Conscious awareness and your job hunt -

Conscious awareness and your job hunt - If you are looking for a job, do you feel stuck and like you dont know what to do next? You are not alone, as most job seekers I know dont intend to become professional job hunters and dont feel confident that they can move from step to step, knowing exactly what they are doing. Last month, I attended a workshop with Havi Brooks. She specializes in what she calls Destuckification: working through the stucknesses that get in the way of doing your thing. Havi teaches about how to get unstuck via a mind-body/yoga practice called Shiva Nata. She calls it brain training that looks like martial arts and acts like drugs-that-make-you-smart-and-hot. Even Havi calls is wacky, and it is nothing if not a bit unconventional teaching your brain to act differently by focusing on patterns, deconstructing them and building new ones!   (Im no expert on the subject, having just starting studying it, but I think that gets at the basics for our purposes! Read Havis blog and explore her site for more details.) So, what does this all have to do with you the job seeker who is stuck and cant figure out the next step? One of the big things we discussed at the workshop was how important it is to bring conscious awareness to patterns in order to challenge and change them. Really, thats just a fancy way of saying that you need to notice whats happening and point it out to yourself to impact a change. So, instead of wallowing in self-doubt and avoiding your job search like the plague, stop and think, Hmmmhow am I feeling when I think of my job hunt? Does it give you a stomach ache? Your head hurts? You panic? You know its important and urgent, but instead of working on it, you decide to take a bike ride instead? Or, eat a plate of cookies? Every time you think of your job hunt and you go numb and panic, try to be aware of the pattern. Look at   your intellectual response I should do this now. I feel guilty if I dont work on my search. Examine the physical response I cant breathe. I get a pain in my neck. Stress creeps into my shoulders. Focus on what you do I clean the house instead. Or eat chocolate. Or watch TV. Then, think about little steps you could do differently. If, when you think of sitting down to your search and start getting stressed, you took a moment to be really aware of all that is going into those feelings, you may have a much better chance of jumping over the hurdle and making a change step-by-step. Maybe instead of cleaning the whole house, or eating the whole box of cookies, you decide that youll JUST clean one bathroom or eat two cookies and then do 30 minutes of job searching. Im no expert in teaching about conscious awareness, and I want to make it clear that is my interpretation of when of the things I learned from Havi, but I thought it was too important of a concept NOT to share the idea. Take some time to be aware of what is going on with you you may be surprised by the results! Would it help to have a coach on your side? Learn more about how I can help you overcome your stuck by teaching you what you need to know to propel your search forward! photo by dyanna