10 Career Essentials

Excel at Your Career by Using Your Personality Type

Donna Dunning

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781857885422
• eBook ISBN: 9781473643383
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

There are many books to help you choose a career, but few to help you excel in the workplace once you are working. Over the course of a lifetime, people can spend 80, 000 hours on the job. With this much time invested, author Donna Dunning asserts that your career should be interesting, motivating and rewarding. And in our competitive, rapidly changing society, you need to know how to be effective and competent at work or you may find yourself unemployed or passed over for promotion. Focusing on day-to-day behaviour and providing practical tips and strategies, 10 Career Essentials becomes your personal career coach by showing you how to work effectively, get recognition and steer your career in the direction you want to go. The ideas such as optimizing your outlook, exceeding expectation and thriving in uncertainty may sound simple, but applying them takes skill and practice. 10 Career Essentials provides the key self-assessment tools and tips to stimulate learning and improve your ability to implement your personal career strategy to its fullest.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

Work is a central part of our lives, with an enormous influence on our lifestyle and personal satisfaction. If you work full time for 40 years, you will spend more than 80,000 hours on the job. Since it consumes a significant part of your life, your career should be interesting, motivating, and rewarding.

There are books that teach you how to paint with watercolors, bake gourmet food, or fix a bicycle, but few that show you how to build career success. That’s where this book comes in.

In the following chapters, you will learn the ten essential career success strategies. Each chapter describes one of these essential strategies and provides self-assessment tools, questions, and tips to stimulate your understanding. Mastering the essentials is key to your career success.

The Ten Essential
Career Success Strategies

1. Ask yourself for directions

Career success means something different to everyone. It occurs when your career direction aligns with who you are and what is important to you. To build a successful career, you need to determine what success looks like for you. After you define success, you can set and meet your personal career and life goals. When you master this success strategy, you channel your efforts in the right direction to ensure that your career brings you personal and professional satisfaction.

2. Optimize your outlook

People quickly judge you based on what you do and say and how you look, walk, and talk. When you take care of yourself, manage stress, and demonstrate a positive attitude and confidence, people enjoy interacting with you and value your contribution. Optimizing your outlook improves both your health and your career success. When you have a positive attitude and believe in and take care of yourself, you can reach your goals more easily.

3. Put yourself in charge

When you put yourself in charge of your career, you take ownership of your mistakes and accomplishments. You stand behind what you say and do. When you take responsibility for your words and actions, you link your efforts to success and learn from your mistakes. Others count on you and see you as determined, dependable, reliable, and dedicated, all qualities much needed and rewarded in the workforce.

4. Learn from everyone

Everyone can teach you something. To be successful, you need to pay attention to what others have to say. You benefit when you listen carefully, gain a clear understanding of others’ expectations, and respond positively to feedback. When you strive to learn from anyone, you begin to embrace multiple perspectives, benefit from corrective feedback, and develop rapport. If you are open to, and eager to learn from, others, many opportunities will come your way.

5. Relate to anyone

Your career success depends on your ability to express yourself clearly, directly, and diplomatically. When you share your perspectives and provide information and constructive feedback, you leave little room for miscommunication or misunderstanding. When you relate to everyone, you resolve conflicts and problems so that everyone benefits. You accomplish your goals by working cooperatively. Mastering this career success strategy provides you with a network of contacts willing to support your career development.

6. Cultivate your curiosity

Our information- and Internet-focused age offers a wealth of facts and ideas. When you cultivate your curiosity, you manage the large amounts of information available and become a lifelong learner. You are interested, up-to-date, knowledgeable, and aware. You use what you learn to help you work more effectively. You understand your learning style and use learning strategies to retain important information. Others are confident in your ability to learn new skills and apply new information, and they will think of you when opportunities or challenges arise.

7. Disentangle your thoughts

To be successful at work, you need to hone and direct your thinking to deal with the situation at hand. When you disentangle your thoughts, you can consider and then select the right approach, strategies, and tools for making decisions and tackling tasks and problems. You make well-thought-out decisions and solve problems effectively. Others see you as resourceful and strategic. You use a flexible combination of thinking modes: practical, creative, global, logical, and humanistic.

8. Exceed expectations

Others need to know they can count on you to achieve exceptional results. To exceed expectations, you must prioritize, plan, organize your time and activities, and persist. When you work to a high standard and continuously look for ways to improve your work, people see you as results oriented, productive, persistent, efficient, and effective. When you show pride in your work and take initiative, others know you will do a good job, and they feel confident offering you new and important tasks and projects.

