Thoughts over coffee: Part fourteen (Part two - career acceleration)

*** *** I've had to come up with strategies to push forward, become better, learn more skills, hone the ones I have and generally to continually improve in my professional career; it's in my nature a human being because staying in place, not moving forward is tantamount to going backwards compared to others who develop, grow and progress - not something I'm willing to accept. Here's the second of two installments on some skills I've learned and used to accelerate my career and to progress. It's never just been about promotion and more income, it's always started with the need to continually improve and my desire to chase excellence rather than perfection. ### Career acceleration **Time management** - I'll keep this short in the interest of time management. Get good at it however you can. use lists, focus-time, diaries and calendars, a personal assistant (I have had many and they work well if one knows how to run them properly.) Wasting time is never going to help progress a career, it will do the opposite. **Negotiation skills** - I've spoken about this before but it's so important I'm mentioning it again. Most people are terrible at negotiation because they don't listen attentively, fail to understand others or core issues, are scattered in their thoughts, distracted, don't seek mutual benefit, are egotistical and prideful and other such things. Brainstorming is something I like to do, finding loads of bad ideas that won't work is a great segway to a few good ones that might. Exploring options, discussing them in an environment where everyone has a voice and addressing the needs of all parties is a great place to start. If you are not good at negotiation and want to accelerate your career then get good at it. **Self-awareness and reflection** - To this day, I reflect on my performance, what I say, how meetings have been, how I negotiated, how my body language presented, my level of preparation, the wins and losses and so on. It helps to identify areas of improvement, things I do well to build on and things I need to improve. It's about being honest, looking as objectively as possible and having the bravery to accept the faults and failures, to actively seek change and to continually improve. Not doing this is professional suicide. **Decisiveness** - Indecision is the enemy of a person seeking to progress in their career and especially so if one is a leader of others. On the battlefield it's better for a leader to make bad decisions (as often happens) than none at all - one has the chance of success and one is a certain failure. It's important to know when and how to consider the risks, how to mitigate them, recover from or reverse them and the benefits as well. Understanding how and where to pivot and being versatile and flexible enough to do so is also advisable as is the point above *self-awareness and reflection* because after decisions are made and results ensue (good or bad) one needs to understand the why and how of it to better make decisions next time. Making no decisions is in fact a decision to fail whereas a bad decision can usually be recovered from, or learned from. So get decisive. *** What do you reckon? If you want to comment below then go ahead, I'm interested in your thoughts and experiences.