"You've got to jump off cliffs, all the time,
and build your wings on the way down.”
– Ray Bradbury

It happens in every career, in every industry. A feeling of being stuck, optionless, and in need of a jolt.   A breakthrough is defined as “any significant or sudden advance, development, achievement, or increase that removes a barrier to progress”. These moments can be career awakening epiphanies.

Experiencing breakthroughs can be a matter of self-fulfilling prophesy. The less likely you feel your chances of experiencing a career breakthrough are, the more elusive they become. However if you position yourself to be more open to small advances, developments, and achievements, the more prepared you will be to seize the opportunities when they present themselves.

Breakthroughs differ from the more typical, long range planning because they jump the tracks of sequential thinking to create a quantum change in results. Management consultant Lisa Haneberg said it best when talking about breakthrough moments when she summed up the difference between normal planning and planning for breakthroughs. She describes the results of a breakthrough as “Something exists that didn't exist before. The next step is clear. You seize an opportunity. You jump onto a new path. Breakthroughs are important and valuable. They can propel results to new levels in ways that continuous improvement cannot.”

Creating Breakthrough Methods

You’ll reach new plateaus and achieve breakthrough results most effectively when you determine which methods maximize the opportunities available to you.  These methods act as conductive vehicles that speed your path towards breakthrough moments. Identifying and  leveraging new ways to seize possibilities will catapult you to breakthroughs.

Methods assisting in breakthroughs vary by individual, here are just a few:

Coaching and Being Coached

Whether in offices or on fields, coaches around the world focus on the accomplishment of goals – helping performers to achieve results and remove barriers. It is their duty to assist in generating solutions, create ideas, and turn the coached individual into someone with new avenues of thinking, decision making, and overall competence.  By giving and receiving more coaching, and thus continually turning new solutions around in your mind, you will achieve more breakthroughs.

Request the Unreasonable

Don’t be afraid of asking for something you’ve got little right to ask for, how else are you going to know if anyone will give them to you? Getting a properly positioned request granted, however unreasonable it may seem, can propel you to a breakthrough like a turbo charger as you rocket towards success. Even when you fail to get your request granted a compromise can be reached, putting you several steps ahead of what you would have normally been comfortable in asking for – great requests are a shortcut to breakthroughs and can make your path far easier.

Get Out Of The Office

A shocking change to the humdrum can have profound effects on your mindset, and can provide fertile ground for breakthroughs to grow and thrive. Putting yourself in a more colorful context can give you new perspective. Haneberg suggests the arts “ Cirque du Soleil shows are inventive, imaginative and stimulative, and would be an ideal exotic context for a management team to enjoy before a strategy session.”

The Direct Approach

Candid, unfiltered, feedback from a group of superiors, peers, and direct reports can have a profound difference in your view of yourself and of those around you. It isn’t the easiest path to reaching your breakthroughs, yet it has been proven that getting subjective, job specific feedback is among the most powerful ways to reshape our thoughts and pick up on unseen opportunities. You’ll get more & better information, and usually several suggestions about how to best get the results you want.

“I think all great innovations are built on rejections.” – Louis Ferdinand Celine

Facing the Prospect of Rejection

A high percentage of your requests, following these methods, will not be approved or accepted. The difference when they are will be tremendous and make the occasions of rejection worthwhile.  Don’t lose heart, or change your opinions of those who you are making the requests of – remember, we asked them knowing they would likely be rejected. Adopting a negative attitude and feeling poorly about others will hinder our willingness to make requests in the future which derails the breakthrough process. In instances of rejection continue forward positively and ask again, but this time for alternate solutions now that the person has a better understanding of what you hope to accomplish.