Alpha for heightened creativity and deep relaxationTo ENJOY GOOD HEALTH, TO BRING TRUE HAPPINESS TO ONE’S FAMILY, TO BRING PEACE TO ALL, ONE MUST FIRST DISCIPLINE AND CONTROL ONE’S OWN MIND. IF A MAN CAN CONTROL HIS MIND HE CAN FIND THE WAY TO ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ALL WISDOM AND VIRTUE WILL NATURALLY COME TO HIM.
—BUDDHA1
Looking for a job is a tough thing: true or false? True if you believe it is, and false if you have the right tools to give you certainty and confidence. Leaving a good job to pursue your dream, or losing a stable, long-term job can present some psychological challenges. Feelings of rejection, failure, and fear creep into everyone’s psyche at times and can stop you from moving forward, and will remain there unless you know how to turn those feelings around.
Armed with the right tools, you can get the job you want regardless of whether you are employed and want something better or you are unemployed and desperate. First, you need to overcome the things that are holding you back. Perhaps it is a loss of confidence or negativity that is holding you back and instead you need to embrace new horizons. Tools that unravel the mysteries of the human brain have come a long way throughout the years, to the point where today’s technology can be used to enhance one’s performance. You can use very affordable technology breakthroughs to gain an advantage over your competition, and to get your brain truly reprogrammed and motivated to take on the stress and challenges of job search. It is not Star Trek; the technology exists and is readily available to you, as you will soon find out.
In my work as a job-search consultant, I have observed that a loss of a job is often accompanied by a temporary or persistent loss in confidence that affects the individual’s ability to land a job. To illustrate this fact, here is a typical story I have heard many times repeated to me through my work as a job-search consultant.
You have worked at a company for more than 10 years. The new young guy you hate is retained by your organization, and you are shown the exit. As you insist on heading back to your desk to get your stuff, the management team tells you they will pack up your personal belongings and send them to you at home. You are now outraged and start thinking, “What a bunch of nasty jerks. They won’t even let me get my coffee or say goodbye to my colleagues and friends. I gave them 10 years of my dedicated blood and sweat and just yesterday I stayed late to make sure the ‘critical job’ was done. Now they put me out like a piece of garbage! I am kicked out to the curb and left totally exposed to the elements. I feel raw and naked. I feel humiliated and worthless. What the hell am I going to do?”
You know who I am talking about. Yes, you! You are the big, tough, grown men and women who look and act like Grizzly Adams (okay, maybe not the women!) that burst into tears when speaking with me on the phone, and then hang up. Eventually you call back really angry, then you call back really depressed and ask for job search advice. I give you tips and strategies that are proven to work in a real-life laboratory. You hear but you do not listen. You say you want to try it the “Internet way” and you say, “I know how to do this. I have a resume, I know about the job boards, and I have contacts.” So off you go with what you think is the new “get a job by the Internet” thing—the “click and send” method of sending your resume to as many jobs as you can find on the Web, as well as sending your resume to your contacts.
You think to yourself, “Wow! It’s so easy. Isn’t technology great?” and you start plastering your resume to adverts on the Internet using the old “click and send” technique. You get lucky and you get an interview. You are happy. Then you remember INTERVIEW—and you think, “Holy heart failure, Batman.”
Let’s face it: Interviews are stressful, especially if you are not prepared! You will have to share your faults and weaknesses with someone you only met 10 minutes ago. It is akin to being stripped down naked in front of a stranger.
This is usually how the interview unwinds: The interviewers’ faces are expressionless, and they look at their watches incessantly. They ask you very insightful questions, such as “If you were a vegetable, which vegetable would you be?” You really want to answer, “I would be a real big frozen carrot so I could stick it up your you-know-what, buddy!” Instead, you answer meekly, as they write furiously with their eyes bulging, hemming and hawing and hanging on every word. You think to yourself, “They are acting like I am revealing the secrets to Tesla’s Death Ray.” You answer, “To tell you the truth, I have never, ever thought about it.” You wonder if this is the right answer, as you now start sweating. Vegetable—what vegetable? You are told the standard: They will get back to you next week. As you walk to your car you think, “All those interview books I read didn’t have anything on being a vegetable. Go figure. What vegetable?”
Once you recover from the interview ordeal, the waiting starts. You sit around waiting on pins and needles, hoping to get a call back. Every time the phone rings, you jump out of your skin. The call does come, not after a week, but after three weeks, with the following news: “Thank you. We really liked you but we hired someone that meets our needs better.”
You interpret their message to mean, “Thanks for coming in, but we don’t hire unemployed losers who cannot figure out which vegetable they are.” Your confidence gets ratcheted down one extra notch.
You think your “click and send” approach worked. Why abandon it now? You keep plugging away, with diminishing returns, exemplified by your dwindling bank account and level of confidence. Many of you have been at this “click and send,” one-armed-bandit game for months, some even for years, with nothing to show for your efforts.
You say, “Okay, Paul, you nailed me! Thanks for making me relive those moments. What’s your point?” You need a new game plan. The problem is you are taking an old playbook into a new fight. Job search has changed. Advances in technology make the way jobs are found and filled online distinctly different from just a few years ago. Before you move on you must first adjust your attitude or you will continue to fail miserably.
In counseling professionals who are involved in changing jobs, I have observed that a continuous lack of progress and repeated rejection lead to a massive loss of confidence. As if an unemployed professional does not have enough to contend with already, employers admit to favoring employed candidates. Being unemployed carries a stigma. Newell Rubbermaid’s Mike Rickheim said, “The best candidate in a hiring manager’s eyes is the one who doesn’t have to make a move. They are and have been gainfully employed and there is another employer who really wants to keep them....”2
Your interpretation is that all the events are piling up and pointing to the deck being stacked against you. You are convinced that losing your job hurts, even though it is one you did not like. The anxiety builds and builds until it is palpable.
For many of you, your last job was not even a job you could really claim to like, yet you are still very upset about losing a less-than-ideal job. Why? Because you believe losing your job is a reflection on you as a person—that your job is your identity; it is who you are. You measure your worth based on being employed and the job you do. By giving all your personal power and identity to your employer, you end up feeling powerless and helpless when you lose your job. If this is the situation you find yourself in now, you need to change your attitude, and quickly. But how? You have read all the self-help books, you have tried the self-help stuff, but still you are back where you started. Get ready for something totally different.
I have spent years studying the self-help and motivational gurus; the message they give you is to change your language and be positive, and this will change your attitude and result in changing your outcome. In other words, by changing your language and your attitude you change what you focus on and attract. My experience has shown that you can pump someone up with all these techniques, but left to their own devices and without constant repetitive coaching or very rigorous self-disciplined self-talk, the professionals I have coached fall back into self-defeating and limiting self-talk patterns very quickly. If you agree with this simple statement, “What you say to yourself controls the way you feel and how you feel controls the way you act,” then it is imperative to find a way to adjust the way you feel about yourself that does not require a destructive behavior like alcohol, drugs, or food, or takes a lot of money, time, or effort.
I went in a relentless search for something better, and I found it. I discovered that applying the best peak performance technology to job search works. How do I know? I have found that it has changed my life positively and the professionals I coach swear by it also. The criteria that I set were to find a technology that was easy to implement, and required very little money and virtually no effort. “No effort” was a must, because what I found in coaching is that people/professionals want to change but they do not want to be uncomfortable. In other words, if there is any pain involved in changing, most professionals will not stick with it. What I am about to reveal may be for some the most important discovery in this book and the most life-changing discovery they will ever make.
Throughout the last few years I have been prescribing this revolutionary technology to my clients with outstanding results. As I said, job loss can have tremendous negative effects on one’s psyche, to the point of very tragic outcomes, and this technology has proven to be a godsend for my clients. What is it, you ask?
It is brainwave therapy! It is the simplest, most affordable way I have found to tap into your higher potential and unleash your power to think, create, and heal, and at the same time bring about real, lasting change. When I say affordable, I mean it. It costs only a one-time investment of about $10 to get great results. That is all you need to invest—really! The great thing about brainwave technology is there’s no training necessary and no big learning curve, no sweat, no effort—and you don’t need to spend tons of money or buy expensive equipment. It is really simple and revolutionary—almost sounds too good to be true, right? Well, let me tell you: I was skeptical at first, but I have seen it work time and time again, and it only takes 30 minutes a day.
This is how easy it is: Find a quiet place, sit down or lie down, and listen to your iPod or MP3 player to bring about massive positive change. I know what you are thinking: All the money you have spent has gone to waste since now you can throw away thousands of dollars’ worth of books and tapes, stop going to those self-help conferences, and instead spend 30 minutes a day chilling and relaxing. Without getting into the medical research in depth, it is all about balancing your brain. A balanced brain enhances your ability to think, learn, create, and recall. Your perception expands, your memory improves, and you can focus more easily, which leads to much better sleep and makes you much more resilient to stress. More importantly, the brainwave enhancement brings freedom from fear, worry, and even addictions that have stood in the way of getting what you want out of life, including the job you really want, as well as experiencing more fulfilment and joy. The professionals I have turned on to brainwave technology tell me they feel better and do better when taking on new challenges, especially, they say, when faced with stressful situations such as those experienced in job search: talking to strangers, selling themselves, going on interviews, and when asking for a higher salary than they normally would. Most importantly, they tell me that they believe it gave them confidence, the ability to visualize exactly what they wanted, and the energy they needed to land their new job. I know it works for me, and through my practice I know it works for others.
The science behind brainwave therapy was first discovered by biophysicist Gerald Oster at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. What is it? It is really quite simple, from the user’s standpoint. Brainwave therapy sends pure, precisely tuned sound waves of different frequencies to your brain via stereo headphones. His research showed that by regulating what sounds are sent to each ear, a “binaural beat” is interpreted by the brain. These precisely tuned sound frequencies delivered to the brain through headphones drive brain activity into high-level states of mind. The type of sound wave delivered engenders different brain states known as:
Alpha for heightened creativity and deep relaxation
Beta for high focus and concentration
Theta for meditation, insight, and memory
Delta for deep sleep and healing
Gamma to increase cognition and improve IQ
Scientists discovered that within minutes of listening, the sound frequencies start to balance the left and right hemispheres of your brain. This balancing creates a remarkable state called hemispheric synchronization. This hemispheric synchronization drives the electrical activity of your brain into powerful states that are normally unattainable. Scientists have noted that this rare phenomenon was accompanied by flashes of creative insight, euphoria, intensely focused concentration, deep calm, and enhanced learning abilities. These are the states I want you to tap into by changing your internal programming so you can get on track to getting the job you really want. This technology is clinically proven to work.
This technology is often called guided meditation. The problem with traditional meditation, from what I have studied, is there is a big learning curve, and it does not work for everyone; brainwave technology, on the other hand, has no learning curve, and you do not have to learn how to get “in state.” All you have to do is be receptive and let the technology put you in state. Simply let it happen. I have not met one person who has tried it and said it did not work for him or her.
Want more evidence that it works? Here are some great endorsements from clinical and medical professionals:
“After only 18 minutes of meditating with Brain Sync, we’ve seen patients reach deep levels of meditation that would normally take 18 years of practice to attain.”—Drew Pierson, PhD, biofeedback researcher3
“These programs are extremely powerful tools for producing peak performance brain states.”—Michael Hutchison, author of Megabrain: New Tools and Techniques for Brain Growth and Mind Expansion4
“...the audio technology that was instrumental to the success of my work with smokers, and work with all types of addiction and disease.”—Edward A. Taub, MD, spokesperson for the American Medical Association’s national Stop Smoking Campaign5
My team and I are working on an “Interview to Win” guided meditation that will eventually be available to the public.
I recommend that you take advantage of this technology right away. Go to www.transitiontohired.com/resources, start with downloading the audio program labeled “Must-Have Brain Wave Therapy,” and experience for yourself what I and my clients have been benefiting from for years. Remember: The great thing is it is really effortless and has tremendous lasting impact.
If you are a pessimist by nature and you do not want to change your life with brainwave technology then you must realize that it will be much harder for you to find work. Why? Most employers I know do not want to hire a sour puss. If you want to get hired, make sure to practice changing your self-talk to positive self-talk; this way you will change your attitude. To learn how to do this, an alternative resource for you is the book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman (Vintage Books, 1992). It offers many proven techniques to get you on the right track.
Now that you have another critically important tool to take on the challenges of job search, it is time to figure out what you want and what advantages you have to offer.