Your professional self - your work - should contribute to unlocking your vast reservoir of untapped potential and creating the future you want. If it's doing the opposite, taking time out to consider these six questions is essential.
What does success mean to you personally?
One of the keys to unlocking a motivational environment is to clearly understand your personal goals and how being successful at work can be one of the vehicles and enablers in helping you realise your goals. The moment we create the bridge in our mind - the link between our personal goals and what we do daily during work - self-motivation kicks in.
What does success mean to you professionally?
When you align personally and professionally your meaning of success and more importantly, the 'WHY you do what you do', this becomes a defining moment. It's the moment you change from someone with a job to someone with a purpose. You acknowledge and accept what you want to achieve professionally, which may be different from what you thought you wanted to achieve.
Are you clear about your personal and professional tensions and trade-offs?
When you are clear about what success means to you, both personally and professionally, you can design your working life, fully aware of the tensions and trade-offs you're making. For example, if you're seeking a promotion, you may accept the extra hours you have to work to prove you've got skin in the game, or you may not. You remove the pressure to be someone that you're not or don't want to be. You remove the potential conflicts weighing you down and the imbalance that goes with it.
What requires your most attention?
Our lives have many facets; work, home, family, friends, colleagues, partners and perhaps children. And over the years commitments have crept in, almost unnoticed, to the point where there are probably multiple versions of you - all with differing demands and expectations. The answer isn't to become universally excellent at all of them, but to understand which one requires the most attention at any given point. Remember, there may be many versions of you, but only one physical you.
Is your work-life balance aligned to your WHY?
So many successful people achieve high levels of professional success only to find when they get there, their relationships have fallen apart, or it's not something they want to be chasing. You might be feeling you've ended up in a place that is now entirely wrong for you. Revisit what success means to you and challenge whether this is where you want to be.
What is truly worthy of your time?
It's so easy to get caught up in the mechanics of the working day, and before you know it days, weeks or even months have passed. Ask yourself what is truly worthy of my time? If you find you're spending more time on tasks and activities which quite clearly you shouldn't be, then now is the time to change this because if you don't, nobody else will. One of the six core human needs is the need for growth - for emotional, intellectual or spiritual development. If you are not learning and bettering yourself every day, then you are not growing. Taking time out will make sure you invest time in you.
This guest post was authored by Royston Guest
Royston Guest is a leading authority on growing businesses and unlocking people potential. Entrepreneur, author of #1 best-seller Built to Grow and RISE: Start living the life you were meant to lead, CEO of Pathways Global and founder of The Business Growth PathwayÔ and Pti Worldwide.
Ms. Career Girl was started in 2008 to help ambitious young professional women figure out who they are, what they want and how to get it.
