One of the challenges some leaders face during career and entrepreneurial transitions, is the fact that they will have to start all over again and lose their expert status. The fallacy of expert status goes hand in hand with a limited view of the possibilities in front of you as well avoiding action completely. Adopting a beginner’s mindset when you are in transition, introduces many possibilities that can help you think through dilemmas; such as how to repackage your wealth of experience, skills and unique perspective or invest your energy doing something worthwhile that you truly enjoy.

During coaching conversations with clients, we focus on what will it take, to get to where they want to go or to do what they want to do. This helps us to create an action plan to drive their perform and progress. Geoff Colvin’s research concluded great performers devote the most hours to ‘deliberate practice’, an activity that is explicitly intended to improve performance. Here are 7 practices that will help you perform exceptionally during and beyond your transition:

1. Push yourself a little harder. Define a set of actions and then do them well.
2. Believe and realize you can be an expert again, again and again. Approach each critical action item with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
3. Continually assess your performance. As you complete a task, focus on what you did, why you did it and how it worked out.
4. Make small changes in your behavior. Solicit feedback on your performance from multiple sources and act on the feedback.
5. Practice regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice simply does not work.
6. Expect and treat setbacks as a prerequisite for success. Study setbacks revise your behaviors accordingly and keep going.
7. Recognize that to be brilliant you will always need to reinvent yourself as your interests, perspective and vision changes.

I would love to know ways in which you have practiced deliberately and what you do to generate exciting possibilities. Please feel free to share your ideas in the comment section below.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Career Advancement, Career Reinvention, Career Transition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.