It can be demoralising to stay in a position where you know you are not being fully valued, or given the freedom to do all that you know you’re capable of. You may start to wonder if you will ever get ahead, or whether you have reached a dead end. If you’ve been dreaming about being promoted, advancing your career, and starting to move up in your industry, you might have started to wonder if there is a secret to progressing. Well, there is a secret, and it’s far more simple than you might have realised.
You may have heard the phrase “Excellence is hard to keep quiet.” This means that when you are great at what you do, it’s hard for the people who matter not to notice. Others will be swept away by your reliability and results. When it comes to making your career move forward, this advice is indispensable. Whether you are trying to catch the attention of a manager for a promotion, or you are a self-made professional, the secret to progressing your career is simply to be good at what you do right now. You may be asking, “How can something so simple be true”?
By focussing on the present, you are putting your energy into achieving excellence. Far too often, we waste our precious time dreaming of the future, resenting a lack of acknowledgment, or trying to overtly convince someone of our value. This kind of thinking will not get you very far, and may even pull you backward.
The truth is, when you are able to truly invest all of your energy and brainpower into being great at what you do, this will inevitably begin to pay off. You will find yourself more readily acting on opportunities and showing off what makes you great. When you are dedicated to doing well now, you will find that you have stopped expending energy that will get you nowhere, and start building bridges that can take you to where you actually want to be.
People get promoted when they focus on being good at their job. Managers want employees who can make them look good and who have good values. To do this, you need to be excellent. You can only truly achieve excellence by being diligent in your job and making that good impression on a daily basis.
Having this self-starting and self-improving attitude will also help to build valuable leadership qualities. When someone is stepping into a position of leadership, they will need to be the herald of how the workplace will be performing. That means that they are setting the stage and choosing the song that the rest of the employees will move to. Without the ability to focus on doing well in the present, a workplace will suffer.
Certain behaviours will get you noticed, and others will make you disappear into the noise. Help yourself by choosing behaviours that exemplify responsibility and a true desire to do well, because that is exactly what managers are looking for. Even if your current role isn’t where you see yourself in the long term, the experience you gain when you set out to do your best will be testament to your abilities when the time comes to move on to bigger and better things.
