Tim's Career Tips ... The Power of 'Believe!'

It's a real pleasure to be joining the growing team of bloggers here at Merrimack Patch. A topic of interest to many of us in Merrimack is employment – finding and winning a new job, starting a new career, or launching a new business. In the upcoming weeks, I'll be sharing with you tips and ideas that may help you improve your job search, find a new career direction, interview better, network more effectively and compete in a very tough job market. If you have a specific question that you would like me to answer just add it as a comment and I'll do my best to cover it in an upcoming post. To get us started, do you know about the power of "Believe"? -- Tim

The Power of Believe

I'm always impressed with the power of "Believe." Case in point, recently I had the real pleasure of meeting with a young woman in Nashua, Kristen Duval, who launched a new jobseekers website ForRealJobs.com. She had the great business idea of creating a new, localized job search portal featuring quality employers offering "real" jobs, not to mention donating a portion of her proceeds to charity. What most impressed me, however, is that Kristen really believes that she will find a way to meet the challenges of building a new business, and seems to be doing so every day. In other words, if she doesn't know how to do something, she figures it out or she learns what she needs. I suspect Kristen is going to be very successful ... partly because she believes she will.

There is a theory called "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" or "The Pygmalion Effect." Studied over many decades, researchers have proved that people who act like they believe they can succeed at something, typically tend to do so ... and those that don't, won't. Clearly success isn't that simple, but it turns out that a "success attitude" plays an important, even critical role.

Employers want to hire people who act like they believe!

So what does all this mean if you're interviewing for a job? 

Fact: Employers want to hire people who act like they believe they will meet the challenges of a job – who can learn something if they don't know it or will find a way to be successful at it. That means acting confidently, speaking confidently and thinking confidently. If you were the one hiring someone, isn't this what you'd want to see in an applicant? It also might just be the one thing that sets you apart from the crowd!

And if you have not already done so, stop by ForRealJobs.com to see what a believer is doing ... and you just might find a great job there as well!