To grow in your career, you need to deliver the goods.
To deliver the goods, apart from the knowledge and the skills, you also need the energy, the brainpower, and the right moods.
So what’s the recipe for career growth?
Here’s a dietary approach. These 10 foods help you improve your day-to-day performance and increase your chances of career advancement.
1. Lemon juice – the career tonic
A glass of fresh lemon juice in the morning everyday phenomenally improves your immunity levels. As a result, you will have more resistance to the viral colds, coughs, fevers, allergies and other issues. The vitamin-C in lemon is also essential in iron absorption for preventing anemia. If you don’t fall sick often, you will be able to uninterruptedly focus on your day-to-day tasks and career goals.
And since you won’t need to call in sick, you’ll be saving a lot of leaves/PTOs that you can use for taking more vacations, staycations and other fun breaks. After each fun break, you will return to work with a rejuvenated force, perform better and achieve more success!
2. Carrots – the interface to success
No. I’m not referring to carrots as in “carrot and stick” policy.
Most of the modern jobs are at the computer and other devices. We need to browse a lot, read a lot, use a lot of online tools, apps, etc. Your eyes are the interface between you and the technologies you use at work. There is a lot of knowledge and information on the web, in the content on LinkedIn Pulse, in the content on various blogs. You need a strong pair of eyes to consume them.
This is where carrots are important for better performance, as they are loaded with the vitamin-A needed for good eyesight, so your eyes don’t get fatigued reading/browsing on the computer and you don’t lose the enthusiasm and the motivation.
So eat a carrot everyday to develop strong eyes. You can eat it raw, par-boiled or steamed. You can eat it grated, or sliced. You can use it as a salad, as a soup, as a sandwich filler, as an accompaniment, or as a dessert. But eat it somehow.
Here are some tempting carrot recipes. If you know other quick carrot recipes, please share in the comments section for the benefit of the readers.
Strengthen your eyes with carrots everyday. Browse more, read more, research more and deliver better goods.
Additionally, you can also do eye-palming, eye-massage, eye-zooming and other eye exercises to relax and train the eye muscles.
3. Spinach – the strength for performance
If you are anemic, would it not impact your performance? It’s common knowledge that spinach is a great source of iron that helps you prevent anemia. I can totally understand that you may not be all that inspired to eat spinach, even if you’re a fan of Popeye. Here are some good spinach recipes to help you get the super strength to focus on your career.
Peas, beans, liver, oysters, lentils and sesame seeds also have high iron content, that you can include in your diet, in addition to spinach.
4. Bananas – at the heart of career
You have to chase deadlines, meet targets. You may have to deal with irate customers, escalations, an upset boss, a manipulative colleague, absent team members, issues, concerns, bugs and what not. All this can put you to stress, that needs a strong heart to deal with it.
Eating a couple of bananas every day helps, as bananas have potassium that is needed for proper heart functioning and reducing hypertension.
Potatoes, sweet potatoes, kidney beans, black-eyed beans, avocado and fish are also rich sources of potassium.
5. Dairy – the CPU of career
Obviously, brainpower is important for executing our tasks – the ability to come up with smart ideas, design powerful plans, execute accurately and deliver successfully. Vitamin-B, and other vitamins help improve brainpower, and dairy (milk, cheese) is a great source of these vitamins.
Apart from dairy, poultry and meat are also enriched with the necessary vitamins for improving brainpower. If you are a vegan, then fortified cereals will work for you.
6. Chocolate – the spirit of career
Sometimes, you may be upset or depressed or in a bad mood. Chocolate stimulates the production of happiness hormones – endorphins and serotonins.
So if you are lying low and unable to concentrate, then take a short break, eat some chocolate, smile and you are ready to go back and perform your usual best or even better!
7. Tea – the career alert
Meals (breakfast and lunch) induce sleep hormones, and you may feel dull, drowsy and unable to concentrate on your work. A little tea helps here. The organic compounds in tea – caffeine and theanine – make you alert and improve your cognition levels.
8. Dates – the energy top-up
Sometimes, you are about to log off for the day, and suddenly an urgent task comes to your desk. You are eager to help, but you are spent on your energies for the day. Or sometimes, even in the normal routine, you may find yourself short of energies. If you continue working on low energies, there are chances that you may under-perform and diminish your prospects of career growth.
It helps to have dried dates handy. Munching on a couple of them in low-energy situations will instantly charge you up and let you focus better on the task at hand.
9. Yogurt – the overnight recharge
A good night’s sleep is essential to perform well at work. A cup of yogurt (or butter milk) at dinner or before going to bed is good for getting better sleep. Yogurt reduces acidity, and that lets you sleep well. Have a sound sleep, wake up feeling cheerful and enthusiastic, and put your best foot forward at work.
10. The humble pie
Eating ‘the humble pie’ and ‘swallowing your pride’. 🙂 …..as shared by one of my readers on LinkedIn.
