As much as we wish life was unicorn taxis, money trees and chocolate rivers, it’s not. It sucks but there is, in fact, a smorgasbord of stress that we have to navigate on a tri-hourly basis and at the top of the stress pyramid is job hunting. It’s just so impossibly stressful. Not only are you trying to find some kind of work, but you’re also having to juggle the loss of income, a boss you can’t stand anymore and/or terrifying uncertainty and, the longer you spend hunting for a job, the more your stress levels get cranked up. Basically, it’s not a stress you want to take lightly.
This begs an almighty important question: what the heck can you do to reduce the anxiety and stress attached to the job hunting process. Well, to help you on your quest for a soothing answer, we’ve pulled together a few strategies which, if nothing else, are a great place to start.
Change Your Goal
The thing with job hunting is, you think the goal is obvious: to get a job. But this is a surefire way to heap the stress on yourself and feel demotivated a dozen times a day. It’s a much better idea to set lots of little goals you can achieve. Then, every time you reach one of them, not only will you feel great, you’ll also be inching your way closer to the new job dream. It’s little things like, send off three applications by Wednesday and go to two networking events.
Narrow It Down
If you’ve ever been on Indeed or Glassdoor or any of those massive job boards, you’ll know how terrifying they are. They just feel so massive, as you scroll and click your way through a thousand pages. It’s a much better idea to whittle down your search early on. Know what sort of industry you want to work in, use a more specialist search option, someone like the Alexander Daniels recruitment agency, and make a list of what you are looking for in a job. The more you know about what you want, the less overwhelming and stressful it will be.
Get Into Meditating
When things aren’t going as quickly as you’d hope and emails aren’t getting replies, you can start to get wrapped up in panicked thoughts about your future. How will you cover your bills? How will you climb the ladder? What if you never get hired? How long will it take? They are all normal thoughts. But one of the best ways to keep on top of them and keep calm and relaxed is to just step away for fifteen minutes a day and practise a bit of mindfulness. It’s so important.
Dress To Impress You
Most of the time, it’s the little things that can have the biggest influence on our attitude, positivity and mental well-being, and one of those little things is to get dressed each morning as if you’re going to the job you want to land. It will keep you motivated and in the right frame of mind. But that’s not the only reason. Life is odd and you’ll never know when you might make a possible – and professional – contact, and being dressed to impress in those moments can change everything.
- This post has been written for Morning Business Chat by an outside source.
