Stop Waiting for Permission to Level Up

Nobody's coming to save your career. While you're waiting for the perfect opportunity or company approval, your competition is investing in themselves and pulling ahead. Here's how to bet on your own growth before the outcome is guaranteed — the courage that separates leaders from followers.

Transcript

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Hey, I'm JP Warren. I'm not a pastor. I'm not a theologian. I'm just a guy figuring out his faith and finding out what's in the scripture keeps showing up at how I lead. This is Lead with Confidence. Five minutes. Let's go. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Lead with Confidence with me, JP Warren. And the fact of the day is nobody is coming to save your career. Okay? So this week uh we've been talking about courage, right? How to walk into a room with executive presence, how to have those uncomfortable conversations. Now it's all about having the courage to get out of your ruts, to get out of your lane and actually level up. A lot of times we wait for the perfect opportunity or the company provide us the training resources. Man, sometimes we guys we got to grab the bull by our horns, by the horns, not all horns. We got to grab the bull up by the horns and execute and level up ourselves. All right. And you see this all the time. The people getting promoted, I mean, are not the most qualified, right? They're the ones that actually invested in becoming qualified before the job even opened up. So they got the track record, they got the search, they got the experience. And you're everyone's always waiting, man, once I get to this role, then I'm gonna learn how to do this. Or worse off, right now in our industry, there's a lot of MA going on. So a lot of times people are getting put into these new positions, right? Managing teams. They've never been a manager before. So they're just put, they get in this role and they're just expected, hey, you've been at this company for 10 years, you should know how to manage, or you've been here for, you know, 10, 15 years, whatever, you should know how to be a manager or vice president or stuff like that. But there are skill sets that are required. And if you're not getting the skill sets from your company, then it's up to you to take accountability and level yourself up. All right. So the problem right now in the world is that you're waiting for your company to pay for your training, right? Send you to conferences and hand you stretch assignments, which is great and all. But right now we're in the world of do more with less, right? We're in a world of reducing expenses. We're in a world where conferences don't go that much. We're in a world where the training and development, skill set development of teams is being pushed aside for either saving costs or investing in other technologies like AI. All right. Another problem is you think you're you think investing yourself is risky, right? But staying where you're at is actually riskier in a changing market. So if you're not learning new skills, and I think one of the most strongest skills that we can learn is our communication skills. Um, I follow this one person, and again, this is part of my me leveling up. I actually changed my algorithm um on my social media accounts. You know, before it was, you know, uh, I'm not even mentioned before, but whatever. Before it was whatever, now it's a lot of leadership, communication, jujitsu, things like that. Actually, if I am scrolling, I'm actually picking up uh information. So the anyway, so one person that I learned from is that you can be a 10 out of 10 uh person in your field. So a 10 out of 10 engineer, let's say, okay? And if your communication levels is a three out of 10, you're not able to connect with people, you're not able to influence people, you're not able to communicate the value or the direction, things like that. What do you think your limits at? Where do you think your ceiling is going to be? Your engineering skills or your communication skills? All right. And the third problem is you want a guaranteed outcome before you invest. So, okay, what's my ROI if I invest in this course? What's my ROI if I actually take the time, energy, and effort to actually start this skill course? Okay. But leadership requires making bets on incomplete information. All right. So one story with me is that, you know, I started my entrepreneurial journey at 41 uh years old. And I, again, I'm gonna get on the other side of that of future, uh, future things, but there was some calling with me where, you know, I'm really good at I I think I'm, you know, my imposter syndrome says I'm not, but my evidence says, and if you turn back, I think two or three episodes, you'll hear about that. But my evidence is that I'm really good at connecting with people, right? I'm very good at like helping people kind of get out of the ruts, kind of reframing things, seeing things, challenging people. And so one of the things for me that I wanted to get a CTA coaching certificate, which I did, you know, through the counsel of a couple of people of buddies of mine in my circles that were coaches, I decided to invest six months, and I think it was like two grand, four grand, something like that, into a coaching certificate. Now, before I even did this, one of my buddies that has a certificate said, dude, like no one's even asked for my certificate, but it's nice to have, just