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This is the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love podcast. And this is episode 67, Getting Responses and Your Blind Spots. Stay tuned.
Hey there. Welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you in your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No flub here. If you want to get a six figure job you love and create real concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Hello and welcome back to another wonderful week on the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love podcast. I have so much to say today as usual. So this topic today, I’ve been wanting to do something on it for a while, I’ve had lots of thoughts floating around in my head about it. And it was inspired by somebody who I talked to on LinkedIn, I connected on LinkedIn. If you’re not connected with me on LinkedIn, go over there, connect with me. And he was saying that he was having trouble. And I was like, “Okay, so what’s going on?” Normally it’s one of two things, when people come to me and they need help. It’s either they’re not getting responses from their resume and cover letter, they can’t get anyone to talk to them or they’re getting interviews and they’re not passing the interviews at various levels.
So some people might pass the first one and then not pass after that. And then some people might get to the very last stages and then just not make it to the last offer stage. So I’ve done a lot of podcasting on the interviews and how you can hone in that process so that you get to the offer stage. And this podcast is about specifically the responses, if you’re not getting responses. And so it’s essentially about that, but it’s about more than that, I’m going to go deep in this podcast, hope you’re ready. So this is what my LinkedIn connection said to me. He said, “I’ve been networking for a year, I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs, I’ve talked to five people every month since college, so over 120 people. I’ve tried Facebook jobs, networking, everything.” And he’s coming to me and he’s super frustrated.
So there’s a few things I want to address about this, because there’s a lot of people doing this and you hear this a lot. It’s like, “I submitted 100 applications and I maybe got two responses, or I submitted 200 applications and I got nothing or 50 or whatever.” And so there’s a few things going on here. And the funny thing is that, we think that we haven’t submitted enough. As I go on with the conversation he says… because I asked for the math. So I want to get down to the math, I want to know specifically how many you’ve sent, and the more data, the better. And this is for you to keep track of. You need to know, what companies you sending them to, if people are seeing them. What are you able to control as far as sending…
I’ll get into that in a minute because I’m going to go into some tactics as to what you can do. But before that, I want to address the misconception of, we think we have to do more. We’re like, “Okay, well I guess I haven’t sent enough.” That’s what he said. I’m like, “Okay. So what do you think the problem is here?” Because without me seeing it, without me digging in and speaking to this person in person, I don’t know. So I’m just like, “Okay, so what do you think the problem is?” And he’s like, “I just haven’t sent enough, I guess.” And it’s like, well, no, there’s something going on there. It sounds like you could send 300 and nobody would respond.
If you’ve submitted 100 job applications and you haven’t gotten a single response from any of them, something is going wrong. And so the first thing is… and we think this is so basic. I proposed an article for vault.com on this, and the editor responded to me and he’s like, “This is nothing new, people know this.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine. We don’t have to do the article on this.” So I’m like, “But people don’t know this.” So we need to keep track of the data. We need to see that if we’re doing that, it’s not working. And it is literally the definition of insanity, we know this, is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Literally the same thing over and over. And so it’s not the same to keep
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trying and failing, keep trying and failing, because along the way, the thing we miss there is we need to evaluate and retry in a different way.
We need to tweak the action. And I’ve been stuck in it for a while, so I know that sometimes you’re like, “I don’t know what different action to take.” So all how to do is, do the same thing over and over. And then when that happens, you end up just compounding this effect of like, “I’ve done all these things and I’m not getting the result.” And then you get really frustrated and you’re in a really bitter, almost angry, entitled state. Like, “Somebody tell me what to do and help me, because I’ve done it all and it’s not working.” I’ve totally been there. So when someone comes to me with this problem, I know what’s going on, and that’s why I wanted to record this podcast.
So why it exists is this person has a limiting belief, they just do. So deep down, they believe something that is blocking them from getting traction. So these beliefs are stopping you from actually doing anything differently. So this person, for example, he just thinks he needs to reach out to more people and that’s the answer, but we know that that’s not. And it doesn’t just show up with this in responses, it shows up with interviews. And you go for interviews, you don’t pass them and you think, “I need to practice my stories more. I need to rehearse more. I need to get more information. I need to look at more answers. I need to be in student mode more.” But we know that if we look at the history and the pattern that still hasn’t worked. So what it is is, there’s a limiting belief. There’s a thought, there’s a belief that you have that is ruling your life.
