65. Looking For a New Job
Looking for a new job does not have to feel terrible and take forever.
That’s easy for me to say now that I’m a coach, but let me assure you that I know firsthand how painful job searching can be.
I’ve spent countless hours crying in frustration as I tried to navigate this particular journey myself, back before I had the coaching tools I use now.
But I’ve also seen how much better this experience can be when you do have coaching tools on your side.
Looking for a new job is a process that brings up tons of negative thoughts and deep insecurities like:
The fear of not being good enough at the work you do.
Dread about having to put yourself out there.
The sting of rejection, because generally getting a new job also means not getting several you applied for along the way.
Frustration when you make it to the final interview over and over but never get offered the job.
And on top of that, job searching usually means going through all of these several times over, as it may take several rounds of applying before you land a job you’re excited to have.
And that’s exactly why we need coaching tools to help us along this path.
We need powerful reframes that help us stay confident even when we get turned down.
We need positive fuel we can use to keep going when we feel like giving up.
We need resilience to help us handle rejection without getting completely derailed by it, even when it happens multiple times.
Tune in this week to learn how to have a much more enjoyable job searching experience, and how to stay resilient when the going gets tough along the way.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why looking for a job is such an uncomfortable experience.
Where I see people struggle the most when it comes to job searching.
The thought patterns you have to overcome in order to confidently sell yourself.
Why the frame through which you ask yourself questions truly matters.
How to get clear on what you have to offer in a new job and why you’re the perfect fit.
What you can do to start actually enjoying the process of searching and interviewing for a new job.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about looking for a new job.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all, happy Wednesday. I’m so excited to talk to you. I’m in a great mood because I just took a really beautiful, long walk around Midtown Sacramento and the weather is gorgeous. It’s exactly the kind of weather I was hoping for when Alex and I chose to move to Sacramento. It’s like 57 degrees out and sunny. And just a beautiful, very mild winter day. And I am so into it.
And it’s especially delightful because lately the weather hasn’t been as warm or as sunny. And that’s okay, California needs the rain. So it was actually kind of great that it did rain, you know, have some of that. But personally, I really prefer this weather. And it’s here, so I’m like, yay.
And I think it’s also just a really good reminder for me to do the thing I’m always inviting y’all to do. Which is to notice and celebrate and revel in what is working and what is going well and what is doing the thing that I would like for it to do. Like everyone else, I also have a brain with negativity bias and my brain often notices when things aren’t going the way I want it to and when things aren’t doing what I would like for them.
And I’ve noticed through a lot of my own self-coaching that when things do go the way I want them to, my brain sometimes left to its own devices has this attitude of like, yeah, because it should be like that. And there’s nothing wrong with having that attitude.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, if when things go not the way I want them to I get upset and I brood, and I’m angry, and I like rage against what is. But then when things go the way I want them to it’s just like no big deal, that just sets me up to really feel a lot of negative emotion and then to not even get to enjoy it when things are going the way I want them to.
And so this is actually a tip that I heard a really long time ago. I think it was from maybe like a Christiane Northrup book, I'm not sure. But the idea of noticing and celebrating and reveling in, not just the obvious big delights that are like a big deal. But even the most minute, boring, mundane things that go the way that we want them to.
And so the example from the book, I remember the example better than where it came from. But the example from the book was like being super excited and like ecstatic when you're riding in an airplane and the airplane lands the way it should, which is like it lands and nothing goes bad. And that is such a mundane experience for anyone who spends a lot of time flying, and that's what we all expect to have happen.
But it's also amazing and something to really delight and revel in because the alternative is not super fun, right? I definitely want the plane to be in one piece and land safely. And that happens most of the time. But if most of the time when things go well I'm just brushing those off, like subconsciously. Not even necessarily purposefully as like this is the way it should be. That just cuts out so much of the things I could be delighting in and deprives me of a lot of like positive emotion.
Now, this isn't about like shoulding yourself about gratitude or anything. It's just about being aware of the brain's natural tendency and being like, hmm, do I like what that's doing for me? If not, maybe I want to do something else with that. And that's what I'm doing today.
So taking my own medicine over here and just enjoying the day and talking about it, which helps me really metabolize how much I'm enjoying it and notice and remember. Which seems like something we wouldn't have to do. And yet I find that it often is.
Okay, enough about that. Let's talk about job searches. I think this is such a fun thing to talk about, which is because I'm a coach and I'm sure lots of y'all don't think it's such a fun thing to talk about. Because I know that job searches are really painful for a lot of people. And I'm going to be honest with y'all, they've been really painful for me in the past when I've done them too.
And I think that's because for a lot of us when we're searching for a new job, when we're applying for a new job, it often feels really yucky and brings up all of our most negative thoughts and deepest insecurities about ourselves, about our value as an employee, about the world, about the industry we work in, et cetera, et cetera.
I also want to take a moment to just mention that yes, the podcast is called love your job before you leave it. And you might not love your job yet and you might want to leave it anyways, and you might want to job search. And you're absolutely 100% allowed to do that because, as we talked about in the podcast episode on when to leave your job, you are the authority and agency in your own life. You have complete sovereignty over what the fuck you're doing with your career.
I want to teach you how to love your job in case you want to learn that skill set or in case you're not able to get a new job as fast as you want to. And I do think it's super useful, and you're absolutely not required to do it. Also, maybe you already did it. Maybe you've already done the coaching or love the job you're in and you still want to leave it, that's allowed, too.
So basically, this podcast episode is just for anyone who wants to look for a new job at any point. And there's no shoulding happening here about when that's appropriate for you because you get to decide when that's appropriate for you.
Okay, now that we've covered that, let's get into it. Job searching, why does it suck so much? My take on why it sucks so much is because, again, like I was saying in the intro, I think it brings up a lot of our insecurities. It's something where most of us are going to face a lot of rejection.
And that's just like a numbers game, because usually we're going to apply for more jobs than we're going to get unless we apply for one and then get it. Usually that's not how it goes. And so we need a lot of resilience, I think, to go through a job search.
We need the ability to have a powerful mindset that's going to allow us to put ourselves out there and try to explain our skill set and our job history in a compelling way. And get asked questions that we didn't formulate an answer to. Answer them as best as we can.
Make it maybe through several rounds of interviews and then get told we didn't make the cut. Sometimes make it through zero rounds, we don't even make it through the phone screening. And then we have to navigate like our emotional experience of that. And then even if we get through all of that, then we have to have the conversation about what our new compensation is going to be.
All this stuff can bring up so many painful thoughts and feelings for people, and can just be really uncomfortable. And as we talk about all the time, humans don't like to feel uncomfortable. It's not super fun. I've done fuckloads of coaching and I still don't like to feel uncomfortable. And I still notice subconsciously I will avoid things that I perceive will be uncomfortable.
Sometimes I'll avoid them for a really long time. And then when I finally do them, they take 15 minutes and they're not that bad. And my personal experience from job searching is sometimes parts of it take 15 minutes and aren't that bad.
And sometimes parts of it really do involve a lot of difficult thinking and a lot of effort to figure out even what kind of job we want to get next, and what our skills are, and how to talk about those skills. So I think it is something that many people experience just tons of discomfort around. And that can make it really hard to do.
Okay, so now that we've talked about why job searching is so painful for people, what the hell are we going to do about that? What am I going to offer you that’s going to help you do this task and have a better experience of it?
Okay, so I have a few things I want to offer to you. Number one, something I see that a lot of people struggle with during job searching is this idea that they don't know what their skills even are. They don't know what kind of job they could even get. Lots of unknowing, not knowing, confusion. And I would say, I think a lot of people wouldn't characterize it this way, but how I would characterize it is a lot of despair.
And that maybe seems like a big word to throw around with job searching, but I'll just claim it for myself. I know that a lot of times when I was job searching, even though I knew I was really smart and I knew I was really effective, and I knew I could be good at stuff, I felt so much despair. And I'm melodramatic and I don't mind calling myself that. So I'm like, yeah, I felt a lot of despair.
And it was because I had all these thoughts like, I don't know how to do this, I'll never figure it out. And for me it wasn't just the not knowing, it was like it seemed so big. It seemed so much bigger than me and like I would never be able to overcome it. And I think that really lends to despair versus just the low level dread or anxiety or other emotions that are common in this situation.
And the thing about despair is I think a lot of times when we're feeling it, it seems even to us like the despair is outsized for what we're dealing with. And then we judge and shame ourselves, right? We're like, “Not only can I not figure out how to get a new job, but I'm being such a baby about not being able to figure it out. Clearly everyone has to do this, like everyone who's getting jobs is having to figure this out.”
I mean not everyone, the world being what it is, but many people, right? And so then we judge and shame ourselves and then it feels even more terrible. And then we have this very vicious cycle of every time I think about job searching, not only does it seem hard and terrible, but I also feel like shit.
Okay, so I told you I was going to get into solutions, and it sounds like I just got more into the problem. Which I guess I kind of did, and that's fine. But basically, let's go back to what I was saying before, which is people have this, I don't know, and I'll never figure it out. So those are thought patterns.
I don't know, maybe is going to seem really true to you. It's a thought pattern. It's a frame, right? When you think with the frame I don't know, your brain, because of confirmation bias, it's going to be like, yeah, you don't know. Let's list all the things you don't know, that seems fun. And then you're going to feel like shit and not want to do anything.
And when we think with the frame of I'm never going to be able to overcome this, same thing. Your confirmation bias comes in and your brain is like, here's some evidence about other things you didn't overcome, or how hard it will be, or how long it will take. And again, we feel like shit and then we don't want to do anything.
And so if we're feeling those feelings and thinking those thought patterns, and we are doing something, it's probably because we're using a lot of willpower to push through. Which we can do, but it tends to wear us out. And willpower is like a muscle that can fatigue. And then we'll squeeze out some effort and then we'll go back to the pit of despair and do something else and avoid the task and put it off for as long as possible, and then judge ourselves for putting it off.
So instead, what I want to offer you is that if I don't know and it's too hard to overcome, if these are thought patterns, which they are, if they’re frames, then we can switch the framing. And when we switch the framing, our brain with our beautiful confirmation bias will do a different search and find different information.
If you come from I don't know and I can't figure it out, that's going to be what feels true to you. If you come from I know some shit and I know how to figure out some shit, that is what will be true for you.
Now, I realize that this may sound like a lot of things with coaching, like magic, but it's not. It's just framing. It's like if I'm looking out one window of my house, I can see one view. If I go look out a different window of my house that's on a different wall, I can see a different view.
Both views are real in that they exist. Neither view is a full view. So we want to ask ourselves not is the current view I have a real, but is it useful? Is it helping me get what I want? And if it's not, is there a different view that could be better?
Okay, so the view that I'm going to offer you, the thought pattern that's more useful is what if I do know and what if I can figure it out? What if I do know the shit I'm good at? What if I do know some jobs I might be a good fit for? What if I do know some things I might like to do and what if I can figure out the things I don't know? So this is going to help you get out of that pit of despair place and into just a little bit of action, a little bit of activity.
So as an example of what this could look like is the I don't know place might have you flopping on the couch and watching Netflix, eating, and feeling shitty and guilty the whole time that you're not doing the job search.
Versus the what if I do know and what if I can figure it out might look like okay, I'm going to set a timer for just five minutes. And I'm going to write down some things I do know how to do in a workplace. And then I'm going to set a timer for five minutes and I'm going to write down some things I would like to be able to do even if I don't have the skills to do them now. And maybe that's all you do that day.
