Don′t self sabotage in your power journey. Let your ¨wrong¨ beliefs behind and be ready to fly.

When asked about my advice to the ones who wants to fast forward their careers I usually reinforce the importance of self-knowledge. Together with studying from different sources, hard work and high level of resilience, self-knowledge is the most important capability one has to develop. Personally I′ve been dedicating significant time to myself – going beyond traditional ¨corporate¨ topics like innovation, futurism or leadership - looking for contents that through an internal journey could take me to a better place as a leader.

With that in mind, I took the Building Power course part of LEAD in Stanford University. My goal? To improve my ability to influence change in my organization. Why I got? An amazing self-learning journey that I′m still processing. It was so helpful for me that I decided to share my key take aways with you. Hope you like it. Hope it′s useful.

• Prejudices and wrong beliefs around Power. I wasn′t comfortable in planning for power, not even in using power to get what I want. I realized that I couldn’t – and am still working on it – clearly see how powerful I am.
• Auto sabotage as a hypnotic and non-conscious habit. When watching the classes, reading the book or discussing in coach sessions, I could almost physically feel my rejections to some concepts. I saw getting power as something old fashioned and I didn’t want to be part of that. Just after recognizing my own sabotage, I could start working on it
• Get noticed, use every opportunity to build a personal brand. Before the course, I usually was in board meetings thinking that this were part of the “old world” and that I didn’t want to be part of that. Now I know that every session is an to build my visibility and strategically get where I want. I pay attention to details like non verbal communication, body language and others perception around you. Liked it or not, others are creating a perception about you all the time – you may manage it or not
• Set a clear map of strategic stakeholders – powerful people that you should be close. Beyond setting who I needed to be close to, I also did an exercise of putting ones in the list that I didn’t have affinity or proximity. This has been a hard task. So far, I built strong connections with people that were comfortable to me, but I tended to avoid relating with the ¨non comfortable ones. The course taught me to set who was important for me as a network independent from my personal preferences.
• Ask for what you want. Basic. Simple. Direct and obvious. But not common. Your (ours, mine) ambitions are not clear until you clearly say it.

That′s it. A lot to think. A long – but exciting- journey to go. What about you? How do you experience power ? How do you create your influence network?