The Inner Game of the Job Search

A few weeks ago, I did a couple of posts about women in their 50s having a tough time finding a job. There are of course puh-lenty of external factors: society’s view of older women, technology advances driving rapid change in how one conducts a job search, and a recession.

But, there is also the internal game that has to do with how confident we are within ourselves and the kinds of unconscious messages we send based on the stories we believe about ourselves. If I lack confidence in myself, that is likely to show up in subtle and not so subtle ways my job interviews. And, the rest of my life as well, but that is another story.

That’s the unfortunate thing…we believe we mask these things so well. Or, perhaps, we aren’t trying to hide them because we are unaware of them. But the truth is they are usually quite visible to others.

Rats! What’s a girl to do??

This week, I’ve engaged in a conversation about the Inner Game of the Job Search with Nancy Oelklaus, a coach and author of Journey from Head to Heart: Living and Working Authentically. It has been an ongoing conversation that continues in the Forums on WomenBloom.

We are talking about ways to surface these internal limiting beliefs that get in our way as well as a few strategies for dealing with them.

Job searching is challenging enough without us stumbling over ourselves.