5 essences to help you stay motivated during your job search
4. Learn from your struggles, reward yourself for your achievements.
How are you doing with your job search? Be frank with yourself about the question and use your experience for the future.
When you achieve a goal, ask yourself: what has helped me to achieve the goal? Which strategy worked? What type of tasks do I enjoy? What helps me remain motivated? Add more of those things to your tasklist for the next month.
If you do not achieve some of your goals, ask yourself what has prevented you from that. Was your plan unrealistic? Did you have a problem keeping motivated and following your plan? Have the strategies you had chosen failed? Think what you could do differently next month. Consider consulting a professional, if you feel stuck.
What else usually helps?
Make your days diverse. Instead of working on the same task for the whole week, try working on several different tasks in parallel – every day for a while, or every day of a week on a different task. It will make your job search period more diverse and fun.
Try to combine strategies and activities that are very different from each other. For example, if one activity is done using your computer and the internet, plan something else that involves going out and meeting people.
Also try to find ways to include your favourite activities in your job search work. This strategy can be very motivating. See the examples below and then create your own for your next working plan.
Example 1:
Do you like meeting people or doing sports? Think how you could combine this with progressing in your job search.
For example, ask your friends to introduce you to their friends who know something about the professional area you would like to work in. Be open about why you want to meet them (to avoid making them feel exploited), but you can still meet them informally. For example, you could play tennis together or go for a coffee, and at the same time get interesting information about work in that field or typical requirements for candidates.
Example 2
Would you like to improve a skill, but you are not keen on taking a training course? Develop this skill while doing your hobby.
If you want to improve your French, find a French native speaker (in person or via the internet) who has similar hobbies to you, tell her or him you would like to practise the language and meet for a drink and/or a chat, speaking French only. You can look up the so-called tandem method on the internet, too.
If you want to get better at organizing events, choose any hobby you love doing (Frisbee, cooking, styling hair, skating) and organize a small gathering around it: a competition, party, afternoon for families with kids etc.). You can do it for friends, another option would be to do it for a charity or a non-profit organization. Like this you can practise organizing, marketing, catering, whatever you wish to improve. Don´t forget to present your success at a job interview as soon as they ask you about experience with organizing. Yes, it counts!
Learn to enjoy every achievement. Give yourself small rewards for goals you achieve: meeting with a friend, devoting an evening to a favourite book, planning a nice trip. Be gentle with yourself, and keep in mind that a job search demands time, but finding a job is still just one milestone in your working life, and while working towards it, you can also meet other needs and goals.
