Poor presentation skills cost businesses time, money and opportunities. For entrepreneurs who rely on presentations to secure new investments or land large client accounts, a weak presentation can be the difference between success and failure.

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Are you feeling stuck in your career? You’ve likely hit a career plateau that happens to the best of us. Sometimes the plateau is caused by feeling uninspired by the work that you’re doing, but it could also be a result of your actions. The difference between a career that flattens and one that skyrockets are the impression that you make on others and key stakeholders within your organization. Instead of becoming stuck within a continual loop of frustration with a position that isn’t going anywhere, you should focus on four attributes that can make or break your career success.

Exercise your authority.

People who can communicate effectively with also a sense of authority can gain influence and respect amongst organizations, which also heightens their chances of having their ideas become showcased. Although your career can progress forward if you can demonstrate work ethic and doing a good job, you’ll travel further if you’re voice is being heard and respected. To access your authority, it can help to do an audit of presentations to make a note of your body language and presence. Throughout your remote meetings, take note of your posture, eye contact, and participation, then watch how people respond to you.

Be warm and approachable.

Another essential attribute is the warmth that you’re able to convey amongst your organization. Warmth can be communicated by being humble, vulnerable, empathetic, and attentive and also how measured by how good a listener you are. Warmth is necessary to create trust, as well as to be relatable, which is crucial to solidifying your position on a team. Do a self-reflection and ask yourself, Do your colleagues trust you? Do people feel comfortable challenging your ideas or giving feedback? Do you acknowledge others during interactions?

Demonstrate collaborative energy.

Demonstrating positive and collaborative energy is an emotional commitment and connection that makes you memorable, impressionable, and persuasive. Harness your energy within the workplace by tuning into how you engage with others and being aware of how others react to you. Do you talk too fast? Not enough? And do you truly listen in a way that makes others feel energized by your interest in them?

Ask for feedback.

Show your colleagues and manager that you are interested in the progression of your career and personal growth by asking for feedback on communication styles, projects, and time management. Seek out feedback from trusted friends, mentors, and colleagues about what kind of impression you make. For feedback to be valuable, you have to be ready to receive the truth to move past your blind posts. Remember, feedback is an opportunity to grow and ascend.

One of the primary differences between those who are successful and those who struggle to create the results they profess to want in their life is their view of who and what prevents them. The first group, those who create success for themselves, believe that the only person capable of preventing them from having what they want is the person who stares back at them in their mirror each morning. The second group, the group that struggles, believes that everything wrong in their life and their world is caused by someone or something outside of them.

First, and most importantly, no one cares about your success as much as you do—or as much as you should. Your life is your own, free and clear. The second factor you might recognize, as bad as it sounds, is that no one cares enough about your success to try to prevent you from creating it. No one is going to lift a finger to stop your ambition.

The Circumstances of Your Birth: Fate may have located you in some part of the world that doesn’t provide a great environment for building success, yet plenty of people find their way out of those circumstances by leaving those places. You may have had the good fortunes of being born into a family with very little money, even though you might have been hungry. For many people, their hunger manifests itself in a type of insatiable appetite to improve their position. The people who stay in environments that don’t provide opportunities don’t stay because someone prevents them from leaving, but because they don’t leave. No one will make any real effort to keep you poor, even your friends who’ll criticize you for “being too good for your old hood.”

Your Lack of Education: You didn’t go to the right schools. Or maybe you did go to the right schools but did so little that you may as well have stayed home. Perhaps you didn’t go to school at all. There may be people who believe you need formal education for some job, but there are countless entrepreneurs with nothing more than a high school diploma, many of whom have built incredible business and lives. You can find a path to success without an education, or you can work a day job and go to school at night and get yourself the sheepskin, should you so desire. No one will prevent you from taking either of these paths and outside your family and friends, no one will stop to notice, let alone stop you.

The Rigged System: You may be confronted with the idea that the system is rigged against you, and it can feel like the movie, The Matrix. In some ways, life every much resembles that movie; you can do what you want once you recognize your power. What you may notice is missing, however, is that no Mr. Smith is chasing you around, working to prevent you from exercising your power and liberating yourself. All of the things that block you are in your mind; the limits you place on yourself are far greater than any external constraints you might imagine.

The list of external forces you might use an excuse for not having the success you want is inexhaustible, starting with the few ideas above. This list also includes your parents, your boss, your lack of resources (an obstacle that always collapses when confronted with your resourcefulness), the Government, the President, Republicans, Democrats, giant companies with money and power and lobbyists, or, if you have a conspiracy bent, the Illuminati.

Only You Can Stop You

The only person who can stop you from being the better version of the person you are now is you. As tragic as this is, it is also fortunate. Because you are the only thing preventing you from whatever you might call success, you already possess the power to change your mind, change your circumstances, and create the life you imagine in your mind’s eye.
First, you have to know what you want from your single life.

Second, you need to recognize and act on your hunger. Acting on what you profess to want is the only proof that you really want it. Not acting on what you profess to want means it is nothing more than a pipe dream (well, for you, anyway). The difference between you and the people who have what you want is that they wanted it enough to act on their desire, and you have not yet done so.

Third, and most importantly, you need to recognize there are no external factors that prevent you from succeeding. Instead, most of the external factors fall into one of two categories: 1) They are excuses you make, whether they are due to a lack of confidence or a lack of will, or 2) They are the external excuses that have no relation to you and your goals, they provide you with something to point at to absolve yourself of responsibility to yourself.

The only person that can prevent you from having what you want is you. Only you can remove the single obstacle standing between you and success.