professional growth
BY WENDY ALEXANDER

Your Ongoing Personal and Professional Growth

Raising Your Career Growth strategies

In our careers, we often reach a stage where we’re starting to feel confident

We're getting the opportunities

We’re earning good money

Many of my clients become complacent and stagnant at this point in their lives

It's easy to get overconfident and think, ‘I don't need to do any more work, I'm where I want to be.’

But that's when you stop growing

Personal growth is an ongoing journey, not a destination

You can never stop learning and improving if you want to keep growing in your career and your personal life

Complacency is the enemy of growth

So keep striving to be better, and you'll keep seeing results

There will be times when you’ll need to go right back to basics

For example, when an opportunity comes up in your company, you may need to revisit your transferable skills and update your resume, so it is up-to-date and shows your best and most current qualifications

Be prepared, so you can put your best foot forward and get promoted – get what you want

True career mastery comes from continuous growth - both personally and professionally

Helping others grow is not only beneficial to them but also you

Through volunteering, mentoring, and other contributions, you can expand your skillset while also benefiting others – and teaching is one of the best ways to learn and grow

The Feynman Technique is a method for learning and growing professionally, attributed to Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, but in reality, it has been around for as long as people have been speaking to each other

The principle is that by teaching someone else about your field, you are forced to develop a deep understanding of the topic

This is because Feynman believed that jargon, vague words, and complexity reveal a lack of understanding

To truly understand your topic, you must be able to explain it to a 12-year-old

I notice that stagnation and complacency often set in during mid-careers

When things are a little bit hard early on in our careers, we keep working at it because we're still hungry

But then we hit mid-career, and get some good runs on the board, and become overconfident and complacent

We think we don't have to keep growing

We think, Oh, I achieved this

I achieved that

I've arrived

The thing is, we never arrive as life is about ongoing personal and professional growth

And there's an old saying that not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers

So stay growing, keep growing, develop yourself, grow others, stay on that journey of consistent growth, and watch your success skyrocket