Category: Careers

How to Apply Perfectionism to Your Career and Life

In business school, if not earlier, we've all learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs, and we've been told that what's called "self-actualization" is the highest, or rather, most pressing human need, on which all other "lower" needs serve as only building blocks. While Maslow's theories have earned their fair share of criticism, I'd like to defer instead to a broader set of ideas in moral philosophy collectively called "perfectionism" and then discuss how these ideas can be successfully implemented in your daily life as well as your career.

I'm sure we've heard our friends, family, or perhaps even ourselves referred to as "perfectionists," with little thought to what that may actually mean. The image of the perfectionist in modern society is often marred with a hint of criticism. We think of perfectionists as compulsive, almost neurotic. This image should perhaps be more rightfully attributed to a person who struggles with some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and it is not the image to which I am referring when I say "perfectionist." To give you a basic idea of perfectionism as a philosophy, Wikipedia offers the following: "…perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being." Sounds tough, huh? Impossible, you say? Well of course, attaining perfection is certainly not possible in one lifetime, but a philosophical perfectionist completely understands this. The key word here is "persistence."

Of course, what counts as perfection will inevitably be based on what an individual values most, but in terms of your career, perfectionism is simply striving to do your very best, every single day, no matter what the size or import of your task at hand is. Surely, the bigger picture does matter, but the successful completion of the optimal life is all in the small things. The devil may be in details, as they say, but so is god, the personal god in each of us that longs to order our lives by standards of excellence.

Although it can be difficult to appreciate the necessity of doing the small things right, I usually defer to my favorite sport, golf. When I focused too much on the outcome of the total score—I'd constantly be adding up figures as I'd step up to the tee box—I'd get hung up on the big picture, and my final score would suffer. However, one day I tried something different. I focused on only each single shot, and told myself that this one shot was the only shot I'd have to take. When I placed greater importance on individual shots—on the small things—I noticed I was doing better on each hole. Still I didn't add up scores. I just marked the number of shots per hole, threw the scorecard back in my bag and moved on. By the time I finished up on the eighteenth hole, I had tallied the totals and—not kidding—it was the best round in my life.

In the final analysis, perfectionism is not an end goal, but a state of mind. If you strive for a systematic approach to perfection, one that keeps in mind the details with a steady, reasonable approach to the big picture, then you will find that unexpected aspects of your life—career and personal—will begin to fall into place as if by magic.

Guest Expert:

Angela Martin writes on job search topics at Job Search Websites. She welcomes your comments at her email angela.martin77@gmail.com.

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10 Confidence Boosting Tips for Interviewers

Job interviews can be intimidating and nerve-racking in a crippling way. But allowing your personality to show through –even if you’re faking it—is the only way to take charge of your interview and have any hope of landing the job. No matter what kinds of qualifications you have, employers want to sit down with an individual who can conduct themselves professionally and charismatically, and if you can’t even hold yourself together to keep up your side of the conversation, you may go unnoticed altogether. Instead, prepare to manage the interview session in a way that puts you in control and limits any awkward moments. Here are 10 confidence-boosting tips to help you do just that.

1. Understand the importance of an in-person interview. An interview is your opportunity to brand yourself in front of your potential boss and really lay down the line for how you’d like to be treated in the office. Don’t come across as cocky, but understand that acting meek and embarrassed during your interview will immediately make your boss feel like he or she can get away with dictating your every move.

2. Smile the very first chance you get. A warm, natural smile exudes confidence and sets the tone for a professional but friendly encounter.

3. Practice your handshake. A good handshake can be exhilarating and empowering, but an awkward fumbling or weak handshake dashes any hope of a dazzling first impression. Practice ahead of time so that it comes naturally.

4. Research the company. Be ready to talk about the company and position you’re applying for by doing a little web research ahead of time.

5. Come with questions. If you have a list of questions to ask, you’ll be ready in case of an awkward silence.

6. Realize that they probably already like you. The very fact that you’re even sitting in the interview seat means that someone liked your resume and believed you’d make a good candidate for the job.

7. Dress professionally. Wear something that makes you look professional and neat but is still comfortable. Something that’s too tight or too bulky will make you feel uneasy. A good tip is to wear something you’ve already worn few times, so you won’t be caught off guard by any wardrobe malfunctions.

8. Sit up straight. You want to appear alert and confident, so sit upright in your chair with your hands folded. Leaning back to far will make you appear arrogant, while hunching over will make you seem nervous and self-conscious.

9. Value the opportunity for what it is. The more you value the interview as its own learning experience and opportunity to practice your interviewing your skills, the more natural and confident you’ll feel asking questions and talking with the interviewer.

