There's no ambiguity about it. Actually it's downright binary: either you have paid employment or you don't. Then the next binary set is: either you are earning enough or you're not.
If the answer to one or both is "no," then you are likely tethered to the 10 habits of ineffective job-searchers. In the February 2010 article on a Seattle blog, Kim Thompson looks at the hunt for work through this filter of outcome. If you don't have work or not enough of it or aren't earning enough then you are stuck. Here are the 10 ways Thompson describes that state of stuckness:
- Bunker mindset and behavior. You're isolating yourself from all kinds of help.
- Self-consciousness. You're consumed with what others might be thinking about you.
- Obsessive focus on the hunt. That keeps narrowing ability to identify, pounce on, and exploit opportunity.
- Avoidance of risk-taking. Instead you're playing out negative scenarios of what could happen rather than experimenting with the potential in the situation.
- A Mourning Becomes Electra attitude about previous professional losses. It's all I coulda, shouda, they shoulda.
- Negativity. Never has that been productive.
- Being scattered. Start and stick to a routine.
- Not acting on possibilities in the now.
- Aim for perfection. You get better at presenting yourself. You will never be perfect at it.
- Caving to fear. You might assume fear insulates you from danger. Fear is the danger.
How to break the 10 habits of ineffective job searchers? Simply surrender to the reality that they aren't working. End of story. You try something else.
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