A Rapid Guide for Working Professionals
The secret to your social mobility lies in your “alliances”.
And by the word alliance, I mean other people, or groups of people, or even organizations – who are willing to take a risk for you.
Understand how these alliances work and cultivate them, and your ascent can be fast, vast, and unparalleled.
Ignore them, and it doesn’t matter how hard you work, how much value you create, or how much business you generate; you won’t get anywhere.
You will – at best – stay where you are put… Which, when you consider inflation, means that you’ll be on a perpetual downward slide.
Let me explain how it all works and how you can find your way up.
What Exactly Is Social Mobility?
Despite all the doctored news about “the economy doing well” or “jobs and wages growing fast”… When you dig deep and do your actual research, you start to see the rise of “income inequality”, the lack of “good jobs”, “diminishing career opportunities” and the “devastating approach of human automation”.
And if you are a millennial, you already have a front row seat to the debacle!
There is a lot of tension and conflict in our culture when it comes to job opportunities, wages and money. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that people – including politicians, presidential candidates, and prominent executives – are talking about redistribution of wealth, guaranteed income and even socialism.
Unfortunately, all this isn’t surprising. And the financial situation is indeed frightening.
After all, 80% of professionals live paycheck to paycheck with zero hope of social mobility[1]. The average young professional owes around $40,000 in student debt[2] and only makes around $30,000 per year[3].
And much more importantly, today’s professionals need to earn $200,000 to $250,000 per year in order to have a middle-class life by their parent’s standards, which incidentally, only ~4% of the population actually earns.[4]
Why does all this matter?
Because “all this” is the crux of the issue…
This Really IS All About Our Parents
You see… One of my early mentors taught me that when people talk about economics, or social issues, you need to take a step back and look at the biology.
Not the news. Not the cultural narratives. Not even psychology. But biology.
That’s because biology makes things CRYSTAL CLEAR.
And when we use biology, we can see what “social mobility” actually is…
Here’s where it comes from:
As status seeking social mammals whose survival and replication depend on our rank in the pecking order, we all want to move up in the world. That’s obvious.
But because our moving up in the world directly helps our survival and replication – things our genes deeply care about – our desire for social mobility becomes much more than a personal yearning.
It turns into an unconscious, deeply ingrained need which we all share.
In other words, whether you know it or not, your desire to ascend hierarchies is part of your biological imperative. You not only want, but you crave social mobility.
Everybody does!
But here’s where it gets tricky…
We, and by “we” I mean our brains and our genes, cannot measure our social mobility by objective standards such as our actual income adjusted to inflation or our total net worth relative to our peers.
And that’s because our brains do not think in “math”.
So instead, we measure it by comparing ourselves with other people, mostly using our peers and parents as yardsticks.
After all, we have no idea what it means to have $250,000 annual salary in 2020. We cannot adjust it by purchasing power and inflation to compare it to whatever our parents made – in a way that we understand at a gut level.
But we CAN compare our lifestyle with how our parents used to live when we were kids, and make some gut level sense of it all.
We remember what their house was like. What kind of a car they drove. How many times we went out to eat each month. How many vacations we took…
We can remember all that… And we can compare ourselves to those memories…
…And to top it all of, we experience a hard-wired urge to live better than those memories.
That gives us our sense of “social mobility”.
Simply put: If you end up doing better than your parents in terms of the purchasing power and lifestyle you EXPERIENCE, you’ll feel that you have achieved upward social mobility.
And if you think you are doing worse, you’ll feel like you are sliding down.
It’s just like having an inner compass which points to your net worth and influences your emotions.
And, unfortunately, for the vast majority of professionals today, that inner compass is pointing towards feelings of frustration, despair and even anger.
Social Mobility Has Become 4x to 10x More Challenging
That is a fact. If you are under 40, and especially if you’re under 30, it takes a lot more dollars, and a lot more hours worked, to get to the same sense of social mobility our parents had.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a lost cause and that you should give up.
In fact, I would never to tell you to change your inner accounting and learn to be content with being poorer than your parents.
At Career Insiders, we despise the idea of a “coping” and we focus on transforming our lives. (Yes “despise” is a strong word, but such strong words build strong futures)
To achieve rapid upward social mobility, we have to start with taking a good look at our world.