So whenever you catch yourself expressing an opinion in thought, word or by an action, realize that you’ve just nailed the belief that is busy at work building your life. So it’ll show up in how you talk about it. It’ll be like, “Well, I guess I just haven’t done enough.” Or, there’s lots of limiting beliefs that we have, and so I’m going to get into some specific examples as far as what my clients have experienced as limiting beliefs and I want you to try and identify yours. So the first thing is knowing that you have a blind spot. And the reason why you keep getting the same results over and over, you’re doing the same thing over and over is because you have a blind spot, that’s why it’s not working. And so doing more of the same without changing it without having any new insight, isn’t going to be the answer, because the limiting beliefs have not been discovered, they have not been addressed, they have not been pointed out to you.
And so if you’re having that, if you’re doing the same thing over and over, and you’re having the same result, you have a limiting belief that you need to have pointed out and you need to be coached on it. Potentially more than one, potentially several limiting beliefs. We need to find what those are, and then you need to get coaching on them. And coaching essentially is pointing out that belief and then poking holes in it, showing you that it doesn’t work for you, showing you that it’s not going to get you the result you want no matter how much action you take. Because I mentioned on the podcast before, you can’t out act a limiting belief because your belief is the most powerful thing that you have.
So then what ends up happening when you don’t address the limiting belief, when you’re completely unaware… and most of us are walking around with these limiting beliefs completely unaware that we even have them, is you end up in this repetitive cycle of insanity. And then what I see happening a lot is people might blame the outside circumstances. They might be like, “But it’s because of the pandemic. It’s because of the market right now. It’s because of the economy. It’s because people aren’t helping me. It’s because people…” That’s a belief right there, which you probably think is fact. You are blaming other people for not helping you. You have a belief that other people in the world are not helpful and that’s all you’re seeing. So even if someone did help you, which along your life, probably someone has, you’re not even going to see that, you’re going to discount it completely, because you have a belief that people don’t help you, for example. Or people are not helpful. So that’s just an example.
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But what you believe you will see. So what we need to do instead is address those limiting beliefs. We need to pinpoint them. You need to know what they are, and you can take a guess. You can be like, “What do you think they are?” You need to be coached on them, that’s what a coach does. So it’s very hard for you to see them yourself, you won’t know. Even me, been a coach for several years who’s gotten into this world really deeply, I still have limiting beliefs and so I still get coached on them. So the first step is knowing that you have blind spots. Being like, “I have blind spots and I just don’t know what they are, I need some help figuring them out.” That’s the first thing that needs to happen.
And the way that I illustrate this really well is that, it’s like you are sitting inside a jar or inside a bottle, and you’re trying to read the label. You’re trying to read what it says on the outside of this bottle and you can’t really read it from sitting inside the jar, because it looks upside down and backwards and it’s blurry. But a coach can tell you. So a good coach will be able to identify those limiting beliefs for you and tell you just by how you talk about what your problem is. So you really do need some help if you are continuing to do the same thing over and over again, and you’re getting the same results and you find yourself getting very bitter and frustrated about it or potentially blaming the external circumstances.
And I always come back to, well, if it really is the economy, if it really is the pandemic, if people really are not helpful, then what? And then you have the choice to continue to keep your limitations if you want to. As a coach, I’m not here to force you to change your beliefs. I just want to give you the option to, so that you can get what you want. And it’s the biggest gift you can ever give yourself is hiring a coach. It’s what I did for myself and I would never go back. So what you need to do is, first address the fact that you have blind spots and it is okay, everybody does. You want to get to the bottom of what they are so that you can clear the way, so that you can take the action you need to take.
So you will always have a blind spot and you’ll get better and better at identifying your blind spots as you go. And the first ones that really clear the way for you, and have you have massive breakthroughs are going to be the most impactful experiences that you’ll have, especially if you’ve been stuck in something for a long time. So it also feels like this to me, for example. So imagine you’re trying to push a Boulder on your own. You’re trying to push it and you can’t move it and you’ve been trying, and no matter how hard you push and how hard you try and how much strength and force you use, you can’t move it. And then someone comes along and says, “Oh, why don’t you just use that two by four as a lever? And then you won’t need to actually use strength to lift it, you can just use it as a lever and then it reduces the resistance and then you can move it easily.”
So it’s like, you still need to move the Boulder, but there’s a much easier way to do it. And as I said, no matter how hard you push on your own, you just don’t have that strength to do it on your own. You need a creative solution, an easier way. So examples of limiting beliefs that my clients have had that might resonate with you… so I want you to be identifying, “What could my limiting beliefs be? What do I think is holding me back?” A lot of my clients, they don’t really believe that they had value when they started working with me. Didn’t really believe that what they did was a big deal. And while that continued to be true in their minds, of course they weren’t going to be able to sell themselves into a high paid position because they didn’t really believe they had value. So if that’s you, then that’s a belief that’s definitely holding you back.