And then the what if I figure it out energy could be the same thing, set a timer for five minutes and be like okay, who could help me? What resources are available to me? What Google searches could I do?
When we tell ourselves we don't know and that it's too hard to figure out, we don't try to figure it out and we don't pay any attention to the things we do know. When we tell ourselves what if I do know and what if I can figure it out? We're coming at it, again, from that different view, which is going to have different resources and different options attached to it. Okay, so that's if you have those thought patterns.
Another thing that I see people struggle with is kind of just general confidence, right? Like I've been in this job, and I've gotten a bunch of good reviews, or maybe you've gotten some good reviews and some less good reviews, but what if I'm not good enough for a different job? Especially if you've applied for a lot of other jobs and not gotten one that you wanted to accept or not gotten one at all, you may be falling into the thing where you feel rejected and you're letting that impact your confidence.
And if that's true for you, then what you need is basically a confidence vitamin. How do we get a confidence vitamin? Here's how we're going to do it, you're going to, like the other thing, write down all the shit you do know how to do. You're going to write down all your career wins.
Now, listen, your brain, if it's been in the head space of feeling rejected and feeling bad about you, it’s not going to want to do that. And you're just going to be like, okay, thanks brain for not wanting to do that, but we're going to do it anyway.
So as an example, if you try to go from I don't know to what if I do know, or if you try to go from my work experience is terrible to my work experience is great, your brain will probably feel resistance to that. And so we kind of just keep nudging and inviting our brain in the direction we want to go.
And what we also want to do and what you may have noticed already with what I've suggested is we want to get this conversation out of your head and onto paper. Inside our own heads, it's very easy to be susceptible to all the negative things our brain is saying.
When you get a piece of paper and write down the things you actually know how to do and write down the successes you've had heretofore in your career, it's harder for your brain to say, well none of that matters. Because you'll be like, well I do have a list of like 60 things here, or six things, or whatever.
So what we really want to do is be making the argument for why you do know and why your work experience is useful, and is beneficial, and is good. And why you do know how to figure out how to move forward, even if you don't know 100% of the answers.
In addition to confidence, another piece that's important here is resilience. For a lot of us, myself included, when we do something we want to be praised immediately. We want someone to be like, oh, you're amazing, you're great, you're so wonderful. We want to hire you right away.
A lot of us feel resistance to kind of like the idea of selling ourselves or having to go through all these interviews. And sometimes we also feel a lot of extra pressure to sell ourselves versus also interviewing the company to see if we're even interested in working there, right?
This is kind of like in dating, when sometimes instead of dating the people we really want to date, we just are like, well there's no one I want to date. So I'm going to go on this date with this person I don't really like. And then they don't really like us and then we feel even more rejected because we're like, I didn't even really like you. I'm out of your league, you're rejecting me. It's extra painful, right?
And I think this actually applies in dating too, but we need to cultivate resilience for ourselves. And I think part of that is normalizing that for many people it's going to take a lot of applications and a lot of interviews to get a job. And that's okay, that doesn't mean anything has gone wrong.
It's kind of like in sales you're often going to talk to a lot more people than the amount of people who are going to buy. Now, over time and with a lot of skill, we can change those margins. But especially if you consider that with job searching you're looking for someone who is a good fit for you, not just you're a good fit for them.
You're looking for someone who wants to hire you into the level you want to be in, at the pay you want, in the culture you want. And I think it's kind of like trying on jeans. I try on so many pairs of jeans before I find a pair that I'm like, okay, I like this cut. I like the way they fit my body, I'm into the price.
I think it's useful to normalize that if we try some things and they're not a good fit, it doesn't mean something bad about us. Because that's part of what makes job searching so painful, is when we're like I applied for three jobs and none of them wanted me. No one's going to want me, everyone hates me, I may as well not try.
And then we're in that pit of despair where we're not trying anymore. And when we're not trying, of course, we're also not getting hired. And then our brain is like see, no one is hiring us.
So how can you bolster yourself to go through this process and understand that being told no is part of it and it doesn't mean anything about you? This is really hard for people, they really want to take this shit personally. They really want to be like how could it not mean anything about me?
But if you have a body that's a certain shape and a jeans are a certain shape and they don't fit your body, it doesn't mean the jeans are wrong or bad, it just means they're not a good fit for you. They may be a really good fit for someone else. What if jobs are just like that?
We're trying them on to see how the two of us fit together in the interview process. And so, yeah, we want to learn to be able to explain our job experience and explain what we're trying to do in our next role clearly and authentically.
But clear and authentic communication is often going to lead to us and another person, whether it's a date or an interview or whatever, deciding we're not a good fit. And that's okay. In fact, it's great. It's better to find that out before we get the job.
I also want to talk about one more thing, and I think this is actually related to the resilience piece. And it's what I'm going to call being super attached to the outcome and getting super attached to a specific job. Versus the idea of finding a job that works really well for us and not knowing ahead of time exactly which job it's going to be.
And I used this metaphor in a coaching call and it's a little racy, so prepare yourself. The metaphor that I used is that when we're like interviewing for a job and we get super attached to it, it can be a little bit like when we're having sex, but we're really attached to the idea of having an orgasm and we're not even enjoying the sex and we're all up in our head like am I going to have the orgasm? Am I going to have the orgasm? And it actually on a physiological level makes it harder for your body to have an orgasm.
I've had this experience before myself, where I got so in my head about it and then, of course, I didn't have one. And then I made that mean a bunch of negative stuff about me. It's actually so much like the job search experience.
Being grippy about needing a certain outcome to happen makes us so that we're less present to what's actually happening. I think when this happens, it's like, first of all, we're not relaxed, we're not ourselves. We don't show up to the situation as well as we could have, we get super grippy and weird. And it just makes it so much harder to enjoy the experience and get the outcome that we want.
