Enjoy work, Get well paid and Make a Difference with the Mindset of Ownership.

Pree Sarkar

🏆 Top 1% Recruiter, LinkedIn 🥇 #1 Bestselling Author - Careers, Amazon

23 articles

 A few weeks ago I wrote an article titled ‘If you hate Mondays, you’re in the wrong job’. 

Many of you responded with insightful comments. What was consistent in your responses is that personal happiness is starting to drive current career decision making. 

This is called Ownership and it’s the key element to a more rewarding job, career, and life. 

Workplace culture has changed significantly since the pandemic began. Good life/work balance is emerging as a primary decision-making component for job hunters. However, our burnout rates are skyrocketing particularly with goal driven, under pressure and time poor professionals.

That’s why I dedicated a whole chapter to ownership in my book ‘Switch: Stand out and get the right job and accelerate your career’  based on my 24 years’ experience and knowledge in recruitment, as well as my own value system around ownership. 

For most people however, there is a mental block around this. 

And quite frankly, there is too much at stake for us not to take career ownership. We all deserve to thrive and have meaningful purpose.

And so, this week we look at how to get to the point of clarity within ourselves, where we know what we want, don’t want and pursue what aligns with our internal values. 

Here are four steps that will help you move towards career success and significance.

1. The Ownership Mindset Self Assessment

Asking yourself the right questions, being gut honest with who you are, what you want, don’t want will bring clarity as the first step.  

Read each statement below and decide on the answer that describes what you believe. You can find the template for this checklist at www.switch.work/bonus

• I am in charge of my choices, my successes and my failures. Yes/No
• I am clear about what I want in my job and my career. Yes/No
• I can choose the people I work with and how they impact the quality of my work. Yes/No
• I can choose the manager I work with as much as they choose me. Yes/No
• I embrace failure as feedback and work o succeeding. Yes/No
• I initiate actions to change my circumstances if they don’t meet my needs. Yes/No
• I can’t find the right job that meets my needs when I look for it. Yes/No
• I am the best version of myself at work. Yes/No
• I am creating my future with every decision I make and action I take. Yes/No

Each question that you answered yes to is a self-empowering belief. These accelerate your progress towards your goals.

Each question that you answered no to (or were undecided on) is a self-limiting belief. These prevent you from reaching your goals.

"self limiting beliefs prevent you from reaching your goals"

2. Practice Self-Awareness

• Practicing self-awareness about empowering and limiting beliefs is powerful. Once you become aware of what is holding you back, you can take action to deal with this handbrake and move forward without anything stopping you. 
• You can change your self-limiting beliefs to self-empowering ones; this can be difficult, but it is possible, and you will enjoy the benefits for the rest of your life.
• In the context of your work and career, empowering beliefs will help you stand out, be preferred, and get the job that is right for you.

"empowering beliefs will help you stand out, go further and be preferred by employers"

3. Identify and question self-limiting decisions and beliefs

• Self-limiting decisions and beliefs are negative, oppositional to your abilities and prevent you from achieving your highest potential. 
• They are ideas that you developed through a single major incident, or a series of small events or words spoken to you about your abilities and potential. 
• Often, they were installed during childhood, teen years, or early adult life, but they will affect decisions you make for the rest of your life unless you consciously recall them, review them and change to positive, self-empowering beliefs.

"self limiting beliefs will affect decisions you make for the rest of your life unless you identify them"

4. Switch to Self-Empowering decisions and beliefs

Empowering beliefs are positive, progressive and most importantly possible. They are ideas that will enable you to act on and reach any goal you set yourself.

They will help you live each day and embrace challenges with confidence and positive expectation. 

Here are some of the empowering beliefs I hear from people around me every day:

• I can learn any skill I want to
• I’m going to learn how to confidently speak to a room full of people.
• I’ve told my manager I’m interested in applying for the job.
• I’ve asked for feedback so I can develop my skills to be a manager.
• I’ve asked my manager to reassess my compensation based on my results.
• I’m going to keep trying until I can work on a project like that.
• I’m ready and willing.
• I will find the strength to get it done.
• I can change.
• I can earn my full potential.
• People will have to accept me for who I am.
• I can do anything I choose.
• I have all the resources I need.
• There are plenty of opportunities out there. 

You can change limiting beliefs into empowering beliefs. Beliefs are created at a moment in time when you decide that they are true, through your own judgement or someone else’s. 

Either way, they can affect how you think, speak and behave for the rest of your life, so it’s important to trace back a limiting decision in your memory to the moment it was formed. 

Assess whether it’s still valid. If it’s not, reject it and replace it with an empowering belief.

"Reinforcing and building empowering beliefs will help you do your best work and live your best life."

👉 What are some of your empowering beliefs that have helped you in your career? Comment below, so that others can benefit.

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Pree Sarkar is an Executive Recruiter and Career Advisor to Managers and Professionals at Start-Up, Scale-Up and Publicly listed global technology companies.

He is the Managing Director at Switch - a leading firm in the areas of Recruitment, Executive Search and Career Advisory across the APAC region (Singapore, Hong Kong and ANZ).

➡️ Message Pree for Executive Search and Recruitment support in ANZ and APAC.

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Pree Sarkar

🏆 Top 1% Recruiter, LinkedIn 🥇 #1 Bestselling Author - Careers, Amazon

Published • 10h

24 articles

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Life's too short to do work that drains and depletes you.A