Are you tweaking your career pitch, so you are ready for opportunities at work when they arise?
Have you developed your success statements?
Can you concisely demonstrate your contributions to the company?
It’s essential to practice and continuously refine your career success stories, so you continually highlight your value to others and the company. You must demonstrate strong communication skills, critical thinking, and leadership capabilities.
To succeed in your career, you must know how to tell stories about yourself in an authentic, humble, and business-focused way.
Subtle self-promotion is the key to your career success. You must have a good track record and have current or former colleagues who can speak for your work and value.
If you don’t have success statements that portray your value to an organization, you are behind. You must craft your short pitches ahead of time to highlight your skill set to others.
Let’s discuss the five stories you should have in your back pocket so you can demonstrate your success to others. Let’s dive in.
1. Your Team-First Mindset
“Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers.” — Pat Riley, an American professional basketball player, coach, and executive
To tell your career story well, you must emphasize how you supported the team and helped everyone do their jobs better. It would help if you talked about how you overcame challenges, shared praise, and removed barriers.
To be considered for promotions and another job, you must have a team-first mindset that demonstrates how your successes helped the team. It would be best to tell how you cultivated the team to perform better but didn’t harp on your personal glory. It’s essential to talk about how you worked with different personalities and brought the best out of everyone else.
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” — Phil Jackson, an American professional basketball player and coach
2. Your Ability to Make Things Happen
What do others, especially senior leadership, care about the most? The company’s bottom line.
- Do you make things happen and help improve the company's operational efficiency?
- Can you point out the results that helped the business grow?
- Can you talk about how you increased a company’s revenue or profit margins?
Create success stories that match the interests of who you are talking to. Mention how you worked with another department to streamline a cumbersome process, broke down team silos, and improved inter-departmental relationships.
Show others how you made things happen and the secrets to your success.
3. Your Great Ideas
Everyone loves someone who has excellent ideas. Please share how you come up with ideas that help the company increase their sales or improve their operational efficiency.
Tell through a story how you asked great questions to discover new ideas. Talk about how you really thought about your ideas. Tell a story on how you examined the idea and sanded it down to its essence.
Talk about how you understand the business at a macro level and how that understanding helps you on the micro level. Discuss how you have a hardened process for capturing ideas, even when they come to you in the shower. Create a success statement on how you combined two different topics to develop an idea or how you studied the opposite perspective of an idea.
4. Your Quest for Getting 1% Better Every Day
“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” — James Clear, an author and entrepreneur
Another career success story is to discuss how you work on your personal development. Talk about the process for how minor, gradual improvements lead to significant changes over time.
Have a story on how you are patient, consistent, and have a strong desire to get 1% better than yesterday. Discuss how small successes helped you make good choices every day and how your continuous improvement works. Talk about how this approach helped you at each of your jobs throughout your career.
Small tweaks everyday lead to significant success over time.
Have a story explaining how you succeeded even though there were more gifted and talented colleagues. Discuss how you became mentally stronger by overcoming tough times in your life. Talk about how the adverse events in your career became blessings in disguise.
5. Your Resilience
The last story you should tell us how you learned from your mistakes and how that helped you become a more resilient person. Talk about how you kept learning, grew your expertise over time, and focused on what you could control in your career.
Create a success statement on how you adjusted and thrived in change. Discuss how you took care of yourself personally through daily exercise and getting enough sleep every day. Talk about how you developed resilience by adapting to the circumstances each company you worked for in your career threw at you.
Resilience comes from believing in yourself.
Talk about how you became stronger by developing mental resiliency. Discuss how you became more resilient by being flexible, confident, and positively approaching your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Talk about your ability to listen to others and make tough decisions.
Highlight that you don’t know it all, but you can weather it all. Discuss how you can bring order to chaos and be confident taking any challenge head-on.
Bringing It All Together
To take your career to the next level, you must have five stories to tell others about your success at work. It would help if you had stories about your team-first mindset, your ability to make things happen, your great ideas, your quest for getting 1% better every day, and your resilience. When you have success statements on these topics, you can show others you have added value at work.
“You are your greatest asset. Put your time, effort and money into training” — Tom Hopkins, a sales leader