If you listen to the ‘Business Bros’ or ‘Girl Bosses’ on social media, you may be forgiven for believing that the only things stopping you from achieving your career goals are your attitude and your lifestyle.

Ladies, for those of you who aren’t where you want to be professionally, listen up! All you need, according to these gurus is a pair of yeast infection-inducing yoga pants; some kind of green juice that you should drink daily (and only out of a Stanley cup of course!) some cute stationery to make your desk look pretty, and, of course, a positive attitude.

Men, ideally, you’ll need to forfeit sleep forever, but if you must sleep, limit it to no more than 2 hours a month. Drink copious amounts of energy drinks, run 80 miles a day followed by a workout at the gym for an additional 4 hours a day (but always skip leg day). Sleep with women but, only submissive ones, and if you do choose to get married it should only be for procreation purposes and you should never ever, under any circumstances fall in love with your wife or provide any kind of emotional support to your children because not only are your wife and children distractions who, if not ignored will prevent you from achieving your goals, but emotions are for girls only.

Needless to say, the above is an exaggeration (a very slight exaggeration) meant to highlight the fact that the ‘advice’ some of these ‘influencers’ are peddling about work is all very superficial, designed to prey on the inexperience and insecurities of younger people who sadly, feel so much pressure to achieve the same levels of financial and social success as their celebrity ‘faves’ in an environment of severe economic inequality.

If you pay attention, you’ll notice that these influencers tell you what you should be doing to prepare for the workday ahead but not how you should approach work to achieve your professional goals.

The don’t tell us how to work.

The Business Bros and Girl bosses can’t provide this information because they don’t know how to work. Chances are you don’t know how to work either, and I only began to understand how to work very recently and wish I had this information earlier.

The reality is that most of us really don’t know how to work – that is, how to, for want of a better word, manipulate what we do for a living to help us achieve our professional goals. It’s not our fault that we don’t know. It’s not something that’s widely taught – especially to regular schmegular folks. And if you do learn it, you kind of learn it by accident after wasting years of your life working against your goals – if you even had any to begin with other than financial survival.

I don’t, by any means have it all figured out yet, but here are a few things I’ve learned through experience that have helped me to get the most out of what I do to ensure my professional progress, motivation, and overall wellbeing.

Speaking of wellbeing…

I imagine that it’s significantly harder to achieve your goals when you’re dead. This is most definitely true if you are very unwell. We need to be at our best physically mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I think we all know this in theory but tend not to put this theory into practice.

I’m not going to list all of the well-being activities you can participate in because there’s a plethora of information online and probably in your own workplaces, but I will say this: No job – not even your dream career is worth jeopardising your health and wellbeing for.

Our grandparents and maybe even some of our parents may have had the luxury of this thing called a ‘job for life’ where they could, if they wanted to, stay with the same company for as long as thirty years or more, moving up the ranks as the years progressed. Upon retirement, they’d get a watch or something from the company, then retire peacefully on a nice pension that they could live on.

Today, jobs for life are rarer than bigfoot riding a unicorn. By the time my generation reaches retirement age, we’d have had so many jobs that our CVs will resemble the bible in terms of length.

And retirement? Forget about it! Most of us will take our final breaths on the job. And even if we do manage to retire, we’ll probably only last for around 3 months before we realise that our piss-poor pensions aren’t enough to live on so we’ll eventually drop dead of hypothermia, starvation or some underlying illness that couldn’t be treated because the NHS has been privatised and we couldn’t afford the £300 for a 10-minute consultation with the AI doctor over Zoom.

Dystopian vision of the not-too-distant future aside, the point is, we don’t want to look back on our lives and wish we’d spent more of it away from our desks, booths, or vehicles. Far too many people already regret the time not spent with loved ones resulting in fractured relationships at best and completely broken ones at worst.

As someone whose grandmother was medically retired in her 40s due to severe back problems as a result of both her nursing career, where, amongst other things, she was lifting and transporting patients, and later her job with London Transport which involved standing for hours, I can tell you that you don’t want your job to be the cause of your ill health.

Work diligently and with purpose. Always do your best. Take pride in what you do and how you do it but, where possible (because everyone’s circumstances are different) never EVER compromise your health for a job.

Time management

Far from being something that should only be practiced within work hours, good time management is essential both within and outside of work to ensure that you’re making the most of your days. Despite what ‘CEO Hard Body’ on LinkedIn might say, good time management doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) involve sleep deprivation, physical or mental stress and ‘going hard’. Good time management can look like getting to bed at a decent time and getting good quality sleep (I know, easier said than done for most of us); allotting realistic time frames and deadlines to your daily tasks, being punctual and boundried about the punctuality of others,  and, in your own way adhering to Bob Carter’s idea that “poor planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine”.

