Month: November 2015

What is the right response to people when they tell you about a problem they are having or may have in the future?  There is an argument that “so what” may be the best response.  Not the demeaning “So What?!” that we have heard throughout our lives but the caring “so what” that spurs people on to make decisions and not wallow in their situation.  We need to learn to do the same thing to ourselves.

Yes, there is a season for everything but guess what… seasons change.  We need to lovingly ask others and ourselves “so what” when negative self-defeating thoughts enter our minds.   TED Radio Hour’s Headspace talks about this.  There is another Podcast that is a shining example of how expectations shape us: How to Become Batman.  It seems that blind people can’t “see” because of everyone’s expectations of them, not because their eyes don’t work.  You see, when people told Daniel Kish and his mother that he was blind they said… so what.

I tell you this because you might be down in the dumps right now.  You just spent 30 minutes working on your resume to submit it for a job posting and no one may ever see it.  So what.  You need to make things happen.  You need a kinetic job search, not a passive one.  I will talk about that more tomorrow.

Al

Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.
Mark Victor Hansen

You keep doing the same think in your job search and yet you are surprised when you get the same results.  This is because we are stuck in the Tick Tock of the job search.  We do what we find comfortable, not what gets results.  Joseph De Sena in his book and podcast Spartan Up! talks about how doing what makes us uncomfortable makes us stronger.

Spartan does this through people pushing their physical and mental limits but we can use this in our job search.  I have been guilty of this in the past also.  It is easiest to sit at home and look the job boards then submit your stale-old resume to jobs again and again only to get the same results.

We also do this in the interview process.  I see it all the time.  People do not follow instructions.  They choose the easy route.  I ask them to schedule a day and time to talk to me through Acuity Scheduling (awesome tool) and they choose the easy way of just emailing back saying “I am available anytime.”  You need to do the things that will make you stand out the right way.

Very few people do what I see as the minimum in their job search and only the top 1% go the extra mile.  Be the 1%.

Al

You can either go to bed satisfied with your efforts today or stressed with what you left for tomorrow. You can either work hard to take on the hill or never know what it is that people see at the top.
Joe De Sena

I had a great example yesterday of why you should ALWAYS follow-up.  I recently started recruiting for an inside sales position.  I had an employee tell me “I have a great person for that position.  I will have them get in touch with you.”  GREAT!  But that just so happened to be on the same day I was working a half day and I had nine new people starting.  The results?  My inbox blew-up and the great candidate’s email got buried.

This is usually no big deal.  I get out the shovel and work through the emails but when I came in early the next morning to catch up on emails I realized I had two projects due to colleagues and few fires to put out.  So rather than digging in, I started piling on.

Late in the day that great candidate emailed me to confirm that I had received their resume.  I immediately stopped what I was doing and set up a phone interview with them after searching my inbox for their resume.  Would I have gotten to their email?  Probably.  Could it have been a week later, yes.

But be sure to follow-up with humility and assume that the person you are reaching out to has the best of intentions, they usually do.  Think if the roles were reversed.  Which email would you rather get?:

Thank you again for applying for our inside sales position.  I am following up to make sure your received my email yesterday with some more information and an invitation to set up a day and time to talk about our opportunity.

or

I emailed you yesterday to set up a phone interview.  Are you not interested?

Yes, I do receive terse emails similar to the second one WAY too often.  No bueno for them.

Al

Success comes from taking the initiative and following up… persisting… eloquently expressing the depth of your love. What simple action could you take today to produce a new momentum toward success in your life?
Tony Robbins