Create a Plan and Lay Out Milestones

Rule #1: Set your own goals.

Don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do. Analyze your company carefully, and try to understand what you can do which will make a significant difference. Get a handle on the problem, develop a solution, and a consensus around it, lobby for approval, then execute better and faster than anyone else.

This is accomplished most effectively by breaking down big projects into small, realistic and manageable daily goals. When you focus on your career, think in terms of concrete, realistic steps: gaining experience in a different area by taking on a new assignment; taking short courses or attending seminars in cutting edge topics; improving your performance by 20%; decreasing by 20% the time it takes you to accomplish a task.

From those incremental improvements, you can begin to lay out significant milestones, such as moving from middle to upper management.

Develop an “Advisory Board”

To keep your career going strong and achieving its full potential, you will need a sounding board, someone who can provide you with an objective judgment of how you’re performing. This can be a trusted mentor, or a group of professional friends, who are willing to meet with you occasionally and review the milestones you’ve set for your career. And don’t forget your significant other. A spouse or partner will usually give you an honest appraisal…mine does….of whether you’re setting your goals too high or too low.

Frequently, changes take place in an industry or pay scales change, and, if you been putting in long hours, you can miss them or fail to realize their significance or how they can impact your own career. To gain perspective and an objective viewpoint, it’s invaluable to be able to turn to trusted advisers.

Take on Public Speaking

It’s impossible to overemphasize the value of being a good communicator. What all leaders share is the ability to articulate and communicate their goals with such passion or eloquence that others are motivated to share those goals and join together to achieve them.

Regardless of whether you are an eloquent speaker, you can at least bring interesting news to an audience, in a fresh and organized way. Since most people in a general audience are not as up to date on your field as you are, you should be able to convey something to them which is of interest and which they didn’t know before.

If you are able to display a mastery of a subject, and keep your presentation brief and to the point, you will make an impression. And public speaking is one of the best ways to raise your profile in the community and in your professional circle.

Create A Skills Inventory and Continue to Expand

Whether your skills are based on your ability with graphics, or your talent for getting an office organized or inspiring people to join your project, you have a set of skills to track and build on. Create your own “portfolio” which identifies and documents those areas you have developed the most and have the greatest competitive advantage in, as measured against your peers, and make its continuous expansion an ongoing priority.

Remember – It’s Still About People: Develop A System to Leverage Your Contacts

Take a hard look at how you are networking and make some basic decisions about how to develop a system to make personal contacts and extended networks work better to advance your career.  Sometimes it takes a little effort.  In the web business, I am finding that I can meet as many influential decision makers and thought leaders at the right tech networking event in Austin as I can in…. let’s say a month of Sundays… in my city.  The downside: It’s an hour and 15 minute drive.  The upside: the contacts and business potential, not to mention the learning experience are well worth it.

To extract and build on the value of your contact, it is important that you be able to recall the details of your meeting and the specifics of the other person’s job and your conversation. My tech buddy drives up to Austin with me and we both collect business cards, sometimes jotting notes on the back of them about details we particularly want to recall.  When we get back we scan them and exchange them by email.  Voila! Twice the new leads, prospects and contacts, and, at the same time, someone to share the drive and dish about industry trends or whatever projects we’re working on.

Once you have developed a system to track your contacts, and all your contact information is recorded and organized, then you should develop a system for communicating on a regular basis with people you’ve met. Communication can be something as simple as sending an email with a web reference or a reminder of an upcoming meeting or a Facebook notice about a new project. Do this regularly and you will build a network which will be there when you need them.

Creating a career plan with milestones, gathering support, continuing to expand both our career skills and our networks, if executed faithfully,  is not only energizing and enjoyable in and of itself, but definitely will  lead to success

Chris Brogan, as usual, has some really insightful tips about speaking. Chris says “Here are two really fast and important speaking tips for you to learn and understand. Start with answering your audience’s most pressing question: “what’s in this for me?” And then finish by giving your audience actionable takeaways. Making these two speaking tips top of mind becomes vital in delivering a presentation that matters. Too often, we have a tendency to clear our autobiographical throats before we dig into educating an audience. Then, we end with no real sense of what comes next. This means we leave people excited, but with nothing to do.”

Brogan provides us with an example: “Takeaways should be very actionable. If you’ve finished up your speech on how podcasting changes communication, give people an assignment to find five podcasts on iTunes and subscribe for a month. Take notes on the ways each show introduces information, etc. Review your current corporate communications documents. Do any lend themselves to a potential audio format as well?

By starting with WIIFM and ending with 5 takeaways – even if you do it in a creative way that breaks the mold a bit, people will feel like they better understand and appreciate your efforts to educate and entertain them.”

The WIIFM and ending with 5 takeaways gives you a structure, a roadmap. AdvancingWomen.com believes having a proven structure always makes a presenter….you…. feel more comfortable and confident and leads to a more effective presentation and better results. Your audience, after all, is coming not just to hear you, but to know what to do next on their own. The more they understand what they need to do next to execute on the main points of your presentation, the more successful you will have been and the higher your audience will rate you.  Always a good thing when jumping on the speaker’s circuit

Do you have any speaking tips or techniques to share?  If so, please jump in and add a comment.  Thanks

For the whole post, go here Two Important Speaking Tips

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