From ZERO to an EIGHT FIGURE Salary!! – [PART 1]
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Welcome back!
Let’s start the third part of this blog by asking ourselves three questions:
- What is it that makes my Services Valuable?
- What Qualities or Characteristics that make me Distinct?
- What Accomplishments have I had that Stand Out?
You must be wondering why I am telling you to ask these questions to yourselves. There is a reason, and I will come to that.
But before that, let’s change the setting and assume that either you are sitting in an interview or in your appraisal discussion and your interviewer or boss is asking you the following questions:
- What is it that makes your Services Valuable?
- What Qualities or Characteristics that make you Distinct?
- What Accomplishments have you had that Stand Out?
You would agree with me that these are not unreasonable questions for a job interview on an appraisal discussion. And also, you would have got the context of why in the beginning of this blog I told you to ask these questions to yourselves.
These are fundamental questions to understand or determine the value of any individual in a corporate setting. Unfortunately, we don’t realise the real power of them and only wait for someone else to ask these questions to us either in an interview setting or in an appraisal discussion. And whenever we actually have to face these questions, we somehow try to figure out an answer with whatever limited data that we are able to recall at that given point.
I have conducted thousands of interviews and appraisal discussions in my career. To me, these two events play an extremely important role in defining your future salary. They, in a way, are your key levers to fast track your journey towards an “Eight Figure” salary. Yet, in most case I have found people to be highly unprepared to answer these questions.
Why?
The answer lies in our inability to differentiate between efforts and outcome at an individual level. In most cases, when we talk about the “individual”, we focus only on the effort and when we talk about the “organisation”, we start describing the outcome. The language turns from “I” to “WE” the moment one starts speaking about the outcome. Many times, I am required to specifically ask this question – “what did you do to get this outcome?” People fumble as they are not able to present the individual in themselves detached from the collective and list down specifics because of which they need to be valued more than the others.
From “ZERO” to an “EIGHT FIGURE” Salary!! – [PART 2]
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There is a second problem too.
Most of the successful corporate professionals have a very highly overrated view of themselves. I have also been through that phase in my career. They start believing that they know it all and with whatever knowledge they have, they will keep getting success in future as well. This completely stops their learning process and as a result, their level of value addition starts getting stagnant.
This belief continues till they hit the first failure of their life. And then, they are devastated. In my career, I have witnessed hundreds of such cases where an inflated ego and a false belief of superiority have killed blossoming careers. One key reason behind the so called – “mid-career or mid-life crisis” is this.
So how do we deal with this situation?
The answer lies in going back to our three fundamental questions that I have listed out in the beginning of this blog.
To all the professionals I have coached so far, and there are more than 5000 of them till date, I advise them to ask these questions to themselves every day. Now, you must be wondering – What? Every Day?? How would that help? The answers would remain the same.
No. That’s the key. Answers have to change over a period of time. And if they are not changing, you must feel uncomfortable about it. It would tell you that you are stagnating in your career and you need to do something about it. That’s the real secret behind my guidance to ask these questions everyday to yourself.
If you have a desire to earn more, you will have to keep providing more value. If you expect someone to pay you more, you must be prepared to give back more. To give back more, you must be learning and enhancing your skills on a regular basis. This is the cycle that has to continue, otherwise you will hit a bump in your career journey at some point in time when you will not be able to enhance the level of your value addition to demand a commensurate price.
Start today. Ask these questions to yourself and see where you stand. I can guarantee you that in a week’s time you will figure out where you are in your career and what you need to do.
And one last thing – be HONEST in your assessment of YOURSELF!!