Opportunities and how to get prepared to them

I’ve already wrote a very wide and generic article about career talking about guidelines and macro objectives. Then the self-retrospectives and motivation check came to help you to keep on the track. But even if you accomplish all of your own objectives as a master, if your goal is a promotion or a new position in your company, you will need an opportunity to grow.

Then let’s talk a bit about posture and how people will look at you while you are trying to grow, and how you will be evaluated to receive that opportunity or not.

Life objectives and your behavior

When you are planning a trip, moving to your own apartment, making a move towards that person you always have a look, you are very well motivated, right? When you talk about that stuff, you are always motivated and specially your humor is always good. So since you act like that to everything that really MATTERS to you, why don’t you apply this behavior to your career?

A research from Harvard tells that people with good humor at the work place seem more confident and competent. Your work place is not a place to make jokes during all the time, but it is a place to be optimist.

A very known cliché sentence very helpful here. You are the image people have from you, and not what’s inside your mind. It means that if you are a pessimist person, always complain, always find something to judge someone, people will end having a bad thought of you. When they think of inviting you to do something important, you can be discarded because people tend to get distance from those who just complain. Sports can be very helpful here. Serotonin is not fiction. It changes your humor and consequently how you will face the things that come to your day. If you are happy, everything will be easier. If your mood is not good, everything will start as a problem.

Being critical is an important quality, do not loose that. But when a moment of discussion come and your thought is to disagree, try to realize if you are disagreeing because there is a real problem or because you are putting a barrier to that subject by yourself. You won’t win all the fights, so pick up and win the important ones. For the rest, to try improve them as much as you can with your ideas.

Be consistent

Nobody likes people who always change their mind. It causes the impression of untrustworthy. So be consistent with your thoughts and don’t change your mind with the flow. Get your principles and stand with them, but you will have to know how to negotiate something different.

It doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. Changing is good, and on labor environment it’s turning into something very valuable. But always change to a level above. That phase when people had proud and wouldn’t change their mind even if it means loosing their business is gone. When you change, it means you learned something new that made you improve your mind, and then you evolved, and then you got better.

Be prepared

The opportunities will come for those who are ready. You already have a plan to develop your knowledge (as explored here) and now you will be able to develop a plan to your own look and how people look at you.

An example of assuming an opportunity and getting prepared for the others: for sure you are a reference for someone in something in your life. You can be a leader for something trivial in your life, such as the sunday’s family barbecue. It’s you who invites everybody, picks up needed stuff, goes to kitchen and tell jokes to make everyone happy during that moment. Now imagine yourself when you are performing this activity. It’s so natural you don’t have to think about doing the next thing. Someone will admire how you do the things you do. In this case your specialty is to be a good cook. Now whenever you get into a new group of friends and the barbecue time doesn’t have a leader yet, you will have the opportunity to get there, coordinate everything and the benefit of making new friends easily.

Now why don’t you get prepared for something like that in your work? What’s your companies goals for next year? For sure there’s one you will fit inside. How can you get prepared to be a reference for some of them?

Show you are prepared

Your physical appearance means and tells a lot about you. When you see someone at the streets yelling, complaining or with a bad look in their face, you will get distance from them. So your clothes and how you talk business matter. Don’t underestimate anyone who’s around you.

Since people don’t know what’s inside your mind, you have to show what’s your will. Sharing knowledge about that specific subject you are getting prepared to receive an opportunity is a good start. Also giving speeches and being a professor, can be activities to make you turn into a reference for that something new.

You will receive an opportunity if you are well prepared to that. So try to talk to people you actually want it and to walk around people who can actually give you that.