So if you're experiencing that, there's nothing wrong with you. You're experiencing a very normal human thought pattern. And it may not be the most useful one. So if you don't want to have that experience of the job search, we need to get a different perspective, a different thought pattern in there.
So a perspective that I might use if I were job searching to help me not be grippy and weird and get to attached to each specific thing is just the idea that I only need one job and it's out there. And I don't know which one it is yet and then so all I need to do in these interviews and in these connections and coffee chats and whatever actions I'm taking to try to get the next job, I just need to show up as myself, right?
Be who I am. Be prepared. Be able and willing to talk about my job history and how I think it relates to whatever thing I'd like to do next. And be willing to not know which job it's going to be. And be willing to entertain and engage with all the various potential matches without having to know like oh, it's going to be this one. I'm all in on this one.
It can be great to be all in, but I think with job searching in particular, like knowing you want a job is really valuable information. And I've even in interviews, because I have no chill whatsoever told someone like, hey, I just want to be really clear, I want this job. I actually said that to the hiring manager at my corporate IT job that I got. No chill Kori, that's me, right?
But I also needed to know that if I didn't get offered that job I was going to keep going and I wasn't going to beat myself up. I mean, I probably would have at that time because that was before the coaching tools I have now. But that I was going to keep going and that if I didn't get that job, there was going to be another job for me.
And I think that that is actually a difficult mindset for a lot of people to step into because they're like, but I don't know. I don't know there's another job. But I think this is one of those examples where you really have to ask yourself is it more helpful to me to believe that there's a job out there so that I keep going and increase the likelihood that I get that job? Or is it more helpful to me to say that there's not?
And weirdly, people always want to make the argument that statistically the terrible thing that they don't want is more likely. I think if you're actively applying to jobs, it's much more likely you're going to get one than that you aren't. But even if you statistically weren't likely, which thought is going to help you do the shit you need to do to get what you want?
Especially the more in my life I'm trying to create things that a lot of people haven't created, the more I lean into thinking thoughts and choosing mindsets that a lot of people wouldn't say are practical. But I don't want practical outcomes in my life. I want insane, delicious outcomes. And so part of that is me being willing to step out into the possibility of that and be the first one to believe in it. Not because I know for sure it'll happen, but because of how I show up to my goals when I step into that possibility.
Okay, there's one final tip that I'm going to offer you and it's a storytelling tip from my many years as a creative writer, and also from my many, many, many brilliant friends who helped me on my career journey before I found the kind of coaching I use now. These are brilliant women, I'm so grateful for them.
And one of them, many of them, I don't even know anymore, told me that part of getting a job is being able to tell the story of why you are an amazing fit for that job. Even if you don't have the exact experience they're looking for. And sometimes, especially if you don't have the exact experience they're looking for.
And especially for any of you who are trying to really go up a level, or trying to get into a different industry, or trying to career hop in a way that doesn't make sense. If you want to do that, I firmly believe you can and that you can take any career history and explain why it's fucking magical for the job you're applying to.
But what I want to offer to you is, it's on you to do that. It's on you to do the heavy lifting of explaining why your experience is not just relevant, but incredibly useful because a lot of other people aren't going to do that. A lot of interviewers aren't going to do that, a lot of people who are reviewing resumes aren't going to do that.
You may be lucky enough that if you have people you're having coffee with, that some of them have that kind of vision and are willing to lend it to you of like, oh, if you've done this, you could do that. I definitely had people like that too, who helped me understand my job experience so that I could tell a better story of it. But ultimately, it's up to you to own that. If you want to make a move, it's up to you to pave the way for that.
Now, other people may be involved. There's going to be people you're going to tell this story to and they're going to ask you questions and you're going to answer their questions. But a lot of people are just looking for someone to fill the job that they need. They're just like, how do I get this job filled? I just need someone to do this stuff.
And a lot of them are not necessarily going to be sitting around thinking about how is it possible this person could be amazing for this? Some people might, there are some incredible people out there in recruiting and hiring managers. And if they have amazing vision, great. But what if you take charge of having amazing vision for yourself so that we never have to rely on someone else to have it?
And some people, if you have your amazing vision and you tell your amazing story, and you tell your narrative of why you're perfect, some people are not going to be on board with that because some people really want people to have traditional career paths and all that. And they're allowed to be like that because they have freewill, and we can't stop them.
But if you want to have an incredible career where you industry hop and do things that don't necessarily make sense to other people, and you can figure out how to tell that story and you can figure out which people to tell it to so that you can get them on board and they help you do it, then you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Okay, so we kind of covered a lot in this episode, so let's review. Basically, job searching brings up a lot of insecurities for most people. And we need to work through those insecurities and switch to more useful thought patterns if we want to, one, have a better experience of job searching. But also to be much more effective at job searching and be resilient enough to keep going until we land the job we want.
And we've talked about a bunch of different ways of doing this going from I don't know to what if I did know. Going from it's going to be too hard to overcome to maybe I just know some things to get started on and I can just do that and then keep going later. I don't have to solve it all immediately.
Building up resilience and normalizing that a lot of people are probably going to say no to us. And it's fine and it means nothing except for that we're doing amazing work and moving forward. Every no gets you closer to where you want to go. Because when you're getting noes it means you're doing something.
And if you keep doing something and learning from it, right? If you do something 100 times and you get 100 noes, you’ve got to also be evaluating why it's not working and making little shifts to get it to work. So I don't think I said that earlier, but that's obviously important.
And then the thing about the orgasms, right? Yes, the outcome we want is to get a job. But if we get too grippy about that and too up in our head about it, it actually makes it harder to get there. And then, finally, you got to be the one who gets to tell the amazing story about what you're capable of, and what you've done and how it makes exact sense for what you want to do next.
And you're capable of that even if you don't identify as creative. Just like everything else, get a fucking piece of paper and write how am I the perfect fit for this? And don't let your brain say anything about how you're not. Only let your brain write down the things that you are. And just sit there until you fill the paper.
And obviously, with thought work it like sort of is magic and it sort of isn't. So you may find that to get to where you want to go, you need to have one or two or three intermediary jobs, right? If you've been in one industry and you want to go to another one. We always want to shoot for the stars, but also hard work and taking our time and hitting goals, like mini-goals to get to our bigger goals is also very welcome here.
I wanted to go from working in corporate to having a six figure coaching business. And I did, but it took a lot longer than I wanted it to. And that was a lot of me keeping going even when it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And being willing to do that part of it until I got to the next part.
So I think that's something useful to keep in mind too. But may as well start by shooting for the stars, right? All right y'all, have a great week. Enjoy your job searches and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all, happy Wednesday. I’m so excited to talk to you. I’m in a great mood because I just took a really beautiful, long walk around Midtown Sacramento and the weather is gorgeous. It’s exactly the kind of weather I was hoping for when Alex and I chose to move to Sacramento. It’s like 57 degrees out and sunny. And just a beautiful, very mild winter day. And I am so into it.
And it’s especially delightful because lately the weather hasn’t been as warm or as sunny. And that’s okay, California needs the rain. So it was actually kind of great that it did rain, you know, have some of that. But personally, I really prefer this weather. And it’s here, so I’m like, yay.
And I think it’s also just a really good reminder for me to do the thing I’m always inviting y’all to do. Which is to notice and celebrate and revel in what is working and what is going well and what is doing the thing that I would like for it to do. Like everyone else, I also have a brain with negativity bias and my brain often notices when things aren’t going the way I want it to and when things aren’t doing what I would like for them.
And I’ve noticed through a lot of my own self-coaching that when things do go the way I want them to, my brain sometimes left to its own devices has this attitude of like, yeah, because it should be like that. And there’s nothing wrong with having that attitude.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, if when things go not the way I want them to I get upset and I brood, and I’m angry, and I like rage against what is. But then when things go the way I want them to it’s just like no big deal, that just sets me up to really feel a lot of negative emotion and then to not even get to enjoy it when things are going the way I want them to.
And so this is actually a tip that I heard a really long time ago. I think it was from maybe like a Christiane Northrup book, I'm not sure. But the idea of noticing and celebrating and reveling in, not just the obvious big delights that are like a big deal. But even the most minute, boring, mundane things that go the way that we want them to.
And so the example from the book, I remember the example better than where it came from. But the example from the book was like being super excited and like ecstatic when you're riding in an airplane and the airplane lands the way it should, which is like it lands and nothing goes bad. And that is such a mundane experience for anyone who spends a lot of time flying, and that's what we all expect to have happen.
But it's also amazing and something to really delight and revel in because the alternative is not super fun, right? I definitely want the plane to be in one piece and land safely. And that happens most of the time. But if most of the time when things go well I'm just brushing those off, like subconsciously. Not even necessarily purposefully as like this is the way it should be. That just cuts out so much of the things I could be delighting in and deprives me of a lot of like positive emotion.
Now, this isn't about like shoulding yourself about gratitude or anything. It's just about being aware of the brain's natural tendency and being like, hmm, do I like what that's doing for me? If not, maybe I want to do something else with that. And that's what I'm doing today.
So taking my own medicine over here and just enjoying the day and talking about it, which helps me really metabolize how much I'm enjoying it and notice and remember. Which seems like something we wouldn't have to do. And yet I find that it often is.
Okay, enough about that. Let's talk about job searches. I think this is such a fun thing to talk about, which is because I'm a coach and I'm sure lots of y'all don't think it's such a fun thing to talk about. Because I know that job searches are really painful for a lot of people. And I'm going to be honest with y'all, they've been really painful for me in the past when I've done them too.
And I think that's because for a lot of us when we're searching for a new job, when we're applying for a new job, it often feels really yucky and brings up all of our most negative thoughts and deepest insecurities about ourselves, about our value as an employee, about the world, about the industry we work in, et cetera, et cetera.
I also want to take a moment to just mention that yes, the podcast is called love your job before you leave it. And you might not love your job yet and you might want to leave it anyways, and you might want to job search. And you're absolutely 100% allowed to do that because, as we talked about in the podcast episode on when to leave your job, you are the authority and agency in your own life. You have complete sovereignty over what the fuck you're doing with your career.
I want to teach you how to love your job in case you want to learn that skill set or in case you're not able to get a new job as fast as you want to. And I do think it's super useful, and you're absolutely not required to do it. Also, maybe you already did it. Maybe you've already done the coaching or love the job you're in and you still want to leave it, that's allowed, too.
So basically, this podcast episode is just for anyone who wants to look for a new job at any point. And there's no shoulding happening here about when that's appropriate for you because you get to decide when that's appropriate for you.
Okay, now that we've covered that, let's get into it. Job searching, why does it suck so much? My take on why it sucks so much is because, again, like I was saying in the intro, I think it brings up a lot of our insecurities. It's something where most of us are going to face a lot of rejection.
And that's just like a numbers game, because usually we're going to apply for more jobs than we're going to get unless we apply for one and then get it. Usually that's not how it goes. And so we need a lot of resilience, I think, to go through a job search.
We need the ability to have a powerful mindset that's going to allow us to put ourselves out there and try to explain our skill set and our job history in a compelling way. And get asked questions that we didn't formulate an answer to. Answer them as best as we can.
Make it maybe through several rounds of interviews and then get told we didn't make the cut. Sometimes make it through zero rounds, we don't even make it through the phone screening. And then we have to navigate like our emotional experience of that. And then even if we get through all of that, then we have to have the conversation about what our new compensation is going to be.
