How To Infuse Your Career and Life with Empowering Options

The first fundamental step to infuse your career with a surge of career options is good work. Taking control of your career not only requires strategic branding but also means making your work visible. Framing success for any employer, recruiter, or network is challenging without good work. You make a case to your next employer by what you accomplish.

Your work is the only evidence to say you did the job well. If you want options, there is work to do, and it takes more than just a “to-do list.” You can apply my suggestions below to infuse your career and life to attract options when it’s time to make the next career move:

1. Infuse Your Career with Critical Thinking to Confront Complex Problems

Find solutions to complex problems and build processes to solve them. If you can be the one to train others to solve the problem, they’ll call you an expert. Correct answers make it easier for your coworkers, who depend on you to solve many other issues. In my conversation with Bethany Wallace a few months ago, she said being open-minded and “… always looking for the solution, always trying to check yourself against what you currently think to ensure that it’s even accurate.”

Instead of running from complexity, embrace the opportunities for solutions and what they will do for your team, job, and career. If you want a significant impact and a great reward, embrace and solve complex business problems. Find seams to make them easier to understand and more straightforward to solve.

2. Infuse Your Career with Resilience to Handle the Difficult Person

   via GIPHY

There are opportunities to be the hero, but it will cost you pride, a little dignity, and time. It’s an accomplishment when you calm a disgruntled person. If you can show others the method to your madness, they won’t send their problem children to you.

Before I got into management, I embraced the role of handling demanding clients and members. I was great at listening with empathy and tempering their frustration. My team appreciated it as much as my bosses did. I wasn’t perfect at it, but embracing the challenge bought me respect from the team and the organization. Respect and tact were noticed and rewarded in my performance reviews.

3. Infuse Your Career with Learning, Then Conduct The Training

Training is an implicit prerequisite to leadership. When you can break down concepts to explain analogies, anecdotes, and stories (even with humor), your career will reshape in value and add value to your brand.

I understand most people don’t want to train, but the person who can grow leadership from training brings an audience with them. They’ve mastered finding answers and facilitating them in a positively authoritative way.

4. Infuse Your Career with Personality

Let’s say it all together: Companies cannot train character (or personality). I say it often because it is the common denominator in every networking, interviewing, and revealing of your superpowers to the world. People don’t forget others who make them think, laugh, reminisce, acquiesce, act, or react. 

5. Infuse Your Career with Permission to Promote Yourself

People are afraid of the label “expert.” But you don’t have ever to call yourself an “expert.” These days it is necessary to put on your marquee accomplishments or notoriety. It is the only way employers will gain interest in your uniqueness and your value offerings.

Your career has many small victories to frame as success you may not have acknowledged. While it helps to have others encourage you to see achievements, you must be the main one to lead with them. Ideally, you want to gather around you people who will fan the flames of what makes you great. You’ll probably see your future differently.

About Mark Anthony Dyson

I am the “The Voice of Job Seekers!” I offer compassionate career and job search advice as I hack and re-imagine the job search process. You need to be “the prescription to an employer’s job description.” You must be solution-oriented and work in positions in companies where you are the remedy. Your job search must be a lifestyle, and your career must be in front of you constantly. You can no longer shed your aspirations at the change seasons. There are strengths you have that need constant use and development.

Be sure you sign up to download my E-Book, “421 Modern Job Search Tips 2021!”

You can find my career advice and work in media outlets such as Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Glassdoor, and many other outlets.