Patience and why it's important

I know that, when you’re unemployed, the slightest thing can set you off. I’ve seen it often. The longer you’re out, the shorter your temper can become, until the littlