Career fitness is a way to run the race of your life at work each day. If you want to jog in place or just tread water in your career, it's not for you. On the other hand, if you want to increase both the paycheck and the satisfaction you achieve from work, career fitness will provide a regimen to build up your occupational strength and self-management skills to do so.

As with physical fitness, there are two aspects to developing a healthy career:

• You must exercise the practices that will develop capacity and endurance in your chosen field
  
• Second, you must focus on and exploit the mental dimensions of career advancement.

A lot of attention is devoted to the first aspect - the best practices - because they are steps you can implement in a job search or career transition right away. The mind-set you bring to those activities, however, is no less important to your success.

What is the mental aspect of career fitness? It is the preparation you do and the outlook you adopt before and during career movements. Those movements can represent something as subtle as enhancing your situation within your current employer and something as radical as shifting your work from one employer to another. To execute them successfully, you must use the best practices in conjunction with an "imaging set-up" that positions you for optimal results.

The purpose of this imaging set-up is to strengthen your stature in your field or industry. Done effectively, it will increase your visibility, your name recognition, credibility and the public perception of your capabilities and character. Those two facets, in turn, position you to achieve significantly more positive results from the steps you take to advance your career or find a new or better job. In effect, they give you forward momentum.

You can accomplish an imaging set-up with any or all of the following activities:

• Volunteering for special assignments.
  
• Participating visibly in professional or industry groups.
  
• Adding meaningfully to the dialogue in your field.
  
• Working closely with one or more mentors.

Let's look briefly at each.

Volunteering for special assignments

Most employees limit the image of their role to their job description. If you can expand the contributions you make to your job, you will have accomplished two career-strengthening feats: creating more challenge and growth opportunity into your work and positioning yourself as an extraordinary performer in your organization. Both of these outcomes set you up for continued success.

Participating visibly in professional or industry groups

Our day-to-day work is demanding. Those of us who display the initiative and capacity to go beyond it, often gain recognition and stature. Making a substantial contribution (i.e., one that involves more than serving as a silent member of some committee) to your profession or industry (without letting your on-the-job performance slip) sets you apart from others and demonstrates attributes that employers value: commitment to personal growth, leadership, and pride in your work. These outcomes also set you up for additional success.

Adding meaningfully to the dialogue in your field

Writing is also a great way to strengthen your visibility and standing in your field. There's always a need for new analysis and insights on key issues and questions, but we're often put off by two tough challenges: expressing your opinions in public and getting published. If, however, you can overcome the first, the second is no longer a problem. You can put yourself into print right away if you:

• Start your own Web-log or blog (you can do so at any number of sites for free)
  
• Contribute to the discussion forum or listserv on your association's Web-site
  
• Join a newsgroup in your field or industry and participating in its discussion (see Google.com for a directory of newsgroups)

Wherever you do your writing, remember that you want to set yourself up for success by burnishing your credentials in your field, not to launch a political diatribe or talk about your hobbies.

Working closely with one or more mentors

A mentor can strengthen your career in several critical ways. Their traditional role, of course, is to offer important insights and counsel regarding your career decisions and movements. That's clearly useful, but in today's competitive job market, it is insufficient to set you up for success. To do that, a mentor must also help enhance your visibility and ensure that you are considered for important new assignments with your current employer.

Not every mentor can or will perform these roles, so be selective in whom you seek out as a mentor. And remember, in today's unpredictable Employment environment, even mentors can lose their footing. If possible, therefore, cultivate two (or even more) mentors so that you always have access to this critical level of support. Then, set aside the time and make the commitment to do your part - be a mentor to somebody else.

A successful career is built with the right moves performed in the right conditions. An imaging set-up enables you to prepare the conditions - to strengthen your stature and reputation - so that the moves you make - those best practices - build the healthy and rewarding career you deserve.