Yes… It is indeed much harder to rise up using the old methods.
But, there is also a lot more opportunity in today’s world… By some accounts, 50x to 100x more opportunity than just 30 years ago.
With the advent of the internet, with the transformation of the racist/sexist stuck-up corporate culture into a more practical and global one, and with the rise of disruptive entrepreneurship – we have gained a lot of new options.
But to tap into those options, you DO need to learn where to look and which game to play…
And that’s especially important because, the old strategy of “get a degree, get a good job, comply with your boss, work your way up” no longer works.
The Rules Have Changed Dramatically
In the new world order, your degrees and credentials have been replaced by your skill-sets.
Instead of banking on a degree, you have to establish yourself in The Five Core Skills and Seven High-Value Disciplines.
But that’s not all…
In the new world order, getting a good job and sticking to it like a loyal pet doesn’t work either.
Instead, you have to define and control your career regardless of your given job at any point in time.
This means: You must constantly re-invent yourself for future opportunities, and tell your story – not the way employers and HR professional want you to tell it – but in a way that empowers you. (We call this controlling your career narrative)
And in the new world order, “schmoozing”, “networking” and “working your way up” doesn’t get you anywhere.
Instead, you need to build lifelong professional alliances by valuable acts of voluntary service (free or paid doesn’t matter, but how much trust you generate does).
While we do teach all this and more through our publications and events, for the rest of this article, I want to focus on the professional alliances bit.
And that’s because understanding professional alliances is the most powerful key to unlock social mobility.
So… Let’s get specific…
Social Mobility Means “A Big Step Up”
It must be a sizeable leap. A discrete and empowering transformation. A BIG next career step.
It’s moving from being an assistant in the department to the manager in charge. Or from leading a single department to running the entire company.
Social mobility demands that you skip a few steps. You leapfrog.
And for that to happen, you have to be given an opportunity you’ve never had before.
Whether you are breaking into an industry, or moving from a rank-and-file role to your first management role, or your first executive one…
Whatever your next step is; it requires you to do something you’ve never “officially” done before.
Which means, it represents a risk to those who would employ you.
Think of it like this: It’s not like you come with an insurance policy that pays them your salary back in case you fail. And there is no guarantee that you’ll be successful.
And if you fail, they will lose a lot more than your salary: They can lose people. Lose market share. Leave money on the table. And even lose face with investors and hurt their own careers!
This is why, for you to get to your next step, someone will always have to take a risk on you.
That’s just the nature of the beast.
So… The obvious question is: How do you make sure that they take that risk?
But the most important question is: How do you earn the right to ask them to take that risk for you?
How Do You Earn Your Next Leap?
First and foremost: They have to trust you.
And there are only two reliable ways for achieving that professional trust:
- Leveraging Existing Personal Alliances
- Winning New People Over
Both are important, and if you want to master your career and social mobility, you need to master both.
1. Leverage Personal Alliances
The old saying goes: “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
With a personal alliance it’s deeper than that: “It’s not who you know, but who knows you AND would be willing to bet on you.”
In that sense, a professional ally is just that. Someone who has your back. Someone you can lean on.
And such allies are rare…
In our hyper-connected world where we count friends through clicks, we tend to fall prey to delusion that we have many allies.
But nothing could be further from the truth!
Most people we connect with, and the vast majority of people who would profess their acquaintance with us, have a “value-neutral” relationship with us.
That means: We don’t owe them anything and they don’t owe us anything.
Which inevitably means, we won’t really do much for them. And they won’t really do much for us.
Which ultimately means, as far as our social mobility is concerned, our connection with them is not an asset, yet…
Yes… They may agree to let the world know that they’ve met you. And they may even Tweet a few good words or become a character reference if you insist…
But they will not help you in any meaningful way to achieve greater social mobility, because they will not take a risk for you.
Remember: Social mobility – by it’s nature – demands risk. No risk, no reward.
Someone has to recommend you to that job, go out on a limb for you and give you that role, or make an introduction and assume that you won’t make them look bad. All of that’s a risk.
If you have friends in high places who are willing to these risks for you, congratulations! Half your work is done.
But if you don’t… You need to cultivate them. And that takes time.
