This will become your guide when it becomes time to make a decision, because there’s hopefully going to come a point where you’re going to have a choice between two and five opportunities. Wouldn’t that be great? Firms wanting you and calling you up and saying, “You’re the one we’ve chosen. We’ve interviewed 150 people and we’ve picked you.” Now, imagine five firms are doing that. You have to know how to choose the one that’s right for you. So check what each company offers you against your priorities.
I remember a time several years ago when I was working with a young woman named Lorraine, who in the stress of having to make a decision, almost made a horrible one. I’d gotten an offer for her that basically met every one of her objectives and then her old firm came back to her with a counter-offer.
Her boss sat her down and said, “Lorraine, we love you. You’re so important to us. Please stay. We need you! How about if we increase your salary by $10,000?” They flattered her so much, she almost decided to go back on all these things that were important to her making her commitment.
So I had a meeting with her and we discussed the counter offer. We reviewed the faults she’d found with her employer to see if anything had changed. Ultimately we found that she almost made a terrible decision based upon her emotions at the moment. She’d forgotten about her original thinking, because she was flattered so much. After a brief coaching session, she wound up taking the job I introduced her to and growing greatly in her career. She thanked me every year for five years afterwards for having helped her.
You have to really be true to what your heart AND HEAD is telling you. You have be true to what you truly want, even though your parents, or your current job situation, or other outer influences, are telling you otherwise. You’re not stuck. You have options.
Imagine for a second you are standing in the middle of the road with your arms out and balanced in place. Now, someone takes your left hand and starts pulling on it, and then someone takes your right hand and starts pulling on it. And then someone starts pulling your right leg, and another person starts pulling your left. Eventually, you’re being tugged in all sorts of directions. Well, that’s a good image of what going on a job search sometimes feels like.
You really start to feel the pressure of being pulled in a lot of different ways and unless you have that base of identified values, it’s really hard to figure out what the right decision is—not for your mom, not for your dad, not for your best friend, but for you.
We spent some time talking about the self-evaluation phase and where you want to get to. Now, in planning for change, is there anything that you can do to move yourself closer to your goal? What training can you take? What mentoring or coaching can you obtain that will move you closer to meeting your ambition with this job change?
You are not a robot that’s going to execute tasks in a job. You are a living, breathing human being with needs, wants, desires, and ambitions. I want to help you meet as many of them as I possibly can.
© The Big Game Hunter, Inc. Asheville, NC 2007, 2016