Tag: Mental Health

The Job Hunt (Part 2): Preparing Yourself

woman holding black flag

This is my first blog on the Job Hunt mini-series. When starting to embark on finding a new job, preparing yourself is the most important first step, so the first set of posts will focus on the initial work necessary to launch yourself going forward.

Prepare yourself both physically, including financially and logistically, but more importantly mentally and emotionally for what you are about to undertake. The job hunt is often an adventure, so readying yourself is crucial.

Here are three basic ways to prepare yourself:

Give yourself time to process what you’re leaving/left.
Take stock mentally, emotionally, and materially for the long haul.
Be patient and know what you can control.

Give yourself time to process what you’re leaving/left.

Frequently when people are looking for a job, they recently ended or would like to end some prior situation: maybe something happened causing them to resign or be let go, or they are stressed for whatever reason at their current position and thus seeking something else. In such situations, make sure you explicitly take time to process and heal from whatever you may be coming out of.

How to do so might depend on both who you are and what you have encountered. Maybe you need to replenish yourself from burnout, emotionally and/or mentally process what happened, or reassess who you are. This will take time, and that it does is in no way a negative reflection of you.

Balance, Meditation, Meditate, Silent, Rest, Sky, Sun

Be conscientious about developing meaningful practices that will rejuvenate you and help you process what happened. Journal, take up a hobby, talk with friends or family, or do whatever helps you. After a day of exertion, our bodies physically need to sleep at night to rebuild the muscle tissue for a new day of adventures. Our emotional and mental faculties often work similarly: taking the time to slow down and process what happened will allow you to move forward in pursuit of your next occupational adventure.

Take stock for the long haul.

Be prepared mentally, emotionally, and materially for the long haul. I frequently hear people say that it takes on average six months to find a job. At the time of writing this, the economy is bad, and it could be longer. Materially and financially take stock of how many resources you have and how you can plan to get by for a while.

Prepare yourself mentally and emotionally a long trek in finding the next job. Try to resist the urge to appease yourself with the potentially false promise of a quick turnaround and ignore any swindlers trying to sell you the same.

Telling yourself that it could take months of grueling work to find a job will help you in the long run. It’ll be much easier on you to have a shorter-than-expected job hunt than to have your high hopes for a quick out crushed.

The job search is (almost always) a long and arduous process. Be ready for that.

To me personally, the job hunt feels like a tunnel: you hope/sense that there is a light at the end of it when you will find the next gig, but you do not know when it will come. It could always be tomorrow that you get that amazing job offer or several months from now.

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There is generally light at the end of the tunnel, but that doesn’t mean the experience isn’t difficult. Having unrealistic expectations will only make the dark times ahead feel all the darker.

Be patient and know what you can control.

The ancient stoic philosophers emphasized not holding yourself accountable to what is beyond your control, and I have found that the job hunt can necessitate its own version of stoicism. You can do a lot to better your application, find the right job, connect with the right people, and these are important.

But, there is always so much about it that you cannot control. You cannot fully control where employers on the other side are coming from and what decisions they make: how and where they look for candidates, what they think of you and whether they value you, or even whether organizations/companies have an open position in the first place.

One pro of the online applications is that we even more equipped to apply to positions around the world, but one con is that thousands of applications go unread. Job prospects can often come and go based on wider structural societally factors – like a failing economy – or the successes or failures of that specific organization. You can do everything right in application and still fail for reasons outside of your control.

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You can and should strive to make your application as strong as possible: both presenting yourself in the best possible light and searching within your means for the best job openings for you. But, as in Richard Niebuhr’s famous prayer, possessing the wisdom to know what you can and cannot change is crucial. This requires that you be patient with yourself if and when you fail so that you can continue to pick yourself back up and try again.

Photo/Graph credit #1: Engin Akyurt at https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-holding-black-flag-1571734/

Photo/Graph credit #2: realworkhard at https://pixabay.com/photos/balance-meditation-meditate-silent-110850/

Photo/Graph credit #3: Free Photos at https://pixabay.com/photos/person-man-male-worker-inside-731151/

Photo/Graph credit #4: Flazingo Phots at https://www.flickr.com/photos/124247024@N07/14110060693/

The Job Hunt (Part 3): Pace Yourself and Set Goals

Pacing yourself is crucial for finding a job, and setting appropriate goals is the best way to ensure that you have a workable pace.

The job hunt is more like a marathon than a sprint, but at the beginning many encounter a strong temptation to jump in headfirst with a full sprint. Like the Hare in Aesop’s Fable, they rush into the process, expecting a quick turnaround in a few days or weeks, if only they can complete everything they have to.

Sometimes this works and they do find a job, and if so, more power to you. But, frequently this simply exhausts the person after the initial transition sets in. You cannot sprint your way through a marathon but must learn to pace yourself, lest you deplete critical energy during your initial charge.

On the other extreme, the job hunt seems uniquely set up to enable procrastination. Fixing your resume, reaching out to someone, filling out that online job application, etc. are important but frequently have undefined deadlines, meaning that you can always put it off until tomorrow. This fact coupled with the emotional energy needed to put oneself out there means that many procrastinate on key activities. This can include the exhausted sprinters who, after the initial high of their sprint crashes, often settle into an equally ineffective procrastination.

Making and keeping effective goals is the answer to both pitfalls. For sprinters, well-paced goals channel your initial energy into something productive while pacing yourself in the long run, and for procrastinators, daily and weekly goals keep you productive now at chipping away the necessary long-term complex tasks.

What I Do

So then, how do you set proper goals for the job search? Here is a breakdown of how I typically set goals:

I break down what I need to do into a series of tasks: networking/connecting with people, submitting job applications online, working on my resumes and cover letters, etc. (I will discuss the importance of and break down how to do each these in more detail in later articles.)

For quantifiably measurable tasks, like connecting with people and applying to jobs, I set a reasonable weekly goal like the following:

Reach out to 20 people a week, a.k.a. 4 people a day during the week (taking the weekends off)
Apply to 12 jobs a week, a.k.a. 3 a day during the week

Now, I prioritize reaching out to people over submitting online applications, because I have found networking to lead to more jobs interviews than submitting online applications, something I will discuss in more detail in a future article.

For qualitatively measurable tasks, like perfecting my resumes and cover letters, I generally set a certain amount of time per day/week to work on until that task is complete. For example, I might work on my resume for 25 minutes a day, for example, until the version I have for each type of job is of the quality I desire. This allows me to slowly chip away at the task.

The point of these goals is to give me the daily and weekly impetus I need to work through a much more complicated task. In the job search, there will be many necessary activities that I can always put off until tomorrow, which means that if I am not careful, I will put them off indefinitely.

By setting goals, I break down each complex task into smaller, manageable and tangible parts that I can slowly chip away at every day. Editing for 25 minutes or reaching out to 4 people is not that difficult, overwhelming, or time-consuming to complete right now, so every day I can easily manage it. The effects of these smaller parts are small at first, but over the course of a few weeks, they snowball into tackling the wider task/goal.

Goal Setting Yourself

So, how do you set reasonable goals, then? Well, the details of the goals you make are up to you and what you can handle given your schedule.

First, however, I would recommend you list out all the tasks you need to complete in order to find a job. For me, in the example above, that was networking, submitting online applications, and writing resumes and cover letters. What do you need to do?

Searching for jobs and bettering one’s application (which these three activities are examples of) are two common types of activities that job seekers must perform, so they are a good place to start. Later articles in this series will discuss several potential activities to consider in later articles as well.

After mapping out what you need to do, I would recommend the following criteria for thinking through the process:

1. Sufficiency: Give yourself enough time to work on the given task each day to slowly chip away at it overtime.
(For example, reaching out to 1 person a day would not enable me to complete my overall networking task quick enough, but 4 people a day could.)
2. Completable: At the same time, make sure your daily goal is completable each day.
(For example, reaching out to 20 people a day would be too high for me, given my schedule, but 4 people a day I have found perfectly doable even on hard days)
3. Resting and Reevaluating: Officially include time to rest from your goals and reevaluate what is working and not working about them.
(Notice I finished all my weekly goals during the week and did not work during the weekend. This both allowed me time to rest and recuperate from the job hunt and gave me space to disengage for a few days to reassess my goal setting. One should remove oneself from one’s goal setting rhythm periodically, because such space allows you to reassess whether that rhythm is working. It is smart to graft such breaks officially into your goals, and for many people, weekends for a natural time to do that. Do it when it makes the most sense for you, though.)
  1. Sufficiency: Give yourself enough time to work on the given task each day to slowly chip away at it overtime.

(For example, reaching out to 1 person a day would not enable me to complete my overall networking task quick enough, but 4 people a day could.)

2. Completable: At the same time, make sure your daily goal is completable each day.

(For example, reaching out to 20 people a day would be too high for me, given my schedule, but 4 people a day I have found perfectly doable even on hard days.)

3. Resting and Reevaluating: Officially include time to rest from your goals and reevaluate what is working and not working about them.

(Notice I finished all my weekly goals during the week and did not work during the weekend. This both allowed me time to rest and recuperate from the job hunt and gave me space to disengage for a few days to reassess my goal setting. One should remove oneself from one’s goal setting rhythm periodically, because such space allows you to reassess whether that rhythm is working. It is smart to graft such breaks officially into your goals, and for many people, weekends for a natural time to do that. Do it when it makes the most sense for you, though.)

Conclusion

The job hunt is often a marathon, taking several months, so setting sufficient yet completable goals with adequate rest is the most important single activity you can do to pace yourself.

Goal setting prevents you both from starting out sprinting way faster than you should and thus just tiring yourself out in the long run, and from procrastinating on going forward at all.  

Finding a job is doable but prepare yourself. It can be a long journey, so you need to treat it as such.

Photo Credit #1: Shannon McGee at https://www.flickr.com/photos/shan213/5860844312/

Photo Credit #2: OpenClipart-Vectorsat https://pixabay.com/vectors/checklist-task-to-do-list-plan-1295319/

Photo Credit #3: gerart at https://pixabay.com/photos/students-board-drawing-learn-start-4190327/

Photo Credit #4: Markus Winkler at https://unsplash.com/photos/LNzuOK1GxRU