so, you know, again, the imposter syndrome. I was like, okay, so I did that. I had no idea about if there's going to be any bookings, coaching, or what I was gonna do with it. But all I know is I wanted to learn the coaching side of things. And it's been fascinating to learn, but I invested in that. And from that, that's just opened up a lot of, not as much doors as I want yet, yet, but I have actually applied the coaching certificate to do trainings, to have the confidence to reach out to do trainings and level people up. And it's something I'm getting more confidence day by day. But without that, without investing myself, without taking the time, and this is not the time where my business is booming. All right, there wasn't a lot of money in the bank, but I knew that I'd invested myself to get those skills, to get that knowledge, to help people. And then you know what? It's gonna hopefully this will pay out pay out down the road. All right. So here's a little framework for you about personal uh investment in your skill set development. Number one, invest before invitation. All right, spend your own money on the conference certification or coaching that builds skills for the role that you want, not the one that you have. Don't wait for the company budget approval. I think this is interesting. So if a lot of people, they want to break into that C suite or they want to break into that VP level role. And I saw, you know, take a triangle and take another triangle and turn that upside down. On the left, the triangle, what is it? 90% of the conversations are mainly operation and then 10% is financial. Once you get to the C level suite, you flip that triangle around, 90% is financial and 10% is operations. So I know that a lot of people that in my circles, they will actually start taking courses on the financial side of things. The financial side, whether it's they're on their job now or whether they apply that on their job now, what they're trying to do is to be comfortable enough to start having those conversations if they're riding up the elevator with the C-suite or they bump into them uh at conferences, right? So again, whether it's for your role right now or in the future, just start investing yourself. Now, here's the deal. I don't think conferences are, and this is my personal thing, I don't think conferences get your company paid for that. But when it comes to like your skill sets, there's YouTube out there, there's TikTok, there's Instagram, there's this podcast. There's a lot of great resources out there for you to actually level up your skill set, okay? And I would often encourage you to do this. If you do take a course or you do start learning a skill set or something you want to try, try it out. All right. Communication is a skill set, okay? It can be learned, practiced, and mastered, just like golf, just like any skill. No one was born an effective communicator. That's something that's learned, okay? The second thing, again, I just bleeding into this, is execute immediately. So once you start learning those skills, once you start learning those frameworks, start applying them today. The more you apply them today, the easier and more comfortable it's gonna be for you tomorrow. All right. And the third thing is document the evidence that you are doing your training. So whenever you do get a certificate from Coursera or you do a I'm not gonna plug it now, but maybe I will, or one of my online uh cohorts, you get a certificate. So document that, promote that, store that in a bank where you actually come up and uh discuss that if a role opens up for you. All right. So, what to do right now? The next time you say, Man, I can't afford that training, um, ask yourself, can you really afford to stay where you're at for the rest of your career? So if you can, then don't get that training. But if you want something more, if you want to learn something more, contribute to different conversations, invest in yourself. The second thing is stop waiting for perfect time to do this. And this is something that is everyone is guilty of. Everyone always waits for things to fall in line or the perfect time to do this. Oh, we got to do the, you know, everything has to be set before we buy the house or before we have children, before I take this role, before I get promoted here. Don't wait for the perfect time. I always say this it's like, it's like planning a garden, right? Your network is not gonna grow. You know, your network's not gonna be there overnight when you need it. It takes time, energy, and effort, just like your skill sets. So start planning and betting on yourself early, all right? And ask yourself, right? What would someone already be doing? Would what would someone already be doing my dream job be learning right now? And I think right now, I'm guilty of this too, probably a lot of AI, um, how to set up AI systems uh with your workflows and all that stuff. So even doing like an online simple thing about an AI training or or communications or financial, whatever that is, start investing in yourself. The best investment you'll ever make is the one that you make in yourself. Thank you everyone for tuning in today, and we will see you on the next Lee with Confidence podcast. That's all I got for today. I'm figuring this out right alongside. I appreciate you listening. And Ben, come join us at Exec Crew if this is resonating. Link in the description, and we'll see you tomorrow.