(143c) 3 Superpowers to Boost Your Career

Career growth has little to do with how smart you are or how hard you work. Despite the long hours, we stay in our role, wondering when we will get promoted or when our efforts will be recognized. Often we believe that others are holding us back, preventing us from getting that promotion or recognition and causing us stress. The truth is that, beyond a performance threshold, success has more to do with ourselves holding us back. The good news about this is that we can control ourselves. In this workshop, I will share three key concepts and techniques that I have learned that have helped me move from a worker to a leader - completely changing my career trajectory and limitations as a result.

Engineers are often hired for their knowledge or technical skills. But over the course of a career, they need to develop professionally - developing new skills and changing others' perception in order to gain visibility and to be given the opportunities to expand professionally. The path to this career success can be distilled down to 3 core behaviors, which I call superpowers. They are not obvious on the surface, but they make a huge difference when put into practice. First, change your relationship with fear. By changing our relationship with fear we change the decisions that we make. Second, change your story. This changes the perception of your ambitions and contributions. Third, learn to breathe. The ability to take a breath and then act in a considered way helps you deal with the challenges of change and it also builds others' confidence in you.

Since beginning to employ these strategies, my career has taken off. I made significant contributions outside of my role. Over the next few years I was granted an $85,000 scholarship from my company to pay for an Executive MBA, at age 30 I was named a Leader Under 40 by Control Engineering magazine, and I was promoted 3 times in 4 years up to a Global Director role at age 33.