Another one is, “I’m not good enough or I’m not smart enough to do what I want to do.” If you believe that you’re in trouble, there’s no upside because then what? “I need to get XYZ degree first, or I won’t be considered.” So then that will stop you from applying, it’ll stop you from taking action. And if you have a really low belief that you can do what you want, of course you won’t take the action to do it. Or they might believe, “I don’t really believe I can do this. I can’t picture it, I can’t really see it happening, I’m very far off from that possibility.” I can help you believe that, that’s what I do as a coach. Or they might think, “I’ll believe it when I see it. I’ll only believe it when it happens.”
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And so they might be very adamant about that. And they might be like, “Well, I can’t believe it until it happens.” And that doesn’t work, it’s backwards. You got to believe it first. And I know that that’s nebulous, but I can teach you how to do that. That’s what I do with my clients. And that’s what I’ve done as I’ve built my business up from nothing to start building that belief in order to create what I’ve created. And that’s the same with you, with whatever you’re facing, you need to build that belief up. And it doesn’t happen in an instant or in a day, it’s a process. But it’s something that you need to do by rewiring your brain, and that’s what I hope you do. So what’s yours? If you don’t know, if you have no idea or if you’re not sure, you need to be coached. You need coaching to unblock yourself.
So if you find yourself in a pattern, in a spiral, you’re feeling confused, defeated, frustrated on a daily basis, and you have been feeling like that for quite some time, you’re in a pattern and you have some limitations and you need some help to clear them. So why it’s so effective is your choices are keeping you in the same pattern. So your choices now, your choices of what you’re thinking and what you’re believing are keeping you in the same pattern. And so they’re just repeating over and over and they’re keeping you stuck, and it’s just because you don’t know there’s another option. There’s another way to think about the same circumstance that you have, you don’t know what that is yet, and you can’t really get on board with it because you don’t really know what it is and you can’t really get there.
That’s okay. That’s what I’m here to help with. So what you need is you need a willingness to be coached on your blind spots. You need a willingness to accept that you have some blind spots, you have limitations. And that’s the difference between people who become successful and people who stay stuck, give up and end up not doing anything for years. So like the person I spoke about in the beginning, he’s been doing this for a year, speaking to five people every month for a year. He’s spoken to 120 people and he hasn’t received any traction on any job possibilities and he’s applied for 100 jobs. So that’s a very defined situation, and so yours might be a little bit broader, a little bit different. But one thing he does have is consistency, so he has that going for him. But his action that he’s taking is fueled by a limitation and it’s not working and it’s never going to work, if nothing changes as far as his mindset goes.
So you need to ask yourself, what current limiting beliefs that you’re aware of are holding you back from stepping into your next level? What common patterns do you find yourself repeating that you are ready to break through? And on a scale of one to 10, how committed are you and how willing are you to get coached on those limiting beliefs and stories, so that you can accelerate your results? So that’s what I need you to seriously consider depending on where you are right now. So what ends up happening when you do break through your limitations, when you finally them and you are able to break through from them and dismantle them slowly, you can get creative in solving your own problems. When you see your blind spots, then you can problem solve for them. And it’s way easier.
You have more brain power to solve in different ways. You get to free up your brain to be creative and resourceful and powerful, because you’re no longer spiraling in this frustration of doing the same thing over and over. So then you’ll have an unlimited capacity to see things differently and keep moving until you get to where you want to go. You’ll be like, “I know this is happening, it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens, happens.” It’s no match for your brain, it’s no match for what you will create and what you will figure out. You won’t feel stuck. You’ll feel you’ve already accomplished your ideal role. So whatever goal you’re doing, I’m assuming it’s your ideal six figure role. But the reality just needs to catch up to what’s already happened. And you’ll know it’s already yours, so that means you won’t be fearing and worrying, stressing about it maybe not happening anymore. That won’t even be any part of your thought process.
You’ll just be at work, making it happen. Problem solving, digging in, making it happen and taking that action in that direction, from being cleared from the limitations, then you’ll be able to do that. So now I
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want to give some tactical information just because this is… it seems so very basic and very simple, but I think I’ll be able to communicate in a way that’ll make sense to you if you have been in the situation where you haven’t been getting responses. So your resume, your cover letter, whatever LinkedIn messages or connection requests you sent, whatever emails you sent to people, whatever written communication you do, it’s going to fall into four different categories. The first is irrelevant. So as a hiring manager, as someone who receives a lot of messages, I receive a lot of irrelevant message.
