5 Essential Skills for Your Career Success

Your life and career can become much more successful by just concentrating your effort on building the five most essential skills!

These essential skills enable you to unleash much greater potential because they work around the most awesome asset - your mind power.

Whether you are confident or doubtful of your real capability, the truth is, everybody has enormous resources within them waiting for discovery. We all have the potential to build a strong mind and body that brings balance, harmony, success and abundance to our life and career.

You may have gone through years of education and training, but never learned the skill of managing your mind –the most powerful tool you ever possess. You may be highly trained in technical and professional skills, but neglected the need to put your mind on a power drive. A powerful mind is capable of drawing deeply into the inner resources for unlimited supply of wisdom and capability.

When a car engineer starts conceptualizing a new car model, the first thing to consider is not the size of the car or the engine power, but the power of the car brake. Without an adequate brake to control the car, all the engine power it has will only bring higher chance of disasters.

A person with personal power is typically balanced, poised, alert, focused, calm, resourceful, controlled, healthy and intuitive. He exudes an unmistakable aura of confidence and positive energy. The secret lies in his ability to garner the power of his mind, to develop a set of essential skills that form the basis of his personal power.

What are the critical essential skills that we all need, to build a successful career, to stay resilient in difficult time, and to become a better human being?

1. Health/Wellness Skills

A fit and healthy body, with boundless stress-free energy, is the foundation of a great life. When one is mentally and physically healthy, he is capable of doing the best work with his talents and expertise. In our competitive society, many people are driven to acquire more technical and professional qualifications at the expense of health. While these qualifications are important in securing a good job, if they are acquired at the expense of health, the long-term career will be greatly hampered when the body is unable to function well to deliver the best performance at work.

Wellness goes beyond physical fitness and health; it includes an optimism and passion for life. It builds mental strength to face challenges in life, as well as to celebrate these challenges as we embrace them. With the essential skills to develop your health and wellness, you lay a strong foundation for all other aspects of personal development.

2. Performance Skills

Peter Drucker, one of the great thinkers of modern management, observed that young executive stalled in their career because they don’t develop the skill to walk into a situation and grasp the whole picture at once – the gestalt.

It is amazing how much details we failed to notice, when our perception is clouded by our pre-conceptions, judgment and values. Our own thoughts are often quick to perform all the analysis, distracting ourselves from hearing, sensing and seeing the obvious that is just in front of us. By neglecting the change in voice tone, tightening of jaw muscle, tension in the shoulder, or subtle change in the eye, we often hear the words without getting the real message.

In executive career, our performance hinges on our ability to grasp the critical information that really matters, rather than being distracted by the fuzzy noises. Our performance depends on our ability to develop the essential skills in perceptual sensibility – our instinct, creativity and imagination.

Instinct, creativity and imagination can be learned and developed, and they go a long way in creating our success in career and life at large.

3. Visionary Skills

Today, with information growing at breakneck speed, the ability to see the future has become one of the most essential skills for career executives.

While not everyone is borne to be great visionary leader, everyone is capable of being the visionary of his own life. We all have the power to create our future if we master three essential skills – intuition, reasoning and decisiveness. With the inner skills that build intuition, reasoning and decision making, we create a vision for our future. As we develop better insights with our inner skills, we see greater clarity in our chosen path. With a future long-term path clearly in sight, our resolve is galvanized and our passion ignited.

There is nothing to stop a mind that is empowered in all capacities.

4. Leadership Skills

Great leaders lead people into massive actions to achieve massive success. They exercise personal power through three critical mind skills: Will, self-confidence and self-discipline.

Great leaders make things happen through powerful mind. With their mind power, they command respect, inspire awe, and garner admiration. Contrary to what most people would think, mind power is not a result of intelligence, talents, or education. Every human mind has enormous power. The success of individuals varies according to the extent they develop the essential skills to tap their mind power.

Even if you have no inclination to be great leader of people, you should at least be leader of your life. Whatever way you may define your goals of success, the critical factor is found in your mind power.


5. Spiritual Skills

While we can be empowered with knowledge, power and influence with the inner skills of our mind, these are incomplete on their own. Power corrupts, unless it is counter-checked by human spirit.

All the tools that we acquired with our mind power will not make us a complete human being, if the human spirit is lacking. Human spirit is the finest aspect of our personality. It brings freedom from fear and pain, and gives purpose and meaning to our life.

We often start our career defining what we know to be success, and work for it passionately years after years. Many of us reached varying degree of success in career and life, only to start rethinking what it all means. If we are not successful as human beings, all the material success looks painfully shallow.

Conclusion:

Utilizing the power of concentration, the successful executives build the following arsenal of essential skills:

• Health/Wellness Skills – for Balance




• Performance Skills – for Sensitivity




• Visionary Skills – for Insight




• Leadership Skills – for Power




• Spiritual Skills – for Harmony

When fully mastered, these essential skills enable you to build significant personal power to live an empowered, abundant and fearless life.