After 10 years of supporting mid- to senior-level professionals overcome blocks to their career success and happiness, I’ve learned one key fact – what holds us back is not what we think. It’s not about external factors and forces pushing against us and keeping us down. It’s about ourselves – plain and simple. Our failure to achieve the success and happiness we want is much more about what we don’t know, and don’t understand about ourselves. And our failure to be happy at work is directly related to how powerfully (or not) we operate in the world, and our mindset and thinking. The truth is that what we don’t know does hurt us.

So, what goes into creating a successful and fulfilling professional life? What are the key behaviors, actions and mindsets (and decision-making capabilities) necessary to craft a career that is both rewarding and meets your needs and desires over the long arch of your life?

These are issues that career coaches and leadership trainers like me grapple with each and every day. They are deep questions that defy simple platitudes or superficial advice that we’re bombarded with every day. But deep as these issues are, there are some basic fundamentals that every professional needs to master in order to thrive in his/her professional life.

I’ve seen that vast majority of professionals today have not received the in-depth training, information, or knowledge they need to ensure they’ll remain on a positive track and build a career that will be fruitful as the years go on. And many don’t understand how to relate to and interact with other people in order to build the support they need to thrive. We just don’t learn this information in the normal course of our lives.

What do professionals really need to know to succeed in their careers?

All working individuals need significant competency and skill in eight crucial areas in order to be successful. Sadly, most are sorely lacking in several if not most of these areas. (My qualitative and quantitative research reveals that most professionals are lacking in at least three of these skills at the same time).

They are:

Communication skill

In order to be successful in your job and career, you need to understand how to communicate powerfully and effectively with confidence and clarity. Many say that extroverts have an easier time of this, but lately, there’s been a great deal written about how introverts can leverage their innate leadership and managerial skills and gifts to succeed as leaders. Your personality type and level of introversion/extroversion aside, if you can’t communicate your ideas in an empowered, clear and engaging way, and build genuine support for your visions and ideas, you won’t perform or progress as well as your counterparts who can communicate with ease and strength.

Building powerful support relationships

So many professionals don’t get this one basic point until it’s too late – you can’t do what you want to in your career, and advance successfully, if you’re alone, in a vacuum or on an island. And you certainly can’t achieve what you long for if you’ve alienated all your colleagues, peers and managers. One toxic boss taught me something very smart many years ago. As horrible as he was at leading and managing, he did know one core principle – no matter how talented and gifted you are at your job, if you don’t have supportive relationships at work, you won’t succeed. Another way to say this is if you hate who you work with and for, they’ll end up hating you back. (To learn more about toxicity in life and in the workplace, and if you’re toxic to be with, read this.)

Effective decision-making


Professionals must make scores (if not hundreds) of decisions every day – from whom they sit with at lunch, to what raise to ask for, to new assignments they’ll accept. Do you understand how to make a decision so that it 1) aligns with what you really want, 2) adds to your capabilities and experience in a beneficial way, and 3) creates new opportunities for you that will be exciting and helpful? Further, do you know how to make business decisions that will generate the outcomes that are most desired for the enterprise? Most individuals have never learned how to evaluate with discernment what’s in front of them, or how to calculate the risks and benefits of each decision they face. (Here’s more about building your decision-making capabilities.)

Leadership

If you’re like me, you never received one scrap of real leadership training throughout your corporate career. Forget about learning what’s required to become an inspiring leader and manager – we just don’t have access to this type of training typically, and if we have it, it’s superficial and often ineffective. Personally speaking, I had no clue about the traits, behaviors and actions that compelling, effective leaders demonstrate, and what stands them apart from the rest. And so many of the leaders I saw around me each day didn’t entice me to want to emulate them.

Key to professional success is learning how to empower, inspire and motivate others, to build a vision that’s compelling and to engender trust, loyalty and support from others to strive toward that vision. In my corporate life, I didn’t understand the importance of being other-focused vs. self-focused. I also didn’t understand how my every action and word either built on, or eroded, my leadership and managerial ability and impact.

Advocating and negotiating for yourself and your causes

In business, you need to advocate and negotiate continually – for yourself, for your staff, for your business concerns, for your budget, etc. How many professionals today can say they know how to speak up powerfully and engagingly for their own causes and support their own advancement in effective, productive ways? I’ve found in my research that women are particularly challenged with advocating strongly for themselves, and there are many factors that exacerbate that challenge. (Here’s a disturbing example of gender bias at work around how both men and women perceive forceful women.)

That said, if you can’t advocate powerfully for your own behalf, it’s a rare thing that anyone else will.

Career planning and management

I’m sure you’ve noticed that your career doesn’t tend to stretch and point in the right direction unless you proactively manage it to do so. One first step in this process is answering this question: “When you’re 90 years old looking back, what do you want to have stood for, given, contributed, taught, created, and left behind? What do you want people to say about you? In your professional life, do you know what you want, and then what you really want?” Until you can answer these questions (and more), you’ll struggle in forging a career path that will lead you to the ultimate destination you want. You’ll end up floating in an aimless sea of missed opportunities, or get lost in a long, error-ridden detour.

Work-life balance

While the struggles of balancing life and work continue to hit working mothers with young children the hardest, the need and desire for work-life balance is an issue that both men and women face. Do you know exactly how to balance (or integrate) your life and work? Have you done a fierce inventory of your life priorities, and possess a deep and unwavering knowledge of what matters most to you, so that you can act from that knowledge with confidence and power? Have you received training on how to negotiate the conflicting demands of our home and family life with what our employer wants from you? Most would answer “Heck no, and I need it!” to that question. (Here’s more on how to achieve a greater degree of work-life balance and integration today.)

Boundary enforcement

I had never heard of the concept of “boundaries” before I trained as a marriage and family therapist, but once I learned about it, my life changed dramatically.

“Boundaries” are the invisible barriers between you and your outside systems (work, school, church, family, friends, etc.). Your boundaries regulate the flow of information and input to and from you and your outside systems. If you are unable to 1) understand yourself, and your own needs and wants, and 2) create an appropriate, protective boundary around these non-negotiables, and 3) speak up for yourself effectively, then professional (and life) success will remain extremely challenging for you.

Challenges with your boundaries typically emerge from treatment you received throughout your childhood, in your family. For instance, if you were verbally, emotionally or physically abused in any way as a child, it’s likely that your boundaries will not have formed in a healthy way, because you were violated in ways from which, as a child, you could not protect yourself.

Developing appropriate boundaries and enforcing them every day in your professional life is an essential behavior, and how you defend your boundaries can make or break your career. To determine if your boundaries are what they need to be, answer yourself these questions:

- Do you know where you end and others (including your employer) begin?
- Can you have the tough conversations you need to have, without shying away, being railroaded, or leaving body parts in your wake?
- Do you understand exactly what you’ll accept and tolerate from others, and also what would be unhealthy (and demeaning and diminishing to you) to allow?
- Who is impinging on your boundaries today, and will you do something about it today?

Interestingly, I’ve seen that dysfunction in our earlier lives and families is often played out in our workplace interactions and experiences. If we don’t heal and grow beyond our earlier mistreatment, it tends to be repeated in later life.

So, how do we go about building these essential skills?

We weren’t born understanding these basic professional fundamentals, but they’re vital to our career success nonetheless. If any of these issues feel challenging to you, I’d encourage you to obtain some outside training, and better yet, ask your employer for it. Training and mastery in these areas will help you grow — in your ability to manage yourself, your emotions, your communications, your decision-making and your career planning — so that you can powerfully shape the direction of your life, not be the victim of it.

You can find the original article on Forbes, here.