High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself to Align Personal & Career Goals

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• 5 Questions to Ask Yourself to Align Personal & Career Goals: "At times, you do have to choose between your career goals and personal goals in order to accomplish one....The key is to take the time to reflect, and ask yourself some questions before you make the decision. Here’s where to start."

• 4 Reasons Good Employees Lose Their Motivation: "With each of these four motivation traps, the trick is to think more comprehensively about what stops employees from initiating, persisting, and putting in mental effort."

• 5 Principles to Follow to Make Your Mark on the World: "People with different backgrounds and skill sets. If you're looking at an opportunity or challenge and you have five ways to look at it versus one, you'll see each other's blind spots."

• 25 Best Habits to Have in Life: "Focus on these 25 habits, consistently making efforts to instill them into your daily routine, and in time, your progress and momentum towards your goals will skyrocket."
• The 5 Principles of Building Trust:"Talk is educational and edifying; but actions are evidence. Provide iconic tangible evidence that what you are claiming can be trusted."

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: 5 Brilliant (and Simple) Ways to Make a Good First Impression

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• 5 Brilliant (and Simple) Ways to Make a Good First Impression: "Something as simple as smiling when you talk or engaging with your eyes in a way that shows interest can go a long way."

• The 4 Reasons Why I Love to Fail: "On the flip side, instead of breaking our will, an embarrassing setback can harden it into titanium and give us the determination to do whatever it takes to achieve our final objective."

• An Entrepreneur's Guide to Confronting and Harnessing Anger: "For many of us, anger is just fear in disguise. It doesn’t matter what it is - fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of feeling small - fear can lead a person down a very dark path."

• What to do When a Personal Crisis is Hurting Your Professional Life: "These are all incredibly tough situations to navigate personally — let alone professionally. Should you disclose what’s happening to your manager and colleagues?"
• 10 Proven Strategies to Build Trust: "Anything that communicates listening, empathy, confidence, caring, is going to signal trustworthiness from a preconscious perspective. Those nonverbals register in our brains as signals of trust or distrust."

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: Shaking Up Your Career and Being Productive

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

© Bellemedia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

• 7 Deadly Sins of a Job Seeker: "Planning for your job search enables you to properly target roles as well as manage your time and those you approach more effectively."


• Building Trust Will Get You Hired: "In order to show that you will be reliable in the future, demonstrate how you have been so the past."


• How to Shake Up Your Career in 2015: "Expand your talents and knowledge by signing up for a Mooc (massive open online course). From branding and management to film-making or forensic psychology, there's a huge range of free courses available to everyone."


• How to Stop Negative Thoughts: "Instead of allowing unfortunate situations, unlucky circumstances and foul people to suck the energy right out of you, turn to humor for a levity break."


• Surround Yourself with Productive People: "Productive people tend to organise not only themselves, but systems, schedules, and the other people around them. This is beneficial for the entire team."

Five questions toward a stronger relationship with your boss

To trust and to be trusted are critical components of organizational and personal success. And while trust in the workplace is on the rise, you should remain vigilant of the level of trust in your relationship with your supervisor. 

Clear, simple communication is essential to build a relationship of trust. To begin a supervisory relationship the right way or to fine-tune one that has already been established, use the questions below:

What expectations do you have for me in the short-term and long-term? A basic yet essential question to get both you and your supervisor on the same page. This question prompts a discussion on what is (and is not) important in your work and what priorities need to be established. 

What methods do you prefer I use to communicate with you? Be upfront and ask how your supervisor would like to receive information from you: short or long phone calls, short or long emails, in-person meetings or through other means or outputs. Indicating to your supervisor that you respect her time and tailoring how you communicate with her will greatly further a relationship of trust.

What can I do to make your job easier? Even though you may be clear about expectations, there could be other ways that you can help out your supervisor...and shine in the process. For example, if your boss isn't as technologically savvy as you are, perhaps you could provide a quick lesson on more advanced functions of Outlook or keyboard shortcuts in Word. Your boss will appreciate your initiative and the assistance you are providing. Remain vigilant of opportunities such as this and offer help where you can; the trust you build will be a reward in and of itself.