10. Review your resume. You may take it for granted that you know everything on your resume since it’s your experience, but understand that all the questions your interviewer will have for you are going to come directly from that resume. Take a few minutes to look over the skills and experience you’ll be expected to discuss.

Guest Expert:

Rose Jensen writes about the best online universities. She welcomes your feedback at Rose.Jensen28@yahoo.com.

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I Got a Contact Name. Now What???

People often tell me they were on LinkedIn, or went to a networking group, or met someone when they were out-and-about and got a name of a potential contact for their job search, but don’t know how to reach them.

“What good is the name without their phone number or email address? It doesn’t do me much good if I can’t connect with them!”

It’s great if you are given a phone number and/or email address with a name, however, with a little creativity and initiative you can certainly find other ways to get in touch. Here are some ideas and techniques to make those connections:

~ Call the main number! Often people forget the simplest and most obvious solution to getting in touch with a new contact… call the company and ask for them! It’s ideal to have a direct-line phone number to the person you’re trying to reach. However, if you don’t, it’s generally pretty easy to find the main company phone number (either from their website online, a phone book, or calling 411), call and ask for the person by name. Generally a phone receptionist won’t put you through to anyone if you ask a general question like “May I speak to the Accounting Manager, please?” However, if you ask for someone by name, they will always put you through. Even if the person works at another company facility than the one you are calling, they generally have the overall company directory and can put you directly through to that person. Call and ask for them by name.

Additionally, if you call after business hours, many companies have an automated answering system with a company directory that will often tell you the extension of the person you are trying to connect to. That’s often a great way to gain the direct-line number of someone.

~ Google! As with so many things… Google is a tremendous resource to find contact information. More than half of the time I'm trying to find contact information, I’m able to do it by searching their name and company name through Google. If, for example, I’m trying to find John Mansky at XYZ Company… I simply search: "John Mansky” “XYZ Company”

I make sure to put his name in quotes to avoid unwanted results like John Smith and Bill Mansky

Scanning down the list of results, I often find some document or site that has their phone number and/or email address. If there are too many results, I may try to narrow the search by trying his name with their web domain. For example: “John Mansky” “xyzco.com”

Their email address is likely to include their web domain, so if the address is “john.mansky@xyzco.com” the search is likely to find it.

If that doesn’t work, I may do a search to find ANY email address at that company to discover what their standard email format is. For example, I may simply search:
email “xyzco.com”

If someone else’s email address pops up that is in a format of 'firstname.lastname@xyzco.com’, for example, I know it’s a very high likelihood that my contact’s address is in the same format. If it’s wrong, their email server will simply bounce the email back to me and no one is the wiser. If it does bounce back, I simply try other common formats like:

firstinitiallastname@xyzco.com
firstname_lastname@xyzco.com
firstinitial_lastname@xyzco.com
…or other combinations.

~ Check emails4corporations! Another great resource to help you find the standard email format for the company where your contact is employed is emails4corporations. Someone has compiled a tremendous list of standard email formats for companies all over the country.

You can find them at: http://sites.google.com/site/emails4corporations

Enter the company name in the search box at the top right corner of the homepage and it will show you the company, email format, address, and phone number. It doesn’t cover every company, however, is a great help if yours is included.

~ Try JigSaw.com! JigSaw.com is probably the worlds largest ‘Rolodex’. It includes the business card information of millions of people. It rarely lets me down and is the last resort resource for me when trying to find someone’s contact information. You can either use it by paying for the service, or for free on a give & take point system. So it take a little money or some effort on your part. However, for me as a recruiter, or you as a job seeker, I believe it’s a very worthwhile resource when you need contact information you can’t seem to find anywhere else.

~ Paid Services. Certainly there are a number of additional paid services (Spoke, ZoomInfo, and others) available online that can provide the information for you as well, however, I’m generally a big fan of “FREE”. It’s pretty rare that I can’t find someone’s contact information through one of the means listed above. Try those and then depending on how badly you need it, a paid service may be worth it.

Generally, I don’t recommend contacting someone directly through LinkedIn’s system. Many people receive a lot of communications through there and have become conditioned to treat them like Spam. It’s generally best to reach them by phone, a professional voicemail, or email first. However, if none of those works, as a last resort, you have nothing to lose by trying the LinkedIn contact system as well.

As always, make sure your communication is professional, well prepared, and succinct!
You can gain more help with that by reading Keys to a great email in your job search! or What to do in an effective networking call!

Be creative, take the initiative, and find the way to connect with those job search contacts!

