Changing Your Mindset About Getting Hired
The Background
In 2008, I gave my first interview for the position of a software developer. And from then onward so far I have appeared in some 12–13 interviews and passed 4–5 of them. It was a tough time, not because of the technical nature of the interviews but because it was a mental struggle for me to come to terms with the hiring process. In the beginning, I had no opinions about the people who interviewed me. As I moved from second to third and more interviews I started forming opinions just like everyone else does in life. Many experiences were painful and hence forming a negative opinion was only my nature as a human being. In some interviews, I was taunted and made fun at and the interviewers simply refused to believe my solution because they have never seen such kind C language code in their lives (nor they were willing to let me write on their workstation or laptop). I used to carry entire C language in my head and you could wake me up at 2 AM from a deep sleep and I could write a solution for your problem in C. I read, wrote, breathed and lived for C and UNIX way of life and that changed my mind so much that it produced strange but efficient and quite readable code conforming to ISO standard. I was not aware of it till recently. I came to see this as an exceptional skill when I decided to transition my career from a programmer to data scientist and I could compare my understanding and my code as a beginner in Python and data science with the understanding and code I wrote in C. This made me understand that dedication, curiosity, interest and insane amounts of hard work, all put together can produce what looks like a miracle when it comes to acquiring skills. Since I am in the middle of a transition and half of data science is about business problems and communication skills I am constantly on the search of hiring process and interview methods and techniques. And just by chance I came across this post by Eric Weber:
Reading this made me think why not apply the same C and UNIX way of life to know where I have failed in understanding the recruiters and the hiring process.
The Method
I decided today that I will change my views and opinions about interviewers and hiring. Do you know that your views and opinions about something are your beliefs about something. You believe those because you got reasons for them. We think that our reasons are logical and rational but unfortunately most of the time our reasons are based on our emotions, mostly our emotional reactions to the things happened. This doesn’t make them wrong though. Most probably you will be right and so was I. No one likes to get insulted or hurt. According to Tony Robbins, it is one wrong way to think. He says, if you want to reach where you want to go in life then you have to shift your way of thinking from the usual. Instead of thinking that “I got hurt, it was wrong what they did”, think “This emotional response empowers me or dis-empowers me?” and then you choose only those responses or reactions that empower your life, that take your life one step up, that grow you, that make you better. It is simple to understand but tough to apply, you need to start practicing it and how you do that? You find people around you or on social media or in your community (offline) who match your definition of success and see what kind of beliefs they have and why and you inculcate those beliefs as a part of your character. You can find successful people, their interviews and life stories on YouTube with a bit of search. But this is only the first step. The bigger problem is how to break out of your dis-empowering beliefs.
A table has four legs and it can handle a certain amount of weight e.g. 200 kg. Any weight more than will crush the table. But what if the table has 10 or 12 legs, then it can handle more weight. This is how your opinions and views about life and people work. Your opinion or view is the table-top and the legs of the table are the beliefs that support your opinion. The more the legs a table has, the stronger a table is. Imagine a table with a thousand legs. It will not break or crush no matter how much weight you put on it, no matter how many times you hit it. To break it, you need to start breaking off the legs, one by one, break them all and the table (opinion/view) will eventually break.
That is roughly how Tony Robbins explained beliefs in his book Awaken The Giant Within. Reading this book can be a life-changing experience for you. He has written a whole chapter on beliefs. The chapters in part two of his book are a goldmine.
The Method, Part Deux
What if you could change your beliefs in a matter of a few hours than a few years or a few decades? What if you could vaporize the thoughts you don’t like?
Meet Karim Benammar, the man who has mastered how beliefs are created and how you can form new beliefs to help you reach where you want to go in life. Just as the best things in life, like air and water, are free, so is his course. Imagine a new life is handed to you, for free:
The Work
Because of my negative experiences in interviews, I started believing that interviewers put obstacles in your path so that you don’t get the job, that they call you for an interview just for the fun of it (yeah, it has happened to me and I know others too). So after a decade, these became my core beliefs. Today when I came across that post by Eric Weber, I realized how much of a serious problem I have and I can not become happy anywhere sooner if I don’t correct this.
What is coming next you will be able to comprehend better if you take Karim’s free course on Udemy. All images are created using Reframe Think. Let’s start with Eric Weber’s basic idea, the table-top, one’s opinion about recruiters:
Now Let us find why I think so? What beliefs I have for this? Let’s collect all those legs for our table:
We have to select four legs (beliefs) which have the largest emotional impact on our opinion in the solid red center. In my case here, two beliefs are similar: cold harsh, rough words, and that they never talk well. So, we can put them together as one:
Now let’s create beliefs for what I want. I want to get hired and I want to be happy. I also know that by 80/20 rule, only 20% of the people in this world are evil. I want to get hired by the rest of the 80%. I am also aware that hatred kills no one but you. Carrying resentment and hurt only makes sure you will be unhappy. It is a failed man’s way to live. I want to succeed instead. Let’s replace those beliefs one by one. Red circle belief is what I have and Blue circle beliefs are the ones I want to have to succeed:
I have four new replacement beliefs or success beliefs. We need to choose the one which has the heaviest emotional impact. The one with the green dot is the one I have chosen for myself. Everyone is unique, we got unique DNAs and hence unique ways of behaviors and thought processes. Hence, you might choose something entirely different. You know what I am talking about.
When you will start working on your beliefs, you will find it very hard to accept new beliefs or you may not even think about beliefs that help you succeed. You will start thinking that these words are not believable, so you are not going to accept them. Well, Karim says it doesn’t matter what looks true, looks believable, and what doesn’t. This is one reason I mentioned Tony Robbins’s book here. You need to read his book to understand how beliefs work. You need to understand we are emotional beings more than we are rational ones. Now let’s go to rest three beliefs and find the replacements:
Now let’s put the selected beliefs together and see what we have:
Next, you ask an important question: What new kind of opinion these beliefs represent? (or something like that). Here is what I came up with:
I reached from hurt and suffering thinking “Recruiters put obstacles in paths so that you don’t get a job” to “This is an original and primary interaction during hiring” belief. I can also add in the word transparent, that recruitment is an honest and transparent process and it is a true too. If it is not true at a company you are interviewing at, may be you shouldn’t work for them then.
This is not the end of it, it is just the beginning. To fully comprehend what I explained, do the free course. Did you notice two more points:
- None of the recruiters had to change. None of the companies changed. The only person who changed was me. Recruiters or companies don’t need to change their hiring process. You need to change yourself instead.
- A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him — As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
I have had a lot of pain in my life, a lot of failures and I became negative out of it. Hence, it is possible that I got those untoward recruiters most of the time because my thinking was full of suffering. I got what I constantly thought, the adverse 20% of 80/20 principle. What if this is true? What if I start thinking about the new beliefs I just created above. What if these are the only thoughts I think about recruiters from today?
What you are going to do now? How you are going to use what you learned here. Make sure you read the book and take the course. The only thing you need to do is to take first step towards success. No one else needs to change if you want to progress in your life. Progress is all your responsibility, no one else’s. And you deserve happiness, abundance. Look around you, nature is always trying to give you abundance of water, green plants, animals to love. May be we need to do same, create happiness, not sorrow, create relationships and bonds, not suffering. One day at a time, one step at a time.
