How To Dramatically Boost Your Chances Of Having A Successful Career

Many people have had their theories about what attributes are required to have a successful and rewarding career. Some say you need to have a high IQ. Others say that great communication and leadership skills are the keys while others think that coming from a wealthy family gives you a significant advantage in the business world. However a study that followed 268 Harvard students over a 70 year showed that the most significant factor to positively influence your career actually had little to do with what you did at work...

The strongest predictor for an effective and rewarding career was found to be having and maintaining close relationships, especially with your family.

These factors were found to dramatically improve your chance of future career success:

1. Being married for more than 10 years

2. Having children

3. Having a good relationship and regular contact with your own children

4. Having lots of friends

5. Keeping in contact with your family of origin

6. Being involved in clubs or playing games with others

 But just how much an impact does close relationships have on career success?

The 58 men in this study who had the best scores reflecting close relationships were three times more likely to be in the Who's Who In America and their average maximum income was 225% greater than the men who were found to have the worse close relationships. Not surprisingly, the men who had the closest relationships also were the happiest. It shows the benefit of a healthy work life balance.

With the ability to maintain close relationships showing to be a great predictor of future career success and happiness, business will be looking to reap the benefits by finding employees with a great family life. But recruiting people with great family lives will do little for the business if they don't provide working conditions that help employees sustain healthy family relationships.

You see, most businesses are all about creating and maintaining professional relationships with your clients. The better you do this, the better your business will be. This study shows why a healthy work life balance is so important. It shows that life outside of your work with your family and loved ones adds to your work life by being an ideal training ground for developing skills for long- lasting relationship building. Family time could now be even considered as valuable professional development and training.

Businesses that encourage their employees to work long hours to get ahead could, in fact be sabotaging their future sustainability and success of their business by denying the appropriate professional development and relationship building training that family and married life provides. In fact, business should be actively encouraging this priceless form of life skills training. They don't even have to pay for it either. All business needs to do is to ensure that their employees have sufficient time off work to develop and maintain close family and personal relationships.

To me, having a healthy work life balance is about putting a bit more of your life into your work and more work into your life.  Then you have a life that works. The skills that you develop at work and in your life outside your work complement each other and like it or not, if you disregard one side of the equation, it will have an adverse impact on the other.