When you manage your time well, you actually create more time within the day which can be used to focus on your hobbies, interests and/or future plans.

Focus

So, this is comprised of 2 areas: immediate focus: staying focused on a task when surrounded by distractions, and long-term focus: keeping sight of your overall objectives.

Immediate focus – there are a number of tools and techniques available online to help you maintain focus. These range from technological tools such as ‘Clockify’ or those little safes that you can lock your phone in for a scheduled amount of time to avoid cellular distractions; techniques such as the Pomodoro technique, or behaviours’ such as rewarding oneself with a little treat for spending a certain amount of focussed and productive time on a task. You can do some research into what’s available and then see which works best for you. (or you can ask your coach to help you find some. Oh, you don’t have a coach but would like one? No problem, I know a good one, contact me for more info!)

Long-term focus – much trickier than the aforementioned, this involves ‘keeping your eyes on the prize’ as it were. Thinking about how what you are doing can help you attain your overall professional and personal objectives.

Now bear with me because I know someone will be reading this and will be thinking ‘how on Earth is my minimum wage/entry level/I’m just doing this to pay the bills job meant to help me achieve my objective of becoming a millionaire?’ Firstly, becoming a millionaire is a goal but not a good one unless it’s SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. Secondly, you should break your overarching objective down into smaller goals so, using ‘becoming a millionaire’ as an example of a goal you may have, it’s very unlikely that your current job will get you there, however, you may want to focus on the smaller (and more achievable) goal of getting a job that pays more than what you’re being paid at the moment. One way of doing this is to focus on specific aspects of your current job that you can develop to appear more attractive to potential employers. Another is to focus on how you can improve on the area(s) of your job that you’re currently not very good at but that will help you find better-paid employment.

Focusing on how to utilise what you’re doing now to help you achieve your future goals will not only ensure that you always have something to work towards, but will also help you to identify the aspects of your job that can and will be useful to you in the long-term.

Motivation

The aforementioned will help with motivation but sometimes, on those particularly rough days, you’re going to need more. Here are a few suggestions:

• Surround yourself with people who are either in the same situation as you or who are a little further along in their achievements so you can support and motivate each other.

• Reward yourself regularly (weekly, monthly) for a job well done. This doesn’t have to involve spending money,  the reward might be something as simple as spending a Saturday watching your favourite TV shows, settling down with a good book, or going on a hike – the point is that you’re rewarding yourself for the work you’ve done and the crap you’ve experienced, all of which have brought you a few steps closer to where you want to be.

• Think about what will happen if you don’t reach your goal(s). Not all motivation is happy and fun, sometimes a look at the worst-case scenario can be enough to motivate you to keep going so you may want to think about being stuck where you are forever. Chances are you might not know exactly where you want to be in 5 years, but you do know that you want to be further along from where you are now.

• Bills. ‘Nuff said.

Networking

Some of us love networking, some of us hate it and one of us has made networking one of her goals for 2024 after actively avoiding it for a very long time. Anyhoo, networking, regardless of how bad some of us may be at it *cough* is actually a very good skill to have and a relatively easy one to build.

Thinking about my own issues with networking, I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of things. Firstly, I think networking may have a bit of an image problem. I don’t know about you, but when I think about networking, I think about people in severe suits with posh job titles, high-flying work histories and really strong but clammy handshakes. I figure that they’ll start talking to me about their ‘portfolios’ before shoving a business card I didn’t ask for into my hand and then rushing off to speak to someone else.  

Secondly, there’s also the dreaded inferiority complex.  I’m successful at keeping her under control for the most part but she still shows up now and then to remind me that I can’t possibly network because I have nothing of value to offer – I don’t have a posh job title, a particularly interesting career or a nice figure (yeah, I dunno what that has to do with anything either but my inferiority complex can be kinda mean!)

The thing is, neither of these things are true (apart from the nice figure part!). While networking can be as I described, it can also be a really nice group of people just chatting about whatever and getting to know each other authentically. I know this because I attended a networking event recently and it was just like that.  

Here’s something else about networking: it doesn’t have to be an event. What I mean is, you can network with a colleague or two you don’t know very well over coffee for 20 mins if you’d like, either in person or virtually. Less formal, short networking opportunities can be just as rewarding as longer more structured ones, so incorporate some networking into your professional life but to get the most out of it, don’t approach it solely as a way of promoting yourself and getting what you want from it, see it as an opportunity to meet interesting new people.

If you have any advice about how to work, pop it in the comments.