What if we...? The significance of this question can be summed up in one word: solutions. Don't just bring problems to your supervisor but suggest solutions to those issues. Employees tend to shy away from solutions (particularly out-of-the-box ones) for fear of looking foolish. Do not fall into this trap: supervisors are looking for creativity in the output you deliver and would not have hired you if they did not want to leverage your talents and insights. Build trust through your creativity and initiative.

In what areas would you like me to improve? Do not wait until your annual review before you ask this question. Stay abreast of areas of improvement and listen to your supervisor's suggestions with an open-mind and willingness to do your work differently. If you have questions or if something does not sit right with you, bring them up respectfully. But your willingness to invite and receive feedback will most certainly strengthen the trust in your relationship.

Use these questions to create a strong, trusting dynamic between you and your supervisor, and role model this behavior to others. 

Daily Leap Career Video of the Week: Rachel Botsman and Reputation

Each week we present our Daily Leap Career Video of the Week. The video we share presents news or advice related to career development, searching for a job, the economy and employment, and other career-related topics.

In this TED talk, author Rachel Botsman  speaks about the importance of our reputation and the implications this has for collaborating with others and developing our careers. She says, "with every trade we make, comment we leave, person we flag, badge we earn, we leave a reputation trail." 

Watch the video below for more:

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share these every weekend so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

1. Tools for Branding Yourself in the Job Market
"Your use of these tools is just another way of demonstrating current technology skills, subject matter, interest, and/or expertise and a bit of creativity."

2. Want a Better Job? Find a Mentor 
"You are never too old or too important to be mentored, and a good mentoring relationship can pay off for both parties."

© Bellemedia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos 

3. What You Should Never Compromise On While Building Your Career
"Sacrificing your health and well-being demonstrates your lack of prioritizing yourself as important, failing to understand that you must care for yourself – and yes, put yourself first — before you can be of true service to anyone else, your organization, your family or your employer."

4. Lessons from a Career, Interrupted
"Despite the challenges of pursuing an unconventional and hybrid career, it's these kinds of journeys that are the most personally rewarding but are also the most valuable to employers, even if they don't know it at first."

5. 4 Lessons from the Best Bosses I Ever Had  
"(E)verything flows from trust — learning, credibility, accountability, a sense of purpose and a mission that makes 'work' bigger than oneself."

Are You Trusted in the Workplace?

Cultivating trustworthiness is a worthwhile endeavor if you want to succeed in the workplace. The more that you are trusted by your supervisor, your coworkers, and your peers, new opportunities and areas of collaboration will be opened up to you. Developing trust, however, requires an amount of vulnerability, honesty, and an ego-free state of being that many struggle to cultivate. Ask yourself these questions to gauge how well you create a persona of trust in the workplace:

Do you stay true to your word? A simple yet important question. You may speak highly of your work (most people do) but are you giving your all to the thorough analysis that you say you do, the time that you proclaim to give to clients, and the attention to detail to that important project? Your work is an extension of you word, so ensure that you produce what you state you will.

Do you speak up if you see problems? Honesty is a critical component of trust, and diplomatically pointing out problems will ensure that your interests are for the project, the team, and your workplace as opposed to yourself.

Do you freely share important information? Those who keep information to themselves can be seen as dodgy and putting their own interests before the team and the project. Share information that you have to cultivate trust and to build strong relationships with those that you work with.

Do you admit mistakes? To err is human…to admit it, superhuman. Immediately admit mistakes and work to rectify them to show that you can learn from your failures and fix problems you have caused.

Do you give credit? It feels good to accomplish things, but share credit with others to create strong relationships and increase the likelihood that they will want to work with you in the future.

Reflect on these questions and adjust your work habits to garner trust and enhance your career.