So an irrelevant message might be one that doesn’t even seem like it’s for me. They spelt my name wrong, they don’t really know what I do. Or for example, if I was a hiring manager and I was looking through applications, maybe it was for the wrong job title or they put the name wrong of the company. So I’m just going to deem that as irrelevant, I think that was a mistake, I don’t even know if they meant to send it to me. The second category is ignored. So might look at it and be like, “Yeah, I get messages like that all the time. Ignore.” For a hiring manager it might be like, “Yep. That looks like everybody else’s, so I don’t really know what to do with that. So the easiest thing is just to ignore it.” Interested, category three. They look at it and they go, “There could be potential with that.”
So something stands out at them, something you said, a bullet point, a word, something that was on there that stood out to them and their thought was, “That one has potential. Let’s keep that one in mind.” And that might be if I get a message, I might be like, “Oh, that piqued my interest. Okay, cool.” I might go back to it, but then I might not. It’s not really that big of a deal, but it’s definitely piqued my interest above the other two. And then four is excited. So excited, the reaction is, “Okay, we need to call them. We need to get an interview with them right away.” So I might delegate that to somebody right away. To my co-worker in HR or my assistant or whatever, I might be like, “Okay, we need to interview this person.”
And I will make that a priority. I will be like, “I’m not going to put this off or I’m going to set a reminder to do it later, but I’m not going to pass this one up.” So those are the four categories. The problem is we don’t know this and we don’t know how to make our resume and cover letter messages compelling. And we’re not really looking at it from the point of view of the person receiving the messages, receiving the cover letters. And so when you write your stuff sometimes… So I imagine like this person who’s talked to 120 people, he got 120 people that talked to him, so he got 120 people on the phone. So then his bottleneck is the conversation. Is he asking the right questions? How is the conversations going? What is happening in the conversations? What is the response?
What is the vibe? He needs more data. And I bet you, he’s not doing that, he’s just doing the same thing, otherwise there’s no way. If he was evaluating every single one of those, he would have more information. He wouldn’t be like, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” He would’ve more information. So drama versus math. So there’s the drama of… And this is how a dramatic description of the problem might sound, “I’ve done everything, I’ve submitted to every single company. There are no more companies that hire for what I do. I’ve talked to every single person. I’ve talked to like 200 people, 120 people. I’ve submitted 200 resumes.” That’s what drama sounds like. And even the numbers might or might not be accurate. They might show me, they might be very detailed and be like, “Okay, I have done it, look at this.” Or they might just be generalizing and saying, “Probably around 200.”
And so what we want is just the math, and the math can get very specific. There’s two choices here, you can either go into victim mentality or go into scientists mentality. So the victim mentality is where you’re like, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve done everything, it’s not working. I don’t know what to do. I can’t do it, it sucks.” That’s victim mentality. And then scientist mentality is, “I’m obviously doing something that’s not working here. People are not responding to my message, I wonder why. What different words could I use? What could I try? What could I think differently? Why do I want to reach out to this person? What is it that interests me about them? They didn’t respond to me. Maybe I’ll send
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them another message and ask them why they didn’t respond to me. And if there was anything else I could have done to make them more inclined to respond.”
So that’s the difference, a victim mentality and scientist. And so there’s lots of really basic questions that we need to ask that we normally don’t, before we go into victim mentality. “I would like to know how many people have actually seen the resume.” And of course, sometimes you can’t know. Sometimes you’ll just get an auto response. So I’ll be like, “Okay, so what else could I do to make sure somebody sees?” So my clients have done this very successfully. They will simply email the hiring manager or LinkedIn them, let them know, “Hey, I’ve applied for the position, let me know if there’s anything I could do to stand out, would love to have a chat. Looks great.” Anything like that, or to a colleague, or to somebody in the company being like, “Hey, I submitted my resume for this position, I was wondering if you could let HR know. And if there’s anything I can do to stand out, let me know.”
Just creatively thinking of solutions of how to get your resume seen. And so I’m giving actions here, but these actions only work if you’re limiting beliefs are cleared. So if you still have the belief that, “Oh, I’m never going to do this. I’m just going through the motions.” Well, you have to have the belief a little, or you probably wouldn’t be going through the motions. But if your belief is very low, then you’re less likely to get a good response. And you’re less likely to keep going enough and taking different action in order to get the result you want. So it’s a combination. You have to have your limiting beliefs cleared, you have to be aware of them, you have to know what’s going on in your own head. And then you could take an action from that clean place.
