If you find yourself banging your head against the wall about a specific career dilemma, or maybe you continue to engage in the same behavior over and over, knowing it isn’t serving you, but you can’t quite seem to shake it, keep reading.
Cause or symptom?
19 March 2019
If you find yourself banging your head against the wall about a specific career dilemma, or maybe you continue to engage in the same behavior over and over, knowing it isn’t serving you, but you can’t quite seem to shake it, keep reading.
We all have roadblocks in our careers and lives, and depending on the nature of the issue, sometimes we can put our minds to work and overcome it – but sometimes we just can’t – and the more we use logic to solve it, the more stuck we get.
Here’s the deal: The act of us being stuck, or the actual challenge itself, is not the cause of the problem. More often, there’s a deeper issue at play, and the actual challenge is just the symptom.
This is like having an illness that causes a rash on your skin – the rash itself isn’t the cause, it’s the symptom. By tackling the rash itself, you aren’t addressing the real issue.
The rash may go away for the time being, but the illness is still there, ready to flare up at a moment’s notice.
This is the same thing that happens when people are in career transitions, job hunting, experiencing performance challenges, etc.
They throw everything they have towards finding their next job or improving their performance (the symptoms) rather than uncovering why they can’t find that next job or are unable to improve their performance (the cause).
You may say to yourself, “Why is it taking me so long to find my next job? I’m not getting offers, there must be something wrong with me. What am I doing wrong?”
And while likely there are things you can do to tweak your networking, resume, cover letter, interviewing skills, or performance, the real issue that needs tweaking is your belief system.
Often when we start looking for the cause, we uncover beliefs such as:
“I’m smart enough for a job like that.”
“I’m not worthy of that sort of title.”
“There is no way I can take on that amount of responsibility.”
“I’m not good enough to be a high performer.”
"If I fail people will find out I'm a fraud."
And the crazy thing is – wait for it – that people don’t even realize they believe these things.
Think about this: If you 100% believed you weren’t smart enough for a job, would you go for it? And if you did go for it, do you think you’d get it? Or instead, would you keep going for jobs that you’ve done before or that don’t challenge you? Or maybe when you do get that interview for a “reach job,” you instead sabotage yourself because you don’t believe you’re smart enough.
This stuff happens under the surface day in and day out to all of us. The point is to become aware of it.
And once you’re aware of it, and replace the beliefs with facts, it’s amazing how you are able to let it go – forever – and the symptoms that came with the belief start to disappear also.
Schedule a free strategy session to uncover your beliefs at play that may be the cause of unwanted symptoms.
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