Sucking up to someone – like sending them free game tickets – only to ask for an introduction two days later, doesn’t work.
Yes, that’s how most people “network”…
But then again, most people don’t get the high-value jobs we guide you into, let alone create a career completely on their own terms.
This type of “fakery” not only makes you look cheap, but it also doesn’t work. You cannot purchase worthwhile allies through bribery. You have to earn them.
***And you earn them by habitually giving, without the expectation of any return, over a LONG period of time.***
You have to be genuinely helpful to people over months, and maybe even years, before they become your allies. But they are totally worth it.
I’ve had people connect me with influential players, offer me contracts, offer me jobs, hire people for me as a favour, and even give shares from their company; all because of such alliances.
In the long run, your personal alliances will be the difference between a six figure and a seven figure income. It’s not only well worth it, but it also feels great. Your allies tend to become your friends and you start creating fulfilling relationships.
But that’s all in the long run.
What if you are in a hurry, or you need to move up in the world tomorrow?
There is only one thing you can do:
2. Win New People Over
Let’s get right into it:
You’ve probably heard about rapport. But you probably haven’t heard about how we shortcut into rapport using signals.
For starters, the basics of rapport are very simple:
People get into rapport with those who are like themselves, as well as people who they aspire to be like.
In other words, similarity and affinity generate rapport.
It’s about belonging to the same tribe.
And it’s about whether you appear to be an outsider or an insider to the professional tribe they belong to or they want to belong to.
Are you a marketer? You need to speak a successful marketer’s language.
Are you a software developer? You need to communicate like a highly sought after software developer.
Are you a business consultant? You need to speak the language of a top business consultant.
By speaking their “Language of Value”, you not only show them that you are an insider to their tribe, but you also show them that you belong to the exclusive club of successful members of that tribe.
*** Sidenote *** As a Bonus: If you’re talking to a new employer, and you know what their Language of Value is, you instantly show them that you have learned the hard lessons about your profession – on someone else’s dime! And that’s the one thing every employer seeks.
But here’s the most important bit in using The Language of Value.
It’s not about what you say, or even how you say it. It’s ALL about what your words imply!
How You Win Professionals Over Instantly
Here’s how it works…
A marketer who has tripled their company’s revenue communicates in a very different way than a marketer who hasn’t earned any profit.
And when someone in need of marketing meets the such a marketer, they get eager and attentive.
Similarly, a software developer who created an app with millions of users, talks very differently than one who has never built anything worthwhile.
And when you want software built, you instantly know which one you want.
Or… A business consultant who advised and grew dozens companies, communicates very differently than one who never had a publicly traded client.
And when you are looking for a consultant, and you stumble upon such a top consultant, you’ll happily pay them an arm and a leg just for a half-day’s meeting!
This is why, it’s crucial to understand that – above all else – good managers and decision makers are always screening for a specific type of communication.
That’s their shortcut. That’s how they manage their time.
They are not only looking for people who think, write, and talk like them…
But they are also looking for people who use the same success signals!
Now… Obviously, it helps to be at the top of your industry to speak the Language of Value.
But it’s not necessary. You can still communicate with the same level of understanding and expertise even if you are just starting.
We call this concept “Speaking the Language of Value”, and we cover this at length in our Launch Your Career program.
Yes… Using it will not turn people into allies after a fifteen minute conversation.
But it will start the relationship on very good terms. It will help you win new people over.
And, most importantly, it will separate you from the masses of people who are seen as unqualified, unwanted, value-leeching outsiders.
Learn it, and watch your social mobility accelerate upward.
Ignore it, and you’ll get more of the same – if you are lucky.
Remember: in business and in your career, you are either growing or dying. There is no middle ground. There is no safe zone.
So why not start winning now?
Additional Resources
I hope you enjoyed this article.
If you know anyone who would benefit from it, please share it with them.
Also… Feel free to check out some of our additional resources:
The Complete FREE Guide to Getting a High-Value Job
Learn About The Five Core Skills & Seven High Value Disciplines
References
[1] Forbes Magazine. Career Builder Research.
[2] CNBC, Forbes Magazine, Wikipedia.
[3] The U.S Bureau of the Census.
[4] The US Government. The Atlantic.