3 Fundamentals to Master for a Successful Career
#3 Personal Branding
The biggest challenge entering the job market or being a young professional is spending your time wisely.
In today’s world, everything competes for your attention both in private and at your job. The constant pinging of slack messages, emails, and endless meetings clogging up your schedule make it a struggle to get your actual work done. And it can also be a struggle for you to get the attention you need to be successful.
The result is that many end up working extended hours. “If I just start a little earlier and finish a little later, then I will surely manage to get everything done.” But that is seldom the case. Your colleagues will quickly find that those off-hours are the best times to contact you, since you are free, and suddenly you are clogged up again.
And the risk of early burn-out or stress becomes a threat to your career and your health.
In the early days of my career I learned that 3 things were fundamental to become successful, some of them I got to practice at the university, and others I absolutely didn’t.
- Get your time management and structure sorted
- Learn how to present if you don’t already
- Mind your Personal brand and have clear values
I have a degree in communication and psychology, so presenting well was one of the points I had good practice with. But managing time and structure of a workday, not so much. As a student, it was easy to work odd hours to accommodate parties, work, and all sorts of fun activities. Personal branding, on the other hand, took me several years to get started on.
#1 Time management skills
Consider what kind of working life you want. Do you want to rise fast in the ranks or is it more important for you to have free time for friends, hobbies, or side projects?
Set clear goals for your career and set some basic rules for how you want your working life to look. For me, I grew up with a father who worked evenings, weekends, and even on vacations. So I decided that I wouldn't do that. I made it a rule not to work weekends or evenings.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. There have been times where deadlines required that sort of thing, but the rule is no. And I stick to it.
Ok, so what does that have to do with time management. Well, let me tell you. If you don’t want to work evenings and weekends, then you must practice being effective during the time you do work.
Strict Calendar control
Microsoft has come to the same conclusion and now Outlook will suggest that you schedule focus time in your calendar every day. That is because it really matters. You need to have long stretches of uninterrupted time to do actual work. So schedule that in your calendar. (And read up on flow states)
Schedule time to check your email in the morning and then try to let it be for most of the day. Check-in once in a while, but don’t look all the time. Email grabs attention and seems important at the moment, but it is rarely answering emails that will take your career to the next level. (Unless it’s your job of course).
Color-code your calendar
I use 3 colors in my calendar to help me structure the way I work. Yellow for timeslots booked to do work. Red for meetings. And orange for meetings that require preparation. Whenever an orange meeting is booked, there must be a yellow slot as well, to have time to get prepared.
Being prepared at meetings is one of the most essential things you can do to be successful.
Take a look at your calendar every morning and if it doesn’t have at least 30% yellow, then you will not get much work done. That won’t help your career.
Remove notifications on your phone and computer
Don’t have email pinging and red icons telling you how many emails you have unread. And remove banners or whatever pops up on your PC too. Remove noise and clutter to make it easy for yourself to focus on doing work.
#2 Learn how to present
Most white-collar jobs will require that you do presentations of some sort. From standing up in a crowded room introducing yourself to giving PowerPoint presentations to a large audience. Presenting is an art form and nailing this will impress people around you and help your career immensely.
It is never too early or too late to start practicing presenting yourself. The easiest place to start is preparing your personal elevator pitch that you can use at networking events or whenever you are meeting new people who can be of benefit to your professional career.
It is a common error whenever people ask about you to start reciting your resume. It is not interesting to hear your whole life story and one of the keys to getting people’s attention is remembering that most people would rather speak about themselves than listen to you.
That means you need something short, crisp, and catchy.
Use the DBC framework
This framework is well presented by Jodu Glickman in her Pitching yourself course on LinkedIn. The framework suggests talking about your Destination, Backstory, and Connecting the dots.
“How you leave others feeling after an experience with you becomes your trademark.” -Jay Danzie
First, you lead with your destination, where you want to go. This can be one of the most difficult questions to answer, which is why you need that reflection and practice before you are in a situation where you need that answer.
Ask yourself what you are excited about. What you want to do next or what you are trying to achieve today.
Next is your backstory. This is the easy part, where you talk about what you have done. The most important part here is that this is not your background. It is not your whole resume from primary school up until today. No, this is select elements of your past, that makes the story you are telling meaningful and believable.
Last, you connect the dots. Why is your backstory relevant to your destination? How is this a story that will frame you as someone interesting and worth hiring or getting to know? We’ll get back to that in the last chapter on personal branding.
How to be a master presenter
Well, presentations are not just about your personal pitch but even more about being strong in doing actual presentations. It’s been said many times, so I won’t go into detail with this. Read for instance how Chris Andersons, from Ted, writes about how to give a killer presentation.
At the core, a strong presenter knows how to tell a story and use of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.
- Ethos: Setting up your authority.
- Logos: How you use arguments to support your points and persuade the logical part of your brain.
- Pathos: Talking to your audience’s feelings. Feelings are a central element in engaging your listeners. Feelings are a strong conduit in retaining knowledge.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
You can also read this piece I wrote on public speaking and this one on doing presentations.
What is most important is that you practice. Get some formal training and then practice. Being a killer presenter can give you opportunities like nothing else.
#3 Personal branding and clear values
What are you known for? If you ask your colleagues about your strongest skills (By the way, you should do this at least once a year), what will they say?
Taking care of your personal brand is one of the fundamental points in building any career. Take control of the way you portray yourself online as well as in-person and develop a coherent story about yourself that drives toward the destination you want for your career.
Personal branding is more than just curating and building your online profile (You should still do that, by the way. Brandyourself.com has a pretty good guide for this). What is even more important is the relationships you build with other people and how you build them.
Are you the person everyone goes to when they need help? Or are you the one people come to when they want to complain about stuff?
Consider the stories you tell about yourself, what kind of person does this portray? Are those stories congruent with your goals?
How about the way you act in meetings, when presented with a project or when you are under pressure? Is that beneficial to the challenges you want to pursue next?
Be clear about the person you want to be
Being clear about the person you want to be and the goals you want to achieve. Any brand must be authentic and so does yours, so you cannot decide to be someone you are not. But you can choose to be deliberate about what elements of yourself you want to show more of and which you want to phase out.
Know your core values
What is important to you? If you want to be an honest person, then you must live by it in all aspects of your life. You can’t lie to your kids or your manager, even about trivial things, if you really want to be an honest person. (This does not mean you have to tell everything about everything all the time or be brutally honest. You can be honest, moderate, and respectful at the same time).
Be deliberate about the stories you tell others
The stories you tell others about yourself and others are a large part of how you are and what other people experience. If your stories build other people up, you will be seen as a positive person, and if you always tear others down then maybe you are seen as the funny person, but are you then management material?
Get to know yourself
Getting feedback from colleagues, friends, managers, and peers to better understand what others think about you, how they see you, is fundamental in improving your brand. What others see is your true brand and you need regular feedback to steer your course. Get to know what others see, to know yourself.
Get to know what others see, to know yourself
In summary
It is easy to get lost in getting work done and trying to impress everyone with what you have done. Don’t forget that how you get things done and the relationships you build along the way are equally important to be successful.
