Staying positive during your job search is not simply a nice thing to do for yourself—it’s necessary to your success. Negative thinking oozes its way into your speech and actions, and it trips you up in all kinds of ways. Positive thinking helps you feel better about yourself AND get hired faster.
We are following the points from great article by Mark Tyrrell on How to Stop Negative Thinking in 7 Simple Steps and applying them to your job search to help you stay positive. (See How to Stop Negative Thinking and Stay Positive in Your Job Search – Part 1 )
Mark says that the 2nd step to staying positive is ‘Stop over-generalizing the negative.’ This means that negative thinkers take one bad thing that happens and apply it to everything, permanently. For example, if you fail a test, a positive person may think, “I’ll try harder next time.” Negative thinkers go straight for, “I’m stupid,” or “I’m going to fail this class.”
In a job search, a negative thinker who hasn’t been successful may say to him or herself, “I’ll never get a job.” Never use those words with yourself. Never say (or even think), “I’ll never get a job…no one will hire me. That is not true. Don’t think that just because you haven’t been successful yet, that means you won’t ever get a job.
I like Harvey MacKay’s quote: “You will never please everyone, but you only have to please a few people to get an offer.” That offer is there. You just have to find it.
If we were standing in front of a pile of stones, and I told you there was one stone in the pile with a special mark on it and if you found it, you’d get a million dollars—wouldn’t you start picking up those stones? You’d pick them up one at a time, check them for the mark, and throw it behind you if it was the wrong one. You wouldn’t think twice about picking up the wrong stone…you wouldn’t worry about it, you wouldn’t think that you’d wasted your time, and you wouldn’t think you’d never find it. You know it’s there, so you’d just throw that useless stone behind you and move on.
That’s exactly what you have to do in your job search. Start through those opportunities and see if they’re the one you need. If it’s not the one, forget it and move on.
You are going to hear a lot of ‘no’s in your search….they don’t have any openings, they didn’t think you’d be a good fit, they found someone else. That’s OK. You only have to find one ‘yes’. It won’t matter how many ‘no’s you’ve been through once you find that ‘yes.’ But if you don’t start, you definitely won’t find it.
If you’re like me, you don’t have the time or the patience to sort through those ‘stones’ one at a time. You’d want to go as fast as you could to find it.
To help you find that job offer fast, I developed a tool called the Hidden Jobs Finder. It will help you run the fastest, most comprehensive, most successful job search you’ve ever had. Watch this video about it to learn more: Hidden Jobs Finder.
The point is…if it isn’t working out so far, do something different. Put yourself in the best position you can be in for a fast job search…
- Upgrade your resume so that it markets you – Write a Resume That POPS
- Learn to interview so well that you ace it every time and get the job offer: 30-60-90-Day Plan: How to Create and Use It to Knock Their Socks Off in the Job Interview