The current chaos and uncertainty in today's climate can make it difficult to feel in control of your own life. But being in control is key to becoming more productive and optimistic.
Now more than ever we see the importance of being flexible and adaptable due to this ever-changing society - and staying on top of your goals and finding purpose within what you do can have a positive impact on both your personal and professional well-being.
Career management is a life-long process enabling us to take control of our lives to embrace self-awareness, career development, learning, and networking. Building on these concepts helps you gain a sense of purpose within your life and the flow-on effect on your professional, social, and personal well-being can be profound.
So how do we take control and build successful and fulfilling career paths?
World-Renowned Expert on Change, Resilience, Leadership & Learning, Richard Gerver, has the answers.
How to positively manage change in both your personal and professional life
"The key is to understand that change is always daunting if it feels like something that is being done to you or forced on you. Too often, change feels disempowering we often respond by freezing or denying, by getting angry or depressed. These are familiar feelings for most of us given the last couple of years and the pandemic. However, if you can try to find points of control so that you feel like an active rather than passive participant in the change process, it makes you feel better. Change that we feel in control of, often feels exciting and positive. If you feel that you are a victim of change or you are a leader/manager trying to implement change, use curiosity to spark people, it encourages questions and an interest in what’s happening or about to happen. it gives people that sense of active involvement that can make all the difference."
How to change failure into growth
"It's vital to remember that you never learn anything new when you get something right. You only ever learn something new from the point of a mistake or the realisation that you don’t know something or can't do something… Try to recalibrate ‘failure’, so that it is the point at which you are about to learn, develop or move forward. Failure is only bad if you allow yourself to feel like a victim of it."
Harnessing the power of networking
"As we get older and more established in our careers, we tend to close down our networks, only hanging out with people who do what we do, think how we think, and breathe the same air. Barry Barish, the 2017 Nobel Prize-winning Physicist told me that when he was hiring people to his research team, he only wanted, what he called three-dimensional colleagues; people who had diverse interests, way beyond their jobs. He wanted scientists who had a passion for the arts and the humanities and people who had interesting hobbies… My advice is, to meet everyone you can, push your boundaries, and don’t pre-censure who you think could be of use to you or not. Spend as much time as you can hanging out with people that seem to have nothing in common with you; you’ll learn more and cultivate extraordinary networks that will support your personal and professional growth."
Preparing for an uncertain future
"Ironically, don’t try to over-plan or over-prepare… overthinking can be one of the catalysts of procrastination and over-complexity. Learn to trust your instincts, they are after all, based on your life experiences, they are not just a flight of fantasy. I love the six questions first posed by a positive psychologist, Martin Seligman.
What is the worst thing that could happen?
What can you do to stop the worst thing from happening?
What is the best thing that could happen?
What can you do to encourage the best thing to happen?
What is the most likely thing to happen?
What will you do if the most likely thing happens?
The real trick is not to lose perspective… stay lucid, stay calm, and trust yourself to be able to deal with whatever comes your way. Remember that the thought of dealing something is often worse than when we actually do deal with something."
Richard is one of the most inspirational leaders of his generation. He identifies and addresses what he thinks is our greatest challenge, which is for all of us is to remember we’re dealing with people, not processes.
Richard has worked and continues to work on exploring the links between great leadership, human potential, change, and innovation. The number of accolades he has been able to achieve. An incredibly strong speaker, he is highly regarded and celebrated in the education sector and is able to apply his teachings across all industries.
Richard is a strategic thinker to the core and is a forward thinker who won’t dwell on what has been done in the past, but instead, how will we influence the future. On separate occasions, he has been awarded Teacher of the Year and subsequently Business Speaker of the Year.
