My most valuable key to unlocking success is acute self-awareness. Firstly, when you have clarity and confidence in your super strengths, you know where and how your special and unique skills add value. That means that you can more easily find opportunities to “lean in” to your brilliance so you can stand out and shine.
My best piece of advice? Discover how to make your spikes “spikier”!
This has the double bonus of helping you keep faith in your abilities if and when things go awry. Secondly, self-awareness enables you to understand your development areas too — this empowers you to find ways to bridge these challenges on your growth journey. And lastly, be self-aware about what long-term success looks like for you — because when you articulate your dreams, you’ll have a much stronger chance of making them come true.
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My number 1 lesson is to not compare myself to other people. It's basic but true. I think the world is so often set up to pit people against each other "if someones doing this at a certain age then I should be doing this". It forces us to make bad decisions. At school, at university, on grad schemes we're graded and compared to our peers but I've forced myself to let go of that mentality.
There's always someone who will be younger, prettier, smarter, more successful than me, so why allow that negative energy into my life?
I make decisions based on what I want to do, live life to the beat of my own little (weird) drum and fundamentally am happier for it. When you're pushing yourself to try new things you're opening yourself up to a lot of rejection, criticism, people knocking you back. You can listen of course, but fundamentally there's nothing wrong with living life on your own terms. If we start to think about the world as winners, losers, better or worse, we start to feel unsatisfied with what we have and lose our sense of community. Life's tough enough, why add more things to worry about to it?
Alice ter Haar
Senior Manager, EU Marketing at Deliveroo, Europe’s fastest-growing company, and a personal development enthusiast.
