Amid your efforts to Create Raving Fans, how often do you rave about yourself?

Metaphysicist and keynote speaker Katrina Mayer says that “loving yourself isn’t vanity. It’s sanity.” There’s truth in that. Feeling great about ourselves isn't just normal, it directly affects the manner in which we present ourselves to co-workers and to clients.

So how does one go about becoming your OWN Raving Fan at Datamax?

Here's 3 Tips on Reaching Your Professional Potential:

1. Learn What Matters to Your Company.

• Visit the Datamax Website: From our ongoing blog posts, to our easily-navigable tech stack to the “Industries We Serve” page, both datamaxtexas.com and datamaxarkansas.com serve as a great starting point for building a firm understanding of everything essentially we do.
• Continue to Educate Yourself: It’s the theme of this month’s newsletter, after all. Techwave.com is one great example, but your supervisor would be happy to provide you with online and hands-on learning tools that make you an even more powerful asset  to the Datamax family.
• When in Doubt, Consult the Little Blue Book: In only 26 pages, it’s stuffed full with our philosophies, our culture and how we roll as an organization.

2. Learn What Matters to Your Clients.

• The Competitive Advantage Program: The elements of this program are the building blocks as to how we remain relevant every single day. By understanding Competitive Advantage, you can communicate to the public precisely what our differentiators are, and how they better serve our clients. For more on this key Datamax initiative, click here.
• Go Vertical, Grow Vertical:  We must own the ability to see things from our clients’ perspective. With more than 50 years of experience developing custom business process-based technology services and solutions for virtually every industry, Datamax knows how to speak the unique language of all kinds of business. Do you? To learn more about applying our expertise to individual industries, click here.
• Take Time to Listen: Just as writer and founder of the world Scouting movement Robert Baden-Powell said, "if you make listening and observation your occupation, you will gain much more than you can by talking." The best method for compiling relevant information is forcing yourself into your client’s shoes and shadowing their path. The only way of getting there is by listening.

3. Learn What Matters to YOU!

• Take Care of Yourself. To maintain a clear perspective internally on what you want to achieve, resort back to the basics: Get an adequate amounts of sleep. Exercise. Develop healthy eating habits. And for goodness sakes, especially in August, continue to hydrate!
• Create a Plan For Yourself. Step 1: Write it down. As you already know, it’s not really a plan until you put it on paper.  Ask yourself those important questions about where you’d like to be days, months, and years from now. Here are 9 quick steps to a Personal Development Plan:

1. Define your goals
2. Prioritize
3. Set a deadline
4. Understand your strengths
5. Recognize opportunities and threats
6. Develop new skills
7. Take action
8. Get support
9. Measure progress

• But Don’t Forget About Right Now. A study published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine says that as you increase the number of things to which the brain needs to pay attention, the result is a bottleneck that blocks awareness of critical information. Multitasking is a reality for many of us throughout a workday. However, when possible, focus on the task at hand and instead of doing “more,” focusing on doing to  “what matters most” right now to the best of your ability.

With taking these steps into consideration, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of your skill set, your weaknesses and those necessary areas of improvement. Eventually, when you look in the mirror, you'll be RAVING about what you see staring back at you.