I was in a networking meeting this morning with HR people who are job-hunting, and I had a chance to do an exercise with them that you might find useful.<\/p>\n
The focus is on crafting your Elevator Speech.\u00a0 That’s the little 30-second spiel that you give to describe who you are, what you’re looking for, and how you might help someone else in the job context.\u00a0 If you don’t have one – or several – I’d suggest that this can be one of the most valuable things you can do.\u00a0 If nothing else, it clarifies in YOUR mind where you want to go.\u00a0 As you might know, I’m also a big fan of the power of verbalizing your intentions as a means to help you push forward.<\/p>\n
The problem with many elevator speeches is that they start out with “Here’s where I’ve come from….”\u00a0 When you’ve just lost your job, often it’s a struggle to make that positive and give it energy.\u00a0 How does this strike you?\u00a0 “I’m an engineer who was just laid off after 25 years with XYZ Corp.”<\/p>\n
That sucks all the life out of the rest of the speech.\u00a0 At this point, as a listener, I’m so depressed that I don’t even want to hear what follows.<\/p>\n
What I had these people do was to take their current Elevator Speech and deconstruct the words and phrases into three categories:<\/p>\n
Most people found that the bulk of their words talked about the past, about roles that they had performed.<\/p>\n
My challenge to them was to change their way of thinking in these four steps:<\/p>\n
1. Create an opening statement which ONLY talks about the future.\u00a0 Dare to dream, sure.\u00a0 Imagine that future contribution which will result in a feature article in the local newspaper.\u00a0 Or the cover of a relevant magazine, if you dare.<\/p>\n
2. Find a word or phrase which captures why you are excited about this future.\u00a0 Ask yourself:\u00a0 Why are you passionate about this?\u00a0 What turns you on?\u00a0 Why would it be so cool that you couldn’t possibly let the opportunity pass?<\/p>\n
3. Capture some phrases which demonstrate where your experience came from to create this future.\u00a0 What did you do, for whom, with what results?\u00a0 Don’t mention anything that’s not relevant to your desired future.\u00a0 Don’t limit yourself to work experience.<\/p>\n
4. Describe your current state with some words which show how you took your past experiences, and now have the necessary skills and assets, to propel you toward your future.<\/p>\n
This is actually a bit harder than it looks, so I’d challenge you to sit down and do this as an exercise.\u00a0\u00a0 You can get useful value in 15 minutes, but only if you’re taking it seriously and writing your ideas down.\u00a0 As long as you just ponder<\/em> the answers, they won’t be concrete enough for you to make progress.<\/p>\n Does this result in a newly written Elevator Speech?\u00a0 Not necessarily.\u00a0 The primary purpose is to open up your way of thinking, and to help generate some ideas and new energy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was in a networking meeting this morning with HR people who are job-hunting, and I had a chance to do an exercise with them that you might find useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[76,27,6,29],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-513","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"post_tag-career","10":"post_tag-change","11":"post_tag-coaching","12":"post_tag-job-hunt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}