Author:

Harry Urschel has over 20 years experience as a technology recruiter in Minnesota. He currently operates as e-Executives, writes a blog for Job Seekers called The Wise Job Search, and can be found on Twitter as @eExecutives.

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Is Social Media Killing Authenticity?

By Jonathan Fields, Awake @ the Wheel

Every social media rulebook hails authenticity as the bastion of success in the world of digital interdigitation.

Yet, I have to confess something…

I wonder if the more ubiquitous social media becomes, the harder is to bear the burden of being authentic IRL (in real life)?

Because, with increasing frequency, you’re not the only person reporting on your every move anymore. When I’m at an event, a gathering, meeting or just having lunch, I’ve come to learn that every word out of my mouth is fair game for social media attribution and distribution. Maybe by the person on the other side of the conversation. Maybe by the person at the table behind me. Or, just a passerby.

And, that freaks me out a bit. Because when I put the message out there, I give it context.

But, when others translate it to social media, especially media that only allows for cherry-picked snippets…who knows?

This used to happen when I was in mainstream media on a fairly regular basis. I’d be interviewed for 30 minutes, then a few sentences or seconds would make it into the interview or segment. I learned, very quickly, how easily it is to be misquoted or have a snippet of a thought quoted out of context, with the meaning dramatically altered.

So, I trained myself to be increasingly politic when doing media interviews.

I was what I’d call cautiously authentic. Tactically transparent.

I said what was on my mind, but always added in a few beats before my thoughts left my mouth to try to frame it in a way that closed as many doors as possible to misquoting and mis-contextualizing. In fact, I began to encourage almost all media, save live TV or radio, do interviews by email, so I could craft and frame the message exactly as I wanted it to appear…and create a paper trail of the full conversation.

In my early days of blogging, I didn’t feel this same need to live-edit my speech.

There was a sense of freedom, of respect, of the desire to want to treat each other right. And, without the time or space limitations of traditional media, there was the ability to include the entire conversation. To keep the context in.

But, I wonder if that’s changed over the last few years, fueled by:

(1) the mass-adoption of social and communications tools that force aggressive truncation of messages, like twitter, texting, wall updates and beyond, (2) the near-pervasive expectation that not only anything you share in social media, but anything you say or do in person, even in real-life public or private, is fair game for publication and distribution,(3) a widespread sense of a lack of the need to provide context, edit, vet information or be accountable, and. (4) mobile access to tools that make sharing information as easy as hitting a few buttons on your cellphone.

I was recently at a conference and said something to a friend that, without knowing our relationship, could easily have been taken as biting or even a bit warped. But, between us, we were just messing around, building on a history we had, it was like a series of inside jokes. Someone behind us, though, overheard the exchange then turned and said, “dude, that’s going on twitter.”

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

I’m totally cool having what I said shared, as long as it’s framed in the nature of my relationship with the other person and the broader context of the joking conversation. Sadly, the chance of that happening in 140 characters is near zilch.

And, that realization has led most folks to now agree that when it comes to social media, you’ve got to be willing to lose control over your message. But, the corollary to that is, you’ve also got to be willing to exert more control over how that message leaves your mouth to give it the best chance of being framed and shared in the way that fully expresses your intent…even if your preference is that it not be shared at all.

Which means I’m left back in my days of live-censoring my conversations, for fear of being miscontextualized, but this time, it’s not just about my conversation with a single reporter…

It’s about every word out of my mouth, because EVERYONE’S now a reporter!

This growing knowledge has slowly drawn me from being fairly free, transparent and authentic with how interact not only online, but out in public or on the phone and in email to being more cautiously authentic. Tactically transparent. It’s led me to include the line, “The content of this e-mail is off the record, unless agreed otherwise” at the end of every email I send.

And it’s set that line up as an automatic cognitive filter in my conversations. Yes, even friendly, face-to-face conversations.

Because, you just don’t how, when, where or why snippets might end up online and out of context.

So, in this odd way, I’ve been feeling a growing sense that the mass adoption of social reporting technology is increasingly encouraging me to stifle, rather than embrace a sense of complete authenticity.

Not because I have major skeletons in my closet that are freaking me out (note to self, buy more nails for that closet!). But, because, it’s become so much easier to become a target of misattribution, misquoting and mis-contextualizing when every person in every direction is potentially reporting on your every word and move (and, trust me, I’m really not that interesting).

Especially when the ADDention span and character limits of the medium increasingly encourage speed over depth and breath.

And, yes, I get that I now also have my own bully pulpit upon which I can fire back.

But, honestly…that’s just not how I want to spend my time.

Curious, anybody else feeling this?

Or, is it all in my head?

 

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