The Danger Of Limiting Beliefs
Guest contributor: Caroline Ceniza-Levine is co-founder of SixFigureStart (www.sixfigurestart.com), a career & life coaching firm that specializes in working with Gen Y young professionals. Formerly in corporate HR and retained search, Caroline most recently headed campus recruiting for Time Inc and has also recruited for Accenture, Citibank, Disney ABC, and others.
The other week I coached an experienced operations manager who had written to me that one of the reasons he felt his job search had stalled was because he was a US immigrant rather than native-born. When you believe you have a liability in your background, you need to examine it to see if it indeed may hamper your search and more importantly, what you can then do about it. In this specific case, I wanted to know: if this person needed to be sponsored (in a tight market that may be an obstacle); if this person was fluent in English (perhaps his communication skills were hampering his interviews); and if his attitude was negative (he might have been wearing this immigrant chip on his shoulder for all the employers to see). As it turned out, he didn’t need to be sponsored, his English was fine, and his attitude considerably lightened after some life coaching around his limiting belief that being an immigrant was a bad thing. I challenged him on this, and we came to an understanding that rather than being a liability, the very thing that he felt limited him was actually an asset.
Career/Life coaching lesson: Limiting beliefs can harm your job search, so get rid of them quick
The danger of limiting beliefs is that they color your entire search. You may avoid certain prospective employers that might actually be good targets to go after. You may have other weaknesses in the search that you don’t see because you are fixated on something else. You may come off as negative or anxious or desperate because you are overly focused on the downside.
If you feel you have a liability, you absolutely need to look at it, just as I did for this client above. I didn’t just assume that there wasn’t a problem – if he felt there was a problem, then maybe there was something there. But there very well might not be a problem. You might just need to shift or reframe your thinking and expand your current limiting belief. So take an objective audit of what you think is wrong in your search but be prepared to change your mind and your strategy if it is you that is wrong in believing this.
(Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates seeking entry-level jobs and other career opportunities)
Source: Sandbox Advisors, Recruiting Blogswap; Topics: Life coaching
