Its Your Choice: Make Progress or be Relegated

Just like in sports, you can be relegated to lower ranks if you do not prove your worth in business, relationships, money and careers. Promotion and relegation in sports takes place at the end of each season. It involves teams being transferred between divisions. 

The best-ranked teams in each division are promoted to the next-highest division, and at the same time the worst-ranked teams in the higher division are relegated (or demoted) to the lower division. In the English premier league, the bottom three teams are relegated. I hope today’s blog post inspires you to avoid the bottom positions. If you are not making progress, you risk being relegated.

What is Progress? 

To make progress means advancing in a positive way. Are you making progress in your career? Are you making progress in your business? Are you making progress in your relationship? 

Progress means the gradual development or growth towards your goals. You have goals don’t ya? You have them written down, right? Progress means achieving your goals. It means looking back at how far you have come and being proud about your rise and rise. Do you feel like you are making progress in your life? Do you feel like you are moving ahead as fast as you would like?

 The earth moves around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. We do not even feel that movement. On the other hand if a car overtook you at 100 miles per hour on a 60 zone, you would think it was moving pretty fast. Progress and speed is relative. It depends on where you are in life and who is assessing your progress.

 There is such thing as perceived progress. To avoid relegation, you need to become a master of making both real and perceived progress. You need to identify what matters and excel in that. In soccer, to avoid relegation, a team must score goals. Technical brilliance on the pitch, as entertaining as it may be, does not prevent relegation.

 Perceived progress can make all the difference between success and failure. Say two people are both equally qualified mechanics. One is perceived to be more experienced, more knowledgeable than the other.  Who would get the better paying jobs?

 Sometimes perceived progress is not worth much. What good is living in a giant mansion when you cannot afford your son’s school fees? What good is your Rolex if you cannot afford bus fare? Should you even be on the bus? Real progress is more solid and long lasting. Aim for real progress but do not ignore the value of perceived progress.

 The following six tips will help you make real or perceived progress and help you avoid relegation.

1.      Master the Basics

2.      Gain Knowledge

3.      Keep the Score

4.      Communicate

5.      Network

6.      Mental Shift

1 – Master the Basics 

To become a black belt in martial arts, one has to master the basics of say karate. Learn all the offensive and defensive techniques. Even in golf, one has to master his or her golf swing before claiming to be good in golf. 

What do you want to be good at? Let us say you want to be a good accountant. You need to understand the basic terminologies, accounting methods and standards. You need to understand the business and legal environment under which you will be operating. 

Without understanding the basics, you are bound to make costly mistakes. Take time to understand what it is that you want to pursue. There is no need of setting off to sea without a compass. 

To be able to run a blog successfully, one has to master the basics of writing, driving traffic to a website, managing blog comments, syndication and subscriptions. It is hard to move to the upper echelons of blogosphere without understanding and mastering the basics. 

Are you a master of the basics? Have you covered all angles as far as the foundation of your success goes? This is an important step. 

2 – Gain Knowledge 

You need to gain knowledge of yourself and be a master of your emotions. You need to control you. Do not let you run amok. Practice self mastery and gain an intimate knowledge of the inner lady or gentleman within. Be at peace with yourself and only embark on a journey that is within your mission in life and in harmony with your aspirations. Without being congruent internally, you will end up sabotaging your progress. 

Have you conducted a SWOT analysis of your venture? SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. What are you talents? What makes you tick? What core strengths and advantages do you have?

 A SWOT analysis helps you assess yourself against the competition. It helps you identify your angle and how to present yourself. If say you are good with people, you can seek out roles and positions that bring out that part of you. If you do not like traveling away from your family, do not take on a role that requires moving from city to city or country to country.

 Understand your opportunities for growth and potential obstacles (threats). A detailed SWOT analysis is something I highly recommend for career, business and even relationships. You want to date that person? What can you do to get their interest? What can you do to keep off the competition? 

3 – Keep the Score 

You will win some and you will lose some. That is the name of the game. Just make sure you do not lose too many times. Keep a score of how well you are doing. Money is a pretty good score card for business. If you are running your business and the numbers tell you that you are winning, then that is good. If on the other hand the numbers tell you that you are sinking money in a bottomless pit, it is time to make changes before you are relegated. 

4 – Communicate 

If you keep making progress and the relevant people do not know about it, then you are missing out on the benefit of that progress. Let us say for example you run a charitable organization and you raise money to help disabled kids. If every month you donate x amount of money and do this or that for the kids, then you need to communicate that with your donors. You need to have an open line of communication with your stakeholders. Otherwise you will be perceived as not making progress. 

Once you make progress, package your progress nicely and communicate the nature of the progress to stakeholders. Let say for example you have just finished your distance learning degree; you need to get the higher ups at your work place to know about it. Every time you add a new skill or capability, let the relevant people know. 

5- Network 

To make progress in careers and in business you need to network with others. The more people you network with the more likely you are to be of use to them and find people who are of use to your career progression. There are two types of networking that you can use to make career progress. 

• Vertical Networking – This means building a network of people above you and below you in your company or industry.
• Lateral Networking - This means reaching out to people outside your domain. If you are a writer for a newspaper, you can network with people in Radio, magazines, bloggers, graphic designers, computer programmers, business people, publishers etc. 

6 – Mental Shift 

Success or failure is all in the mind. You need to prepare yourself for moving up the ladder. You need to know how the game is played at the next level. Otherwise you might find yourself out of your depth and end up being relegated back to where you came from. 

Let us say you are transitioning from an employee to a self employed person. There are things that you need to adjust in order to be successful. You need to develop self promotion skills that you might not have needed in your previous job. You need to become more confident and independent from the security of corporate environment. You may need to learn to swim with sharks. 

Summary 

Making real and perceived progress can help you avoid being relegated to lower ranks. Relegation occurs when one is not perceived to be pulling in their weight. We have looked at 6 tips to avoid relegation: master the basics, gain knowledge, keep the score, communicate, network and have a mental shift to the next level.

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