So we always want to be committed to the end result, completely 100% committed to the end result, but not attached to the instant gratification that we might get from a response from any one company. So we don’t put all our eggs in one basket, we know this. People listening to me for a bit, you know this. So you want to ask yourself just these very basic questions. “Who has seen it? How can I make sure they’ve seen it? What else could I do? Who else could I contact to make sure? Okay. Do I feel I’ve done everything I can here? Cool. Let’s move on to the next one. What could I do for this one? How could I word it differently? Is my personality desirable to this position that they’re looking for? Who could I talk to specifically to engage in a conversation, to find out more about the company before I apply?”
I had somebody who talked to five different people in the company that she wanted to work for. And she asked them questions about like, “Okay, so how did you do it? How did you pass the interview? What worked for you? What were you thinking? What was your mentality behind it?” Getting into their heads. Because honestly what they were thinking is more valuable than what they did to you, as somebody who’s investigating as a scientist. So you can ask for somebody to pass it along as a favor. You can say you already applied. You can bring it to someone’s attention. You can follow up and say, “Hey, I was wondering if there was anything I could have done to get a reply here?”
And I’ve had clients get responses from that. They’ll be like, “Yeah, this person was actually on maternity leave, so that’s why they missed your message.” And then they’ll have a conversation. So you never know what’s going to happen. You just have to take that action from the belief that you’re making it happen. So sending your follow ups, that works for lots of my clients. They’ll send follow ups if they haven’t heard, because maybe they fell into the interested category, they’re like, “That person has potential. I think I’d like to talk to them.” Then they put it away and then they forgot. Making it really easy for people to respond. Being like, “Okay, I’m free within these times, but I can work around your schedule.” Just give easy, yes or no answer. So making it very easy for somebody to respond instead of being like, “Okay, well let me know what time works you.”
Then they’re going to be like, “Oh, I got to think about that. And I’ll do it later.” So you can email them and ask them why they didn’t respond. You can ask if there’s anything that interested them about what you could offer. You could try recapping your value again. There’s just endless things you can do. And it’s
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not in the doing, it’s in the creative thinking that gets you into the scientist mode that then gets you doing. And that’s the biggest point I want to get across. And sometimes I feel I shouldn’t just tell people what to do, because I could tell you what to do all day and there’s still going to be that person who says, “I submitted 120 applications and I talked to 120 people and it didn’t work.” And so the answer to that is, you have a limiting belief that you don’t know you have and you need to get coaching on it.
So there you have it my friends, that is my rant. It was a little bit of a ranty episode I think, so thank you for listening. And just identify yourself in the episode like, is this you, is it not you. Take what I have to say that helps you and use it. And if something that I say doesn’t work for you, then don’t use it. Don’t make what I say, a problem. Just use what you need and take it. So that is what I have to offer you. And thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that one, it was a little bit different than the normal ones, and I will talk to you next week. And remember we’re doing the client series, so we’re going to have snippets of clients talking at the end of every episode, just little snippets of their experiences. And apply to work with me because if you are having limiting beliefs, that is my specialty. Apply for my program and we will get you all coached up so you can get your results. Don’t wait any longer. Talk to you soon. Bye.
To think three months ago, since I contacted you and really started job hunting for real, and now here I am two weeks into a job that I never thought I would get in the middle of the pandemic. I want to say I was just lucky, but yeah, there was a process to get me here.
Now I can absolutely say thanks to Natalie, my coach, that I’ve actually sealed the deal and I will be starting in my new role, November 16th at a dream school here in the city of Philadelphia.
After three months of work, we were able to figure out exactly what I should be doing, which was data science. And about three months after we stopped working together, I ended up with three opportunities and I took one, which was to start a business after I found a partner in Toronto. And we’ve been working on that ever since.
I have to ask Natalie, how do you process the dynamics that happen between us on the same 10 day? And I got the position and it just happened so fast. When you think of about that, it happened fast.
You had a different perspective and I always appreciate getting a different perspective. And you helped me think a little more outside the box when I was struggling to find a new route. It was also a matter of having someone to help redirect me back to the positive paths that I was trying to create, that helped a lot.
Hey there. So if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, I want to invite you to something very special. And as you know, I’ve been coaching one on one for years, and you’ve heard me talk about all my clients and you’ve heard them come on the podcast. And from these experiences and from all these hours that I’ve done coaching, I’ve created the ultimate program where I take you through the steps that I walked everyone through to achieve the unreasonable results that they’ve achieved. And I don’t just mean getting a job, just getting any job or making things a little better here or there, I mean life changing results, doubling salaries, switching industries while doubling salary. Getting six figure positions with no official paid experience, and just creating a life that they didn’t imagine was possible.
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