The Job Hunter’s Guide to Self Confidence
By: Sarah Kat
Tags: Wisdom, Job Hunting, Life Lessons, Careers, Psychology

The Job Hunter’s Guide to Self Confidence

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Don’t worry. This is not going to be full of cheesy quotes about being the King of the Jungle. I just wanted to catch your attention with the tiger picture, so that I could give you some real food for thought on getting hired in the current climate.

Work history, qualifications and skills aside — confidence is a big part of the picture when it comes to finding a job during a recession.

I’ve noticed that confidence has been a big struggle for me recently. But as a psychology graduate who works with go-getting Entrepreneurs, I should know how to pull myself out of a funk.

As I’m doing just that, I figured why not pull you out with me too. We are stronger together, right?

So what follows is not a list of job application dos and don’t — you can find that anywhere online. Rather, these are a couple of psychology-based ideas that you can mull over to help you find your way forward.

Your inner critic

Have you heard of the Gestalt Chair Technique? It’s an exercise used by Gestalt-trained Psychotherapists to give your inner voices an outer, physical image or personality. From there, you can talk to them and rationalize your own negative inner talk.

In short, you sit in one chair, and another chair is left empty. The therapist asks you to imagine the person you want to speak with is in the empty chair. Then you speak, and let the pent up stuff out to be worked on.

This morning I realized that applying for jobs which felt a bit out of my league was like having a conversation with the multiple voices in my head.

Have you felt something similar?

As I’m sat there reading the job specification, I’m literally negotiating with myself…

“I can do that. I have relatable skills.”

“Wait… That sounds a bit too advanced for me.”

“What if I’m out of my depth here?”

Before I know it, I’m thinking myself in circles. But what if I literally put my inner critic in the Gestalt Chair?

Get some space

By separating your inner critic, you can physically put a little space between you and them. For most of us, our inner critic is an amalgamation of all the negative influences in our lives.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels

A mean teacher from school. Your horrible aunt. Echoes from any time you failed or felt shame. They are our demons.

Yet because they reside within our own minds, we take them on as a part of us.

So let’s separate that voice, just for a while, and give it a seat in another chair.

How does it feel when they are a little further removed from you?

Can you think back and identify some of the life experiences that created your inner critic’s voice?

Would you like to challenge that voice’s authority over you?

When you look at yourself objectively, as you are today, can you acknowledge that you have grown a great deal since that voice was first formed in your mind?

Could you even say that the voice of your inner critic is out of date and redundant these days?

Now look again at that job specification with fresh eyes. How do you feel now?

It’s a much quoted statistic that men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. Gender aside, let’s consider this more generally. Not everybody who applies for a job is fully qualified for it — that’s the bottom line here.

What I’m saying is don’t be intimidated by the job specification. If you feel that you are a good fit and you are passionate about the role, then it’s worth trying.

Note your negative bias

In the psychology world, ‘negative bias’ is the term used for the way that we focus more on the bad than the good.

When we think about who we are, we all tend to ignore the things we do well, and focus on the things we don’t do so well.

We pay more attention to our perceived shortcomings, using them as ‘evidence’ to berate ourselves.

The reason that this is a part of our psychological makeup is believed to be largely evolutionary. In neolithic times, we lived in caves and were under threat from predators.

So instead of skipping around in a cloud of positivity, our brain is always scanning for the risk. We live on the lookout for lions and tigers.

We focus on our own weaknesses, not our strengths, to stay aware of possible threats.

Simply understanding this is a powerful shift. Now that you know why you are hard on yourself, you can think more logically when looking at your abilities.

Your career history is your proof

We love to look for evidence. So now, instead of looking for evidence of our weakness, let’s look at evidence of our strengths.

When you are applying for jobs, you are constantly asked to list your career history, including your key responsibilities and strengths.

I know that being asked to repeat your career history with every application is laborious. But what if you treated it differently…

What if you read your list of achievements to yourself like a mantra? Look over that list of roles, and remind yourself how far you have come already.

List those responsibilities and strengths with pride. You did those things. And you know what? You can do all those things again, and more.

It is perfectly normal for your confidence to take a hit in a time like this. The recession means that there are far more people all competing for the same positions.

It’s important not to take rejection personally. We are all getting rejected, time after time, and that is just the climate we are in.

Keep trying and stay positive. You’ve got this.