This can be the Secret Weapon Employees Can Use for Their Growth

You are already employed but you want to have quicker career growth. But in the present-day context, when there is cut-throat competition everywhere including in workplaces, this aspiration seems to be a difficult one. The question now is: Is it really impossible to accelerate your career growth? Experts in the career field emphatically say that it is certainly possible to achieve faster career growth. But it may not be a cakewalk. It needs some purposeful efforts. More particularly, you need to use a secret weapon for achieving your aim. You may be eager to know what this weapon is. Let us find out. But once you know and use this weapon appropriately, you are certain to become the most valuable employee of your company. Needless to say, the quick career growth you have been aspiring for will automatically be ready for your grab as well.

How KK could achieve this quick career growth?

KK was a teacher in a school that was run by a missionary. Compared to many other teachers of the school, she was younger, though her academic qualifications were as good as those of others, if not better. But when the school management decided to open a new branch, they appointed KK as its principal. You may wonder why. KK had less experience than many other teachers. She was younger than many of the teachers as well. But what made the management decide to appoint her as the principal of their new branch? The reason was KK, knowingly or unknowingly, was using the secret weapon  

Please do not come to the conclusion that teachers alone can use this weapon. Employees who are working in other fields can use this weapon also. Unfortunately, this secret weapon may not be visible to many including you because it is sandwiched between selfishness and ego. But if you do not identify this weapon to use it appropriately, you are likely to get frustrated. As an expert puts it, "frustration can be a ruthless career killer." Your focus will get blurred and hence, you will not make smart and wise decisions. Thanks to this focus-shrinker, you will find it more difficult to accomplish your aim having quick career growth.  

This again will corrupt the files of your brain. You will start thinking "I am not good enough to achieve quicker career growth." The only way to get over this is to first take the following step for getting rid of these corrupt files of your brain.

Instead of always thinking of your shortcomings, start focusing on your positives. This means when your mind wanders and starts thinking about your negative points, you should tune out your mind first. You should then turn the radar of your mind towards your positives. Of course, you may find this exercise difficult to do in the initial stages but if you consistently practice and bring back your mind and force it to think only of your positives, you will succeed in this step in due course of time. Remember that when you shoot for the moon, there may be many misses. But you should not fail to re-aim.

Once you remove the corrupt files from your brain, you will be ready to use the secret weapon that can help you achieve accelerated career growth. The time is now ripe to talk about this weapon.

When you are hired, you sign certain documents that state that you will be discharging the duties or tasks assigned to you and for this, the company will be paying you a certain salary. But if you think that you can achieve quicker career growth just by doing your tasks and completing them on time, you are very much wrong. In fact, authorities who manage almost all companies expect something more from you. But your ego may say, "I am doing the tasks assigned to me and the company is paying me for this. How can the company expect something beyond this?" If this is your attitude, you can never achieve quicker career growth. 

Now, what does this mean? You should be ready to do much more. This is the secret weapon, KK, the teacher in the school, used. Apart from teaching the students of her class, she assumed other responsibilities as well such as managing the office of the school, distributing books, organizing meetings, and so on. In short, she was shouldering more responsibilities, though she was appointed only for teaching. She could have emulated other teachers and focused just on her teaching duties. But she did not. She was ready to shoulder more responsibilities. That paid off handsomely. The management did not think even a minute for appointing her as the principal of the new branch they opened. 

Therefore, the secret weapon that can get you quicker career growth is: You should do much more than paid for. It may be in the form of becoming the go-to person for having innovative suggestions for the improvement of the company's business, it may be actual work in the form of assisting other teams in their projects, and so on. There are various ways of doing this. If you apply your mind, you will get innumerable ideas. Therefore, use this weapon and achieve quicker growth in your career.

Stop These Career-Killing Attitudes

When we have unpleasant experiences, many of us tend to put our minds into autopilot and start imagining things. For example, when you do not get the promotion you have all along been thinking you will get, you may immediately come to the conclusion that you are not good enough for getting it. Still worse, you may think that you will never be good enough during your entire career and so, you will never get that promotion.

If such a self-depreciating thinking is an isolated incident, you need not worry. But if you allow a torrent of such thoughts to wreck your life, this is an attitudinal problem. They are also known as cognitive distortions. You must therefore stop them because they may kill your career. If you have this problem, you may tend to interpret a simple event in such a manner that it may cause extreme mental stress. 

The greatest problem with this attitude is it may negatively impact your self-esteem. Eroded self-confidence will affect your productivity. You should therefore know about some of the cognitive distortions so you can stop those attitudes.

Projecting an isolated failure upon every endeavor you undertake

During the course of doing your job, you can not rule out failures. But projecting an isolated failure on future endeavors is wrong. Experts call this as "Black-or-White Thinking."

For stopping this, you must learn to listen how your mind speaks. When you hear your mind speaking such an extreme and unrealistic language, you must push those thoughts out. You must instead recall your past endeavors in which you achieved success. You can also recall the promotions you got or the occasions when you were showered with heaps of praises by your managers and co-workers for well-executed tasks..

Failing to take control of situations when something goes wrong.

When you face a tricky situation and if you allow your negative imagination to fly high, you will not be able to think in the right perspective. Not only that, you may conclude the outcome of the situation may be catastrophic. Such Catastrophic Thinking will not allow you to take control of the situation. 

So, when you face such situations, you must study the situations well to know if there are any areas that can be controlled. You can be certain that regardless of the seriousness of a situation, there may be certain steps upon which you may have control. Therefore, take appropriate action and do your best. This will reduce your stress.

Not allowing the positives to influence your thinking

Risks of failures will always be there. As experts put it, only if you do not take any action, you can avoid failures. But it you fail in a particular task, it is not that you will fail in whatever you do. In fact, you may have accomplished many things in your career. You must not forget those positives. If you forget them, you will be allowing only negative thoughts to reside cozily in your mind. 

The right approach to get rid of this problem is to to forcibly tune your focus only on your positives. You can keep a journal that contains all your accomplishments. Whenever you are staring at a failure, you should immediately take out the journal and go through its contents so you will not allow negative thinking to take on the reins.

Coming to conclusions without knowing the complete facts

When you come across a situation, you should not come to conclusions without studying all the facts completely. This may lead to a lot of stress. You must therefore ask yourself whether you have all the facts and if you have studied them fully. In short, your conclusions should be based only on facts and facts alone.

External control may be a fallacy

Many a time, all of us think that we become victims of circumstances. For example, if you have failed in an interview, you are only responsible for that. You may not have prepared well for the interview session. There is absolutely no external control here. In fact, when you analyze any situation, external control may be a fallacy. You should therefore not blame your circumstances or others for your failures. If you do so, it shows you are not taking responsibility for your life.

To summarize, only if you recognize that you have such attitudes, you will be able to overcome them. You must implant new and different thought patterns in your mind so you can push out the distorted thoughts. If you learn to challenge these career-killing attitudes, you can not only get rid of your stress but can build your self-confidence as well. This will go a long way in helping you climb your career ladder.