How to open the doors to professional success

Dealing With Professional Issues

Hi guys and welcome to the last the section of this course. Now in the previous section, we saw how our personal life can affect our professional life. In this section, we will also see how professional issues can hamper our growth. 

As working professionals, we have to work with different kinds of people. Every person has their own personality and sometimes adjusting to these personalities can be very difficult. Our work lives are already stressful; moreover, we deal with professional competition. We work hard and put in all the efforts to make our career. All of us dream of having a good promotion, position or monthly income and to achieve this, we leave no stones unturned. 

This eventually leads to us developing chronic stress and depression issues. How do we work around this and how do we handle stress? Does stress affect our professional growth? Let us move on to the first topic of this section

The relation between stress and professional growth

Stress at moderate limits is fine, however, when it takes over our lives it can ruin everything for us. In the recent times, we have seen that stress has become one of the contributing factors to develop various kinds of health concerns as well. 

When we are stressed out, we cannot think straight. We often tend to start forgetting things and that affects our overall productivity. When we let stress take over our lives, we tend to give in to negativity in many ways. Our behaviour starts to change. We get angry over small issues, take out our frustration on our loved ones and so on. 

Stress also becomes one of the biggest obstacles for our professional growth. Because we are so stressed out, we start trying to multi-task to make our work easy. Sometimes, we also take on more tasks only to get out of stress. Knowingly or unknowingly, we become machines that have a one-track mind.

When we are stressed, we lose the ability to think out of the box. Instead of working smart, we work very hard. No doubt, hard work pays, but when you work smartly, you are able to think out of the box. You come up with creative ways to become more productive. 

This is why I keep on saying, do not let stress or anything negative bring you down. On this note, I will move ahead to the next section where I will talk about dealing with professional jealousy. 

How does professional jealousy affect your growth?

Professional jealously is something that is bound to happen to us at one point of our life. Remember, when you start achieving your goals, people start becoming jealous of you. Sometimes you are also tagged with names that does not sound good. 

So why is it that some people are subjected to professional jealously? And, how does it affect our personal growth? Let me illustrate a small story to make you understand this.

A boy just graduated from college and landed with his first job. During the start., things were a bit slow for him. After around six months, he started to get the hang of the job and slowly started over achieving his goals. 

Within the first year itself, his performance was so good that he came under the eyes of the management. During his first performance appraisal, his salary was raised by 20%. By the second year of his job, he was not only overachieving his targets, but was also contributing towards his team’s performance. 

A few of the team mates who were first his friends slowly started going far from him. Some of them who were in the company longer than him started to develop a lot of negativity towards him. He never paid attention to all that and continued working hard. By the end of the third year, he was promoted to a manger’s position for the very team he was a part of. 

His friends who were part of the team were very happy. However, some of them were not at all happy. They started creating a lot of problems for him by not performing properly. Since he was the manager, he was answerable as to why his team was not performing. 

Eventually he was not only demoted from being a manager but was shifted to another department where he was working under the main manager of the floor. Even there, he performed and made sure he achieved his targets on time. 

His seniors were very surprised to see that as a subordinate he was performing so well, but the minute he became a manager, things took a wrong turn. 

So what happened in this situation – he became the victim of professional jealousy. His team mates could not handle the fact that a newbie became their manager. They took it on to their ego and decided not to perform. In the end he payed the brunt. He was not only demoted but also transferred to another department. 

Even though he had gone through so much, he did not let the negativity come in between him and his goal.

The moral of the story is that come what may, you should learn how not to give up. Professional jealousy can bring your down, but if you continue to work hard, it cannot come on your way of success. With this note I will continue the same story for the next question of this topic. 

Are you self-sabotaging your professional success?

Now that he was in a new department, he continued to work hard. There was no difference with his performance. Seeing this, the company decided to give him one more chance. They decided to make him an assistant manager of the new department. He had a team of new employees whom he had to train. He went ahead and did what was expected of him. He not only trained them but delegated tasks based on their experience. 

Within the department, there was a small competition for all the teams. The team that achieved their targets within certain number of days were not only subjected to a bonus but would also receive a special surprise. 

All the teams worked very hard and put in a lot of efforts. On the final day, the management decided to take a look at the performance of all the teams. They were shocked to see that a team with freshers did a lot better than the seasoned employees of the company. When the results were out, everybody was surprised to see that the new team of employees won the competition.

When the management asked him how he did it, his answer was simple. When he took on the new team, these were people who were open to learning. Although some of them were older than him, they were willing to work hard and learn something new. It was this attitude that helped him to achieve his goal.

The management then asked him why he was not able to do justice to his previous team. He replied, how can I achieve anything when people block themselves from me. The previous team could not digest the fact that a person who came after them was heading them. They became so negative that refused to help him. Not only did this affect the team’s performance but also affected him in the bargain. 

So, what have you learned from this story?

The answer is simple – You are in control of your actions; you are not in control of the reactions that come due to your actions. No matter how hard things may be, you should learn how to keep on focusing on your own goal. 

Ups and downs are a part of life, but eventually you will achieve your goal if you focus and stay strong. Remember, to open the doors to professional success, you need to be determined and focused. Your career is in your hands and how you mould it is totally up to you. 

If you react to negative situations, you will not be able to move on. However, when you work towards your goal and you only focus on that, you will learn how to overcome all obstacles. 

On this note, I would now like to conclude this course and thank you for giving me your precious time. I hope the examples that I have narrated during this course will help you tio understand how you can control things. 

Learn to go above the situation and always stay positive. I wish you all the best and hope that this course will bring in a positive change in your life. Thank you.