How can you start bringing concrete contribution?

Once you had a good idea and find your way to push it on the web (e.g. via LinkedIn), you should aslo have a try in the real life and test how good it really is.

Now the story gets harder and doubts may rise uncountable: carrying out ideas has never been an easy task, even when they are good. But, despite difficulties, we may use the right attitude to pursue our convictions.

Working (and generally Living) leads you to a continuous contact with people. However such confrontation may bring to objection and denial. Developing and Realizing ideas in a workgroup, a team or a complex organization, means they must be understood and then supported. So you first need to find alignment with your colleagues, your customers, your company's vision and mission.

By direct experience as well as by literature, I understood that to match the ideas in our head with the outside world, you need first of all Assertiveness. You can easily find a definition of this quality (e.g. on Wikipedia), but I'd rather describe what it is by my personal experience.

Assertiveness is not a quality you can develop alone. It is fist of all a positive attitude to bring your ideas to other people. Nevertheless, when someboby rejects it, being assertive means being willing to understand such objection, enlarge your view as much as possible, involve your interlocutors and discuss openly.

Being assertive in some organization may be uncomfortable, especially for some relaxed managers. But it is the only way to understand and master "what's outside", which keeps changing and for which we must always find the fair wind, i.e. concrete opportunities.

Since being assertive forces your to be very sure of your ideas, it forces you to be tidy and aware of what surrounds you. Doing so, you would not grow your creativity, but surely you will analyze and judge your ideas more carefully. You would also grow in proposing even when somebody will deny them.

Assertiveness is therefore a hard work, because it pushes you:

• to look after and test your ideas before disclosing them,
• to be positive even when people around you is negative,
• to argue against possible objections, explicit them, with clear and open speaking,
• to develop your relationship with colleagues, collaborators, customers and suppliers often.

As I openly stated, this post will not be a spirng to new ideas (I'm afraid you must find them by yourself). Yet worse, when you have one, it will be often hard to bring it to completion. Therefore I suggest to learn and practice Assertiveness: you would grow ideas, and also your self-esteem. By the way, this what I personally do at work and when I write on LinkedIn.