How to stay focused on achieving results
After I updated LinkedIn to show I had started working somewhere, I received numerous notes of congratulations. I was also asked by someone if I had any advice about finding a job. I don’t know where that person was coming from exactly but I could identify with the question. I had made a practice of asking the question of people who got jobs the same question.
Looking back now, I can say asking the question helped me in two ways. It was helpful and it was humbling. Helpful because I always took away one or two things that I knew I needed to change or that would improve my job search efforts. Humbling because it would put me face to face with someone who had accomplished something I had not. The humbling part was very important because it forced me to summon the courage to re-evaluate my approach from the ground up to make sure I wasn’t just falling into a rut and losing focus on the results I wanted to achieve.
Take this for what it’s worth – how often are you asking people how they got to where they are? If it’s at least not once a month, preferably more, you could be falling into a rut.
That is very humbling. I think that in any search where you are “selling” yourself or a service you have to be willing to ask questions. That is hard sometimes because it does point out what we don’t know. We often do not want to expose what we do not know, it leaves us feeling vulnerable and when facing unemployment we already feel that way. My employment is dependent on my selling what I do in photography, there are so many out there that do it better and I have to keep learning and asking others how they do it….it is not easy.