Knowing the Market

If you want to move up in your career and you want to show that you can influence people in your job, it’s time to look at strategies to create visibility at work. Here are 10 tips to help you maintain visibility at work:

1. Take a self-inventory — this is basically an assessment of where you are in your current position. What are the skills and attributes you have that are important to the company. If you aren’t sure, ask your boss.

2. Keep up with professional development — make sure that you take any opportunity to upgrade your skills or your knowledge in your profession. If a new opportunity comes along, you want to be able to take it.

3. Take credit for the jobs you do well –when someone notices that you have done a good job, gracefully thank them and then suggest that you are pleased with what you did.

4. Show initiative and motivation — volunteer for committees or new products that come up. Sometimes taking a project that is a bit risky that you know you can make succeed will put you in the forefront of the bosses’ mind.

5. Write articles - share your information that you discover in a company newsletter or other publication that is appropriate. Also join a professional organization and write for their newsletter. This will insure your visibility at work.

6. Promote others — when you want visibility, help someone else to become visible. If you are a part of a team and they have finished putting together a project, make sure that they get visibility for their contributions.

7. Get involved — let people get to know you through company gatherings. Talk to people from all over the company and get to know a wide selection of people in addition to those you already know.

8. Keep a portfolio — whether you are in a job where a portfolio is necessary or not, it is a good idea to keep a portfolio of all the projects you’ve worked on and seen through to the end. Even the first page of each report is good. This will give you something to talk about to your boss at a later date.

9. Ask for a promotion when its time — some people become visible but forget to ask for a promotion when the timing is right. Use your portfolio to help and outline what you’ve done and why you feel a promotion is a good idea.

10. Share your knowledge — be sure to share your knowledge at conferences, in special meetings or whenever the opportunity is appropriate.

The more you can maintain your visibility at work the better. Maintaining visibility to stand out at work is important, especially if you want to move up the career ladder. These tips should help you out, the important thing is not to loose focus.

To have more creativity, follow this two-step plan:

1. Encourage creativity.

2. Train your brain to be more creative.

Start on both of these right now, and you can experience greater creativity today.

Encourage your creativity and you’ll increase your creativity. Of course, this is true of most things you want to see more of in your life. Encouragement can work wonders, but how do you encourage creativity?

Start by paying attention to it. Our subconscious minds tends to give us more of what we pay attention to. Ignore the creative aspects of your life, and you are telling your subconscious that they are unimportant. Consciously note when you’re creative, and your subconscious mind will start feeding you more creative ideas. Just look for it and you’ll find more of it.

You can encourage creativity by writing your ideas down. Start keeping an “idea journal.” Do this regularly, and you’ll notice that you often start having more ideas the moment you start to write. A so-so idea may normally be forgotten, but by writing it down, you may remember it. Then your subconscious can work on it, and may transform into something very creative.

For more creativity in your life, start putting creative ideas into practice. If you paint, paint something totally different from your usual subjects. If you sell houses, try a new approach. Even just driving a different route to work to see if it is quicker can encourage your creativity. Just get your mind working outside of its regular patterns.

Changing your surroundings can encourage creativity. For more creativity in your love life, go hike up a mountain with your partner. If you write, try sitting on a roof to write. For new ideas for your business, take a notebook to the park and sit by the duck pond. Any change of enviroment can get your brain out of it’s ruts.

Creativity Training

To dramatically increase your creativity, develop creative habits of mind. If you watch a good comedian, you’ll see that she has trained her mind to look for the “different angle” on everyday things. Why not train your mind to do the same?

Start challenging assumptions, for example, until it becomes habit. If you’re looking for ways to get more customers, stop and say, “Do I really need more customers?” It’s a question that suggests other creative solutions, like finding ways to make more money off existing customers, or ways to cut expenses. It could lead to more profitable ideas. Challenge assumptions is a great way to have more creativity in your problem solving.

While driving to work, randomly choose anything you see and ask what it can teach you about whatever problem you are working on. A helicopter might make you think about a way to track where the car goes when you loan it to your kids. Palm trees may lead to a new design for patio umbrellas.

These two techniques are called “Assumption Challenging” and “Random Presentation,” and are classic creative problem solving techniques. There are dozens more. If you train your brain to habitually use these or other techniques, and provide it with a little encouragement, you really can have more creativity.

Steve Gillman has been studying brainpower and related topics for years. For more on How To Increase Brain Power, and to get the Brain Power Newsletter and other free gifts, visit: www.IncreaseBrainPower.com