STRATEGIC PARLOUR

In order to reach your goals, you have to have a clear vision and be very strategic in your planning. In fact, all of your goals should have backup plans. Think of achieving your goals like playing chess. You can’t simply make one place and then rest on your laurels without changing your approach. You have to continuously plan and change those plans according to changing situations. Being strategic involves having multiple plans and approaches that will give you the same results. A big part of being a strategic thinker is believing that no matter what happens that you will succeed. However, you must be willing to change your plans based on your results and intuition. A strategic thinker has a keen sense of intuition. They are very good at using their gut feeling to decide whether an action or plan will be a good fit for them and their goals. Not every decision can be based on facts and experience alone, strategic thinkers trust their gut when analyzing whether a risk is worth it. They...

1. Seeing the client as someone they have to please Your client hired you because you are the expert at what you do. They are the expert at the thing they do. And you have been brought in to add your expertise to the client’s expertise to help them accomplish their goal. (If you’re presenting work and unclear on what that goal is we have a bigger problem than this article is going to address.) What they didn’t hire you to do is make them happy, or be their friend. Your decisions should revolve around achieving that goal, not pleasing the client. And while you should do everything in a professional and pleasing manner, never conflate helping the client achieve their goal with making them happy. They will ask you to do things that run counter, in your expertise, to achieving the goal. Your job is to convince them otherwise. In the end, they will be better served if you see yourself as the expert they believe they hired. And while this may result in some unpleasant conversations during t...