All this stuff can bring up so many painful thoughts and feelings for people, and can just be really uncomfortable. And as we talk about all the time, humans don't like to feel uncomfortable. It's not super fun. I've done fuckloads of coaching and I still don't like to feel uncomfortable. And I still notice subconsciously I will avoid things that I perceive will be uncomfortable.
Sometimes I'll avoid them for a really long time. And then when I finally do them, they take 15 minutes and they're not that bad. And my personal experience from job searching is sometimes parts of it take 15 minutes and aren't that bad.
And sometimes parts of it really do involve a lot of difficult thinking and a lot of effort to figure out even what kind of job we want to get next, and what our skills are, and how to talk about those skills. So I think it is something that many people experience just tons of discomfort around. And that can make it really hard to do.
Okay, so now that we've talked about why job searching is so painful for people, what the hell are we going to do about that? What am I going to offer you that’s going to help you do this task and have a better experience of it?
Okay, so I have a few things I want to offer to you. Number one, something I see that a lot of people struggle with during job searching is this idea that they don't know what their skills even are. They don't know what kind of job they could even get. Lots of unknowing, not knowing, confusion. And I would say, I think a lot of people wouldn't characterize it this way, but how I would characterize it is a lot of despair.
And that maybe seems like a big word to throw around with job searching, but I'll just claim it for myself. I know that a lot of times when I was job searching, even though I knew I was really smart and I knew I was really effective, and I knew I could be good at stuff, I felt so much despair. And I'm melodramatic and I don't mind calling myself that. So I'm like, yeah, I felt a lot of despair.
And it was because I had all these thoughts like, I don't know how to do this, I'll never figure it out. And for me it wasn't just the not knowing, it was like it seemed so big. It seemed so much bigger than me and like I would never be able to overcome it. And I think that really lends to despair versus just the low level dread or anxiety or other emotions that are common in this situation.
And the thing about despair is I think a lot of times when we're feeling it, it seems even to us like the despair is outsized for what we're dealing with. And then we judge and shame ourselves, right? We're like, “Not only can I not figure out how to get a new job, but I'm being such a baby about not being able to figure it out. Clearly everyone has to do this, like everyone who's getting jobs is having to figure this out.”
I mean not everyone, the world being what it is, but many people, right? And so then we judge and shame ourselves and then it feels even more terrible. And then we have this very vicious cycle of every time I think about job searching, not only does it seem hard and terrible, but I also feel like shit.
Okay, so I told you I was going to get into solutions, and it sounds like I just got more into the problem. Which I guess I kind of did, and that's fine. But basically, let's go back to what I was saying before, which is people have this, I don't know, and I'll never figure it out. So those are thought patterns.
I don't know, maybe is going to seem really true to you. It's a thought pattern. It's a frame, right? When you think with the frame I don't know, your brain, because of confirmation bias, it's going to be like, yeah, you don't know. Let's list all the things you don't know, that seems fun. And then you're going to feel like shit and not want to do anything.
And when we think with the frame of I'm never going to be able to overcome this, same thing. Your confirmation bias comes in and your brain is like, here's some evidence about other things you didn't overcome, or how hard it will be, or how long it will take. And again, we feel like shit and then we don't want to do anything.
And so if we're feeling those feelings and thinking those thought patterns, and we are doing something, it's probably because we're using a lot of willpower to push through. Which we can do, but it tends to wear us out. And willpower is like a muscle that can fatigue. And then we'll squeeze out some effort and then we'll go back to the pit of despair and do something else and avoid the task and put it off for as long as possible, and then judge ourselves for putting it off.
So instead, what I want to offer you is that if I don't know and it's too hard to overcome, if these are thought patterns, which they are, if they’re frames, then we can switch the framing. And when we switch the framing, our brain with our beautiful confirmation bias will do a different search and find different information.
If you come from I don't know and I can't figure it out, that's going to be what feels true to you. If you come from I know some shit and I know how to figure out some shit, that is what will be true for you.
Now, I realize that this may sound like a lot of things with coaching, like magic, but it's not. It's just framing. It's like if I'm looking out one window of my house, I can see one view. If I go look out a different window of my house that's on a different wall, I can see a different view.
Both views are real in that they exist. Neither view is a full view. So we want to ask ourselves not is the current view I have a real, but is it useful? Is it helping me get what I want? And if it's not, is there a different view that could be better?
Okay, so the view that I'm going to offer you, the thought pattern that's more useful is what if I do know and what if I can figure it out? What if I do know the shit I'm good at? What if I do know some jobs I might be a good fit for? What if I do know some things I might like to do and what if I can figure out the things I don't know? So this is going to help you get out of that pit of despair place and into just a little bit of action, a little bit of activity.
So as an example of what this could look like is the I don't know place might have you flopping on the couch and watching Netflix, eating, and feeling shitty and guilty the whole time that you're not doing the job search.
Versus the what if I do know and what if I can figure it out might look like okay, I'm going to set a timer for just five minutes. And I'm going to write down some things I do know how to do in a workplace. And then I'm going to set a timer for five minutes and I'm going to write down some things I would like to be able to do even if I don't have the skills to do them now. And maybe that's all you do that day.
And then the what if I figure it out energy could be the same thing, set a timer for five minutes and be like okay, who could help me? What resources are available to me? What Google searches could I do?
When we tell ourselves we don't know and that it's too hard to figure out, we don't try to figure it out and we don't pay any attention to the things we do know. When we tell ourselves what if I do know and what if I can figure it out? We're coming at it, again, from that different view, which is going to have different resources and different options attached to it. Okay, so that's if you have those thought patterns.
Another thing that I see people struggle with is kind of just general confidence, right? Like I've been in this job, and I've gotten a bunch of good reviews, or maybe you've gotten some good reviews and some less good reviews, but what if I'm not good enough for a different job? Especially if you've applied for a lot of other jobs and not gotten one that you wanted to accept or not gotten one at all, you may be falling into the thing where you feel rejected and you're letting that impact your confidence.
And if that's true for you, then what you need is basically a confidence vitamin. How do we get a confidence vitamin? Here's how we're going to do it, you're going to, like the other thing, write down all the shit you do know how to do. You're going to write down all your career wins.
Now, listen, your brain, if it's been in the head space of feeling rejected and feeling bad about you, it’s not going to want to do that. And you're just going to be like, okay, thanks brain for not wanting to do that, but we're going to do it anyway.
So as an example, if you try to go from I don't know to what if I do know, or if you try to go from my work experience is terrible to my work experience is great, your brain will probably feel resistance to that. And so we kind of just keep nudging and inviting our brain in the direction we want to go.
And what we also want to do and what you may have noticed already with what I've suggested is we want to get this conversation out of your head and onto paper. Inside our own heads, it's very easy to be susceptible to all the negative things our brain is saying.
When you get a piece of paper and write down the things you actually know how to do and write down the successes you've had heretofore in your career, it's harder for your brain to say, well none of that matters. Because you'll be like, well I do have a list of like 60 things here, or six things, or whatever.
So what we really want to do is be making the argument for why you do know and why your work experience is useful, and is beneficial, and is good. And why you do know how to figure out how to move forward, even if you don't know 100% of the answers.
In addition to confidence, another piece that's important here is resilience. For a lot of us, myself included, when we do something we want to be praised immediately. We want someone to be like, oh, you're amazing, you're great, you're so wonderful. We want to hire you right away.
A lot of us feel resistance to kind of like the idea of selling ourselves or having to go through all these interviews. And sometimes we also feel a lot of extra pressure to sell ourselves versus also interviewing the company to see if we're even interested in working there, right?
This is kind of like in dating, when sometimes instead of dating the people we really want to date, we just are like, well there's no one I want to date. So I'm going to go on this date with this person I don't really like. And then they don't really like us and then we feel even more rejected because we're like, I didn't even really like you. I'm out of your league, you're rejecting me. It's extra painful, right?
And I think this actually applies in dating too, but we need to cultivate resilience for ourselves. And I think part of that is normalizing that for many people it's going to take a lot of applications and a lot of interviews to get a job. And that's okay, that doesn't mean anything has gone wrong.
It's kind of like in sales you're often going to talk to a lot more people than the amount of people who are going to buy. Now, over time and with a lot of skill, we can change those margins. But especially if you consider that with job searching you're looking for someone who is a good fit for you, not just you're a good fit for them.
You're looking for someone who wants to hire you into the level you want to be in, at the pay you want, in the culture you want. And I think it's kind of like trying on jeans. I try on so many pairs of jeans before I find a pair that I'm like, okay, I like this cut. I like the way they fit my body, I'm into the price.
I think it's useful to normalize that if we try some things and they're not a good fit, it doesn't mean something bad about us. Because that's part of what makes job searching so painful, is when we're like I applied for three jobs and none of them wanted me. No one's going to want me, everyone hates me, I may as well not try.
And then we're in that pit of despair where we're not trying anymore. And when we're not trying, of course, we're also not getting hired. And then our brain is like see, no one is hiring us.
So how can you bolster yourself to go through this process and understand that being told no is part of it and it doesn't mean anything about you? This is really hard for people, they really want to take this shit personally. They really want to be like how could it not mean anything about me?
But if you have a body that's a certain shape and a jeans are a certain shape and they don't fit your body, it doesn't mean the jeans are wrong or bad, it just means they're not a good fit for you. They may be a really good fit for someone else. What if jobs are just like that?
We're trying them on to see how the two of us fit together in the interview process. And so, yeah, we want to learn to be able to explain our job experience and explain what we're trying to do in our next role clearly and authentically.
But clear and authentic communication is often going to lead to us and another person, whether it's a date or an interview or whatever, deciding we're not a good fit. And that's okay. In fact, it's great. It's better to find that out before we get the job.
I also want to talk about one more thing, and I think this is actually related to the resilience piece. And it's what I'm going to call being super attached to the outcome and getting super attached to a specific job. Versus the idea of finding a job that works really well for us and not knowing ahead of time exactly which job it's going to be.
And I used this metaphor in a coaching call and it's a little racy, so prepare yourself. The metaphor that I used is that when we're like interviewing for a job and we get super attached to it, it can be a little bit like when we're having sex, but we're really attached to the idea of having an orgasm and we're not even enjoying the sex and we're all up in our head like am I going to have the orgasm? Am I going to have the orgasm? And it actually on a physiological level makes it harder for your body to have an orgasm.
I've had this experience before myself, where I got so in my head about it and then, of course, I didn't have one. And then I made that mean a bunch of negative stuff about me. It's actually so much like the job search experience.
Being grippy about needing a certain outcome to happen makes us so that we're less present to what's actually happening. I think when this happens, it's like, first of all, we're not relaxed, we're not ourselves. We don't show up to the situation as well as we could have, we get super grippy and weird. And it just makes it so much harder to enjoy the experience and get the outcome that we want.
So if you're experiencing that, there's nothing wrong with you. You're experiencing a very normal human thought pattern. And it may not be the most useful one. So if you don't want to have that experience of the job search, we need to get a different perspective, a different thought pattern in there.
So a perspective that I might use if I were job searching to help me not be grippy and weird and get to attached to each specific thing is just the idea that I only need one job and it's out there. And I don't know which one it is yet and then so all I need to do in these interviews and in these connections and coffee chats and whatever actions I'm taking to try to get the next job, I just need to show up as myself, right?
Be who I am. Be prepared. Be able and willing to talk about my job history and how I think it relates to whatever thing I'd like to do next. And be willing to not know which job it's going to be. And be willing to entertain and engage with all the various potential matches without having to know like oh, it's going to be this one. I'm all in on this one.
It can be great to be all in, but I think with job searching in particular, like knowing you want a job is really valuable information. And I've even in interviews, because I have no chill whatsoever told someone like, hey, I just want to be really clear, I want this job. I actually said that to the hiring manager at my corporate IT job that I got. No chill Kori, that's me, right?
But I also needed to know that if I didn't get offered that job I was going to keep going and I wasn't going to beat myself up. I mean, I probably would have at that time because that was before the coaching tools I have now. But that I was going to keep going and that if I didn't get that job, there was going to be another job for me.
And I think that that is actually a difficult mindset for a lot of people to step into because they're like, but I don't know. I don't know there's another job. But I think this is one of those examples where you really have to ask yourself is it more helpful to me to believe that there's a job out there so that I keep going and increase the likelihood that I get that job? Or is it more helpful to me to say that there's not?
And weirdly, people always want to make the argument that statistically the terrible thing that they don't want is more likely. I think if you're actively applying to jobs, it's much more likely you're going to get one than that you aren't. But even if you statistically weren't likely, which thought is going to help you do the shit you need to do to get what you want?
Especially the more in my life I'm trying to create things that a lot of people haven't created, the more I lean into thinking thoughts and choosing mindsets that a lot of people wouldn't say are practical. But I don't want practical outcomes in my life. I want insane, delicious outcomes. And so part of that is me being willing to step out into the possibility of that and be the first one to believe in it. Not because I know for sure it'll happen, but because of how I show up to my goals when I step into that possibility.
Okay, there's one final tip that I'm going to offer you and it's a storytelling tip from my many years as a creative writer, and also from my many, many, many brilliant friends who helped me on my career journey before I found the kind of coaching I use now. These are brilliant women, I'm so grateful for them.
And one of them, many of them, I don't even know anymore, told me that part of getting a job is being able to tell the story of why you are an amazing fit for that job. Even if you don't have the exact experience they're looking for. And sometimes, especially if you don't have the exact experience they're looking for.
And especially for any of you who are trying to really go up a level, or trying to get into a different industry, or trying to career hop in a way that doesn't make sense. If you want to do that, I firmly believe you can and that you can take any career history and explain why it's fucking magical for the job you're applying to.
But what I want to offer to you is, it's on you to do that. It's on you to do the heavy lifting of explaining why your experience is not just relevant, but incredibly useful because a lot of other people aren't going to do that. A lot of interviewers aren't going to do that, a lot of people who are reviewing resumes aren't going to do that.
You may be lucky enough that if you have people you're having coffee with, that some of them have that kind of vision and are willing to lend it to you of like, oh, if you've done this, you could do that. I definitely had people like that too, who helped me understand my job experience so that I could tell a better story of it. But ultimately, it's up to you to own that. If you want to make a move, it's up to you to pave the way for that.
Now, other people may be involved. There's going to be people you're going to tell this story to and they're going to ask you questions and you're going to answer their questions. But a lot of people are just looking for someone to fill the job that they need. They're just like, how do I get this job filled? I just need someone to do this stuff.
And a lot of them are not necessarily going to be sitting around thinking about how is it possible this person could be amazing for this? Some people might, there are some incredible people out there in recruiting and hiring managers. And if they have amazing vision, great. But what if you take charge of having amazing vision for yourself so that we never have to rely on someone else to have it?
And some people, if you have your amazing vision and you tell your amazing story, and you tell your narrative of why you're perfect, some people are not going to be on board with that because some people really want people to have traditional career paths and all that. And they're allowed to be like that because they have freewill, and we can't stop them.
But if you want to have an incredible career where you industry hop and do things that don't necessarily make sense to other people, and you can figure out how to tell that story and you can figure out which people to tell it to so that you can get them on board and they help you do it, then you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Okay, so we kind of covered a lot in this episode, so let's review. Basically, job searching brings up a lot of insecurities for most people. And we need to work through those insecurities and switch to more useful thought patterns if we want to, one, have a better experience of job searching. But also to be much more effective at job searching and be resilient enough to keep going until we land the job we want.
And we've talked about a bunch of different ways of doing this going from I don't know to what if I did know. Going from it's going to be too hard to overcome to maybe I just know some things to get started on and I can just do that and then keep going later. I don't have to solve it all immediately.
Building up resilience and normalizing that a lot of people are probably going to say no to us. And it's fine and it means nothing except for that we're doing amazing work and moving forward. Every no gets you closer to where you want to go. Because when you're getting noes it means you're doing something.
And if you keep doing something and learning from it, right? If you do something 100 times and you get 100 noes, you’ve got to also be evaluating why it's not working and making little shifts to get it to work. So I don't think I said that earlier, but that's obviously important.
And then the thing about the orgasms, right? Yes, the outcome we want is to get a job. But if we get too grippy about that and too up in our head about it, it actually makes it harder to get there. And then, finally, you got to be the one who gets to tell the amazing story about what you're capable of, and what you've done and how it makes exact sense for what you want to do next.
And you're capable of that even if you don't identify as creative. Just like everything else, get a fucking piece of paper and write how am I the perfect fit for this? And don't let your brain say anything about how you're not. Only let your brain write down the things that you are. And just sit there until you fill the paper.
And obviously, with thought work it like sort of is magic and it sort of isn't. So you may find that to get to where you want to go, you need to have one or two or three intermediary jobs, right? If you've been in one industry and you want to go to another one. We always want to shoot for the stars, but also hard work and taking our time and hitting goals, like mini-goals to get to our bigger goals is also very welcome here.
I wanted to go from working in corporate to having a six figure coaching business. And I did, but it took a lot longer than I wanted it to. And that was a lot of me keeping going even when it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And being willing to do that part of it until I got to the next part.
So I think that's something useful to keep in mind too. But may as well start by shooting for the stars, right? All right y'all, have a great week. Enjoy your job searches and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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