9. Thrive in uncertainty

Those who are successful in their careers accept that the world is changing rapidly. To thrive in uncertainty, you need to take a heads-up approach to work, observing patterns and trends and anticipating change so you can quickly adjust. When you thrive in uncertainty, you make the most of opportunities by being adaptable and proactive, and you position yourself for success. Others see you as flexible and versatile, and they are confident in your ability to cope with unexpected changes.

10. Promote your progress

To create your success, you need to let others know your goals and aspirations so they can assist and guide your progress. You can also promote your skills, interests, experience, and other valuable personal qualities. Self-promotion opens the door to opportunities by showing people who you are and what you can do.

How to Use This Book

The starting point for your career development is self-awareness. Each chapter in this book stimulates your thinking and encourages you to identify your unique learning needs. Only you can decide which of the essential career success strategies you already use well and which you need to develop. Each chapter contains self-assessment tools. These tools help you identify and make the most of your strengths, and highlight potential areas for development. Each chapter also provides tips for optimizing the career success strategy.

Chapter 2 introduces personality type as a tool for customizing your learning. Personality type can help you understand your personal learning style and work preferences. Personality type tips in each chapter show you how to tailor the career success strategies to your personal preferences.

To get the most from this book, interact. Complete the self-assessment exercises, think about and answer the questions, and use the reflection and action exercise at the end of each chapter to set personal goals. Each career strategy is linked to concrete behaviors you can learn. Take control by choosing behaviors you want to change. Only you can create your ideal career path.

Self-assessment is not always easy. Ask for feedback from those willing to support your learning. They may be able to help you target areas for improvement and growth. They also can encourage and assist your efforts as you strive to improve.

This book is designed to help you create career satisfaction and success on your own terms. Enjoy your journey.

CHAPTER TWO
Ask Yourself for
Directions

Career success is commonly measured by money, power, and prestige. However, these are not the only sources of work satisfaction. Only you can define what your career success looks like. You have a unique combination of interests, skills, values, and personality preferences. You are in a specific situation, faced with your own set of constraints, and in search of a suitable lifestyle. This chapter will help you identify your personal approach to work and clearly define your career goals and aspirations.

When you use your natural preferences and strengths every day, work becomes more interesting and rewarding. Knowing your personality preferences can help you decide what your own career success will look like. Personality type, based on the work of Carl Jung, identifies your natural preferences and strengths. You can use personality type to figure out how you prefer to do your work. When you know how you prefer to work and what kind of work you prefer to do, you can choose the right career direction and focus your energy on career success.

Jung’s theory of personality type has been expanded and popularized through the work of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. This mother-daughter team created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality inventory, a nonjudgmental assessment tool for identifying personality type that has thrived through more than 60 years of research and development.

This chapter will help you identify your natural personality preferences and provide strategies for clarifying your life and career goals. It is not designed to help you choose a career or change careers. Rather, it is designed to help you hone your existing career and life goals. If you are unsure of your career direction, you may want to engage in a more complete career-planning process, such as that described in the companion book What’s Your Type of Career?

10 Career Essentials provides you with a review of the personality type preferences assessed by the MBTI® instrument and an informal way to self-assess your preferences. By reading the descriptions and filling in the check boxes on the next pages you will start to discover your natural personality preferences. It is important to note that the descriptions given here are general, so not all statements will apply to you or any other specific individual.

The preferences you express and develop are greatly influenced by your current situation and past experiences. There are many personal and situational factors that may influence how you see yourself. You may have ignored your natural disposition and learned the skills and attributes of an opposing preference in order to be successful. You may be at a point in your life where you need to or choose to develop preferences you have not used much in the past. Others may be encouraging or pressuring you to demonstrate behaviors that don’t align with the way you naturally would prefer to act. For these reasons, a single checklist may not provide enough information for you to sort out what is learned and expected from what is natural for you.

To most accurately identify your natural preferences it is best to complete the official MBTI^® instrument. The Association for Psychological Type International (APTi) can refer you to a specialist in your area who can administer and interpret the MBTI® personality assessment. The URL for the APTi website is www.aptinternational.org. You can also take the official MBTI^® personality assessment online at www.mbticomplete.com. This online version of the personality assessment guides you through an interpretation process to validate your personality preferences.

In personality type theory, the characteristic ways in which you prefer to function and orient yourself to the world are grouped into four pairs. You will naturally prefer one element of each pair to the other. By choosing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Ask Yourself for Directions
• Chapter 3: Optimize Your Outlook
• Chapter 4: Put Yourself in Charge
• Chapter 5: Learn from Everyone
• Chapter 6: Relate to Anyone
• Chapter 7: Cultivate Your Curiosity
• Chapter 8: Disentangle Your Thoughts
• Chapter 9: Exceed Expectations
• Chapter 10: Thrive in Uncertainty
• Chapter 11: Promote Your Progress
• Additional Resources
• Index