Social Leverage: The Key to Finding a Job
http://www.careerfeed.net/articles/11487/1/Social-Leverage-The-Key-to-Finding-a-Job/Page1.html
John Berling Hardy
John Berling Hardy is a sought after business consultant, author, speaker and originator of "The Hidden Game"; a strategic plan to increase the success of your personal and professional life. To learn more about John and to download his free ebooks, visit http://www.johnberlinghardy.com By John Berling Hardy
Published on 01/21/2010
You need a job. You need to persuade someone to give you a job. As blunt and simplistic as that sounds, the situation is that simple.
You need a job. You need to persuade someone to give you a job. As blunt and simplistic as that sounds, the situation is that simple.
One of the most daunting challenges any of us are likely to face is looking for a job in midlife. Just at the time when we thought we would be settled, and have our life in order, we are thrust into the job market.
The first thing you are likely to experience when this happens is the Rip Van Winkle effect. Having been in your routine for decades, nicely insulated from the rest of reality, you were oblivious to the passage of time. All of a sudden you wake up in the 21st century. Life has changed. Technology has moved forward by leaps and bounds. You feel like a dinosaur.
This is the bad news! The good news is that while the outer world may change, human nature has not changed since the beginning of time. People are people, and our ability to get along with others is the key determinant of our success.
In the 1930s, at the peak of the depression, Dale Carnegie wrote his famous work How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book is as a valid today as it was then. This should not really come as any surprise since the times we live and are remarkably similar those when the book was written. In my mind, the master key to human relations is something I call social leverage.
In life, as in sports, you win at the game by creating leverage. with leverage, you have a base to build from, time works in your favour, success becomes inevitable. Without it you are always starting from scratch, hoping for some lucky break. Placing this in the context of looking for work, even before we make our pitch, the first thing we have to do is get people to listen to our pitch.
Too often we make the mistake of pitching to a cold audience. We are forever telling our story to people who are not really that interested. So then how do we get people to listen to us? The way most of us go about it is by getting them to believe that we know what we're talking about. This we do by talking at length about our training, education, and experience.
Unfortunately, most of us are emotionally rather than rationally motivated. We tend to believe the people we like. It makes no sense but that is the way it is. No one likes the smartest guy in the room. so very often the more successful we are at convincing our audience of our competence, the less likely we are to get them to choose us above all the other candidates. So then how do we get people to like us?
People like other people for two main reasons. Firstly, because they find them similar and can thus relate to them. Secondly, because they like them. Dale Carnegie made making the other feel important his cardinal rule of human relations. So is it not ironic, when you look around with so many people being either out of work or seriously worried about losing their jobs these days, so few follow this basic edict. If after reading this you do nothing else, change nothing other than start make a conscious effort to show genuine interest in people, your chances of finding work will greatly increase immediately. And who knows you might even find what they have to say interesting.
What do you have to lose, give it a try. Give it a try today!
One of the most daunting challenges any of us are likely to face is looking for a job in midlife. Just at the time when we thought we would be settled, and have our life in order, we are thrust into the job market.
The first thing you are likely to experience when this happens is the Rip Van Winkle effect. Having been in your routine for decades, nicely insulated from the rest of reality, you were oblivious to the passage of time. All of a sudden you wake up in the 21st century. Life has changed. Technology has moved forward by leaps and bounds. You feel like a dinosaur.
This is the bad news! The good news is that while the outer world may change, human nature has not changed since the beginning of time. People are people, and our ability to get along with others is the key determinant of our success.
In the 1930s, at the peak of the depression, Dale Carnegie wrote his famous work How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book is as a valid today as it was then. This should not really come as any surprise since the times we live and are remarkably similar those when the book was written. In my mind, the master key to human relations is something I call social leverage.
In life, as in sports, you win at the game by creating leverage. with leverage, you have a base to build from, time works in your favour, success becomes inevitable. Without it you are always starting from scratch, hoping for some lucky break. Placing this in the context of looking for work, even before we make our pitch, the first thing we have to do is get people to listen to our pitch.
Too often we make the mistake of pitching to a cold audience. We are forever telling our story to people who are not really that interested. So then how do we get people to listen to us? The way most of us go about it is by getting them to believe that we know what we're talking about. This we do by talking at length about our training, education, and experience.
Unfortunately, most of us are emotionally rather than rationally motivated. We tend to believe the people we like. It makes no sense but that is the way it is. No one likes the smartest guy in the room. so very often the more successful we are at convincing our audience of our competence, the less likely we are to get them to choose us above all the other candidates. So then how do we get people to like us?
People like other people for two main reasons. Firstly, because they find them similar and can thus relate to them. Secondly, because they like them. Dale Carnegie made making the other feel important his cardinal rule of human relations. So is it not ironic, when you look around with so many people being either out of work or seriously worried about losing their jobs these days, so few follow this basic edict. If after reading this you do nothing else, change nothing other than start make a conscious effort to show genuine interest in people, your chances of finding work will greatly increase immediately. And who knows you might even find what they have to say interesting.
What do you have to lose, give it a try. Give it a try today!