Commitment to your career success is one the four success principles I discuss in my latest career success coach book Success Tweets. Staying committed to your career success when things are going well is pretty easy. Staying committed when things are going poorly can be more difficult.
Tweet 32 in Success Tweets offers this career advice. “Stuff happens as you go about creating your life and career success. Choose to respond positively to the negative stuff that happens.” In other words, if you want to become a career success you need to be resilient.
Sam Parker of GiveMore.com has some of the best career advice on being resilient that I’ve come across. Check it out…
Sam Parker’s 4 Point Career Advice on How To Be Resilient…
1) Focus on results. Embrace the fact that results are what we’re all really after. Effort and attempts are great first steps, but we need to act with commitment to delivering (just like we want people to do for us).
2) Make lessons of failures. Minimize the tendency to make a mistake anything more than a lesson on how not to do something. We need to learn from our experiences and accept them as tuition for future success. And yes… Our mistakes might put us in a bind at times and have some uncomfortable consequences but again, that’s real life.
3) Continue on. Smarter.
4) Reinforce. Support each other (and ourselves) by continually reminding and encouraging one another to deliver on the first three points.
You can learn more about Sam Parker and his approach to creating your life and career success on his website, http://www.givemore.com. Be sure to check out Sam’s Pocket Cards. They can help you on your journey to the life and career success you want and deserve.
Resilience is echoed in a lot of life and career success writings. Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has this to say…
“It’s not really what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well.”
Dr. Covey provides some great career advice here. We can’t always choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we react to both the positive and negative experiences we have as we go through life. Successful people choose to make lemonade out of lemons. Unsuccessful people choose to complain about the bitter, tart taste of the lemons they are handed.
I know the “lemons into lemonade” career advice is a cliché. However, clichés become clichés because they have an underlying truth.
The important career success point here is that we human beings are blessed with free will. As such, we can choose what we do and how we react to the world around us. We can choose a positive, productive path; or we can choose a path of self pity and inaction – and hurt only ourselves in the end.
Dr. Covey has another quote about resiliency that I really like…
“Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn’t a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.”
I think the concept of carrying your own weather with you also is great career advice. Choosing to react positively to the negative people and events in your life is the best way to carry your weather – and to take personal responsibility for your life and career success.
The common sense career success coach point here is clear. Successful people know that they can choose how they respond to everyone they meet and everything that happens to them. They know that “the devil made me do it” is never an accurate statement. They follow the career advice in Tweet 32 in Success Tweets. “Stuff happens as you go about creating your life and career success. Choose to respond positively to the negative stuff that happens.” If you want to create the career success you deserve, remember Stephen Covey’s advice. Carry your weather with you. In this way, whether it rains or shines on the outside, it will be sunny on the inside. Choose to react positively to the negative people you meet, and the negative things that happen to you. When you do, you’ll find that you’ll have less negative things happening and fewer negative people entering your life.
That’s my take on Sam Parker and Stephen Covey’s career advice on being resilient. What’s yours? Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment. As always, thanks for reading my musings on life and career success.
Bud
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