"CHART your Journey" Blog Series || Chapter 4: Leverage and "A"

Hey, thanks for tuning in to this blog series. We're now halfway through! If you would remember, in the previous blog we talked about honing our skills and investing in ourselves through learning. By now, we should already have a deeper understanding of ourselves, already identified our strengths and whole-heartedly accepted our flaws/ weaknesses. By this time, we should already be exploring learning opportunities and finding a mentor who can support us in our journey towards success.

Now that we already have a wealth of knowledge about ourselves and what we're capable of, the next step to success is being able to put those into practice. This leads us to the third topic on the "CHART your journey" series. It start's with a letter "A" and it should be an easy guess for you.

Yes, "A" stands for "Apply". This word is defined by Wikipedia as "to put into action; to engage (oneself) in a task with close attention or persistence".

To give you more context, "applying" involves the following activities:

1. Leverage on your skills and competencies.

The key to success is not just knowing what your skills and competencies are, rather finding ways to leverage them to achieve results. Leveraging means using those skills to the maximum advantage. This would require us to assess how we can better use our skills and the extent of impact it can give us. This would also require us to take meaning actions so that we can see the results.

A popular piece of advice from Ann marie Houghtailing (an American keynote speaker, coach & author) says "you serve the world and yourself when you leverage your skills and talents to their highest and best use. Wasting yourself is wasting a valuable resource and that us a big of a crisis as wasting energy or fuel or water."

2. Prepare to fail.

In the success context, failure is inevitable. If you will notice, a vast majority of successful people in the world had experienced a lot of failures before they became successful. One interesting trait they all have is that they did not let their failures drag them down, instead, they used their failures as a challenge for them to do better. Their failures did not stop them from achieving what they want, in fact, they considered their failures as blessings. Their failures triggered them to carefully analyze the situation and see where they missed or lacked, and quickly worked on fixing those.

As Jack Canfield (an American author, motivational speaker, seminar leader, corporate trainer, and entrepreneur) once said, "don't worry about failures, worry about that chances you miss when you don't even try".

3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Like failure, mistakes are part of the success journey. Ariana Huffington (a Greek American author, syndicated columnist, and businesswoman) shared that "we need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes."

We can all agree that statement is true. Being human, we are prone to making mistakes and that's normal, but, what matters is how we treat those mistakes and how we work on them. A popular quote says that "mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before."

A straight-forward advice from Paul Bear Bryant (an American college football player and coach) states that "when you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it and don't repeat it."

4. Explore opportunities for growth.

In the success context, there are 2 types of growth that we should learn: vertical and horizontal.

Vertical growth means moving up or ascending to a higher spot. A common example of vertical growth is promotion, climbing the corporate ladder from a lower position to a higher role. Horizontal growth, on the other hand, is scaling oneself. This can be achieved through learning a new skill, building an expertise or mastering a skill. It's all about leveraging the skills and competencies that we already have and further improving on those. In order to be successful, we have to find ways to explore opportunities for our personal growth, either in a vertical or horizontal manner.

My favorite quote about growth is from Jim Rohn (an American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker). He says "you cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight. If you want to reach your goals and fulfill your potential... become intentional about your personal growth. It WILL change your life."

There you have it, folks. That's our third step in the "Success Roadmap". I hope this gives you valuable insights on why leveraging our knowledge and skills and putting them into practice are important for success. Our fourth topic will be out tomorrow.  I'll see you in my next blog. :)

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