so on.
I’ve also worked with clients who felt they should have been promoted but weren’t. They felt they were being overlooked – that they didn’t have the respect or influence they needed to get ahead. Using these same principles, I’ve helped them tap into their strengths, and build their reputations so that they could land that next promotion – whether that was at their current company, or somewhere else.
I’ve also applied these principles to help people find new jobs. They learn how to tell the story of their career in a compelling way, and to build rapport with their interviewers. They also learn how to determine whether the company and the role are a good fit for them – again setting themselves up for success.
These same principles apply when someone needs to rebuild their reputation after a bad performance review or needs to work around a difficult colleague – including a difficult boss. I’ve used them over and over again to help clients figure out what to do, how to handle the situation, and how to feel confident in the face of the challenges in front of them.
The result is that they move through their careers with more success and less overwhelm.
I’m going to be sharing these five principles that my clients have used for their success in a live training on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at noon Eastern, so you can begin to apply them in your career as well. Register here.
Whether you adopt mine or find your own, articulating a set of guiding principles for your work can contribute significantly to your career. When you know what you stand for as a leader, and what you believe drives success, you can perform consistently. That helps to reduce overwhelm because you’ll know that whatever the challenge, you can handle it.
Please join me on May 3, 2023 to discover the five core shifts – the guiding principles – that I believe clients need to make in order to have satisfying careers, where they’re getting the recognition, the pay raises, and the respect that they deserve.
The workshop will include live Q&A, so even if you have already seen another training where I’ve shared them, this training will be a great opportunity to find out more about how to apply them in your career.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Here’s a video if you prefer to watch and listen to me talk about this topic:
