🧘🏻♀️2 Mindset Hacks to keep your confidence while job searching
If you’ve been following along, I’ve recently shared an overview on how to create a repeatable process you can follow to land more interviews and offers.
However, even when the process is fairly straightforward, it becomes difficult to keep going when feeling like your skills are not enough or not owning your new identity within the tech space, makes it hard to keep the motivation to even look for opportunities. That’s why today’s article is about mindset.
Your mindset is the way you view yourself, others and the world around you.
When entering a new career, you are BRAND new to the industry. That means you have a skills, yet they are new skills and you don’t yet have much confidence in them. It also means you are just starting a create a network in the industry, so you can feel as if you’re climbing uphill when reaching out and not hearing back from people. This is all valid and OK.
Starting from scratch, building a new career, does feel difficult, because it’s not easy. Most important for you to remember is that others have done it, so there is a path you can follow and many others are on this path with you!
Two mindset hacks to maintain your sense of confidence even when you feel stuck.
Drop out of Comparison and into validation
When you are new to an activity, it’s very common to compare yourself. You will naturally compare your skills, abilities, sense of knowledge and career growth to others. The problem with Comparison mode is that you are invalidating your own learnings and skills. You are throwing away all that you learned only to say “ she is better”, “she is more experienced”, “she can do it better”.
Move from thinking in Comparison to thinking in Validation. Validation means you acknowledge how far you’ve come, what you’ve learned, the skills you currently have. Shifting your mindset from constantly comparing yourself to validating yourself, especially when you feel unsure of yourself or your skills, is the key to feeling confident what you have learned so far, helping you maintain confidence even even the results in your job search are not immediate.
Treat all feedback as DATA you can learn from
The human mind is quick is remember negative emotions. This means that any neutral or positive emotions are thrown to the side, hidden away. When growing a new career, it’s important to bolster your confidence, not undermine it with constant negative feedback. That is why it’s useful to reframe all feedback as wins.
Got an interview? WIN. Got a no-thank you email? DATA Landed an offer? WIN. Setup a connection call? WIN.
I am NOT saying to pretend that everything is amazing all the time. I AM saying to train your mind to not dwell on the rejection and to instead treat all interactions from your job search as DATA you can use to reflect, evaluate and revise your approach. This way you can LEARN. Use your ability to learn to find new opportunities instead of dwelling in the past.
Looking for a solution to reduce the stress of the job search? The Get Hired guide is a self-paced instruction manual that will take you from A-Z of the job search to show you how to land a job in less time that you think.