Igniting Your Professional Development
- Jul 6, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 24, 2024
Written by: Dr. Jennifer Jones Bryant, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Igniting your professional development as a leader and an entrepreneur requires you to reach within and recognize your worth as an industry expert. Successfully navigating your professional development path, and advancing your career and business through continuous professional growth takes courage, commitment, and consistency by leveraging these simple and memorable key points:
Initiate
Initiate your first steps to launch growth by focusing on your short and long-term goals. Goal setting gives you something tangible to work towards. Make sure your progress is documented somewhere so you can reflect on them, and don’t forget to celebrate your wins. This is a great way to own your growth journey.
Growth
Discovering entrepreneurial opportunities require that you not only possess prior knowledge, but that you have the cognitive abilities to add value and apply knowledge. Make it one of your goals to learn a new skill, fully immerse yourself in everything about your industry; learning the inner workings of your business, and know your audience and competitors. Become an authority in your specialized field whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.
Networking
This is not just attending events. This is about connecting and focusing on relationship building after the event, finding common grounds, building trust, and partnering by asking how you can help to achieve mutual benefits in the business relationship.
Innovate
Never stop reinventing yourself because it will make you more creative, and will enhance your professional brand. The more you innovate, the more creative you’ll be which will improve how you do things and the quicker you’ll be able to solve problems. Become a thought leader by inspiring others with innovative ideas; turning ideas into reality, and creating force multipliers by showing others how to replicate success.
Teachable
What are you willing to sacrifice to invest in your learning? Stop watching TV? Stop shopping? Reducing eating out? Commit to your growth process by remaining in the pursuit of fostering, maintaining, and pursuing the desire to invest in yourself through emerging learning opportunities such as reading scholarly articles, books, attending industry workshops, webinars, and conferences, sharing best practices and knowledge sharing with a professional colleague, and participation in professional organizations.
Excellence
Aim for excellence instead of perfection. Perfection is impossible. Extraordinary efforts yield extraordinary rewards. Excellence is cultivated over a period of time through hard work, passion, and performance. Nuggets of wisdom for achieving excellence include being passionate, embracing your talents, and soliciting continuous feedback. Give your best effort to whatever tasks you embark; be humble with recognition and understand that there’s room for improvement.
Reflect on the I.G.N.I.T.E. key points in your daily activities and for six days go through each one to see how you express that quality of leadership and identify which area you need to grow and the steps you need to take to grow in each area.
Actively pursuing professional growth is an empowerment journey of learning, humility, courage, and consistency. The benefits and fulfillment from your experience from incremental and continuous growth to stay relevant will fuel your soul and support you to go deeper when needed as you flourish.
Strike a match to your professional growth, ignite your fire®, and commit to your growth!
Cheers to your next step as an amazing entrepreneur and leader!
Dr. Jennifer Jones Bryant
Dr. Jennifer Jones Bryant was fatherless during her childhood. She spent her teenage years caring for her mother, who was mentally ill when Dr. Bryant’s only sibling was incarcerated. After going through sexual assault and domestic abuse throughout her early twenties and later dealing with the loss of all her loved ones that left her deeply depressed, Dr. Bryant looked past her challenging beginnings and reached within herself, and relied on faith find strength. She has since spent her life helping others find and grow their inner strength to accelerate to the next level in their careers. Her 33-year career and executive-level experience with the federal government and corporate spanned many functional areas, including budget and finance, human resources, procurement coordination, logistical support, strategic planning, strategic communication, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. She is Executive Founder of Reaching From Within, an Empowerment Journey LLC, the well sought out coaching and mentoring company with thousands of clients worldwide, including federal government agencies, academia, churches, and community organizations. She provides services through workshops, resume reviews and updates, and interview preparations, and goal setting. Dr. Bryant is also the host of the "Empowerment Journey" Podcast, which is consistently among the top podcasts within the Elite Conversation Community. She was featured in Speakers Magazine, Faith Heart, Glam CEO, Power 20, Women on the Verge, VoyATL, One Tribe, and UpWord global magazines, Making Headlines News, Radio One, Great Day Washington WUSA, NBC and ABC affiliates, and ThatAnitaLiveShow, and numerous Podcast interviews. Her mission: Ignite Your Fire® to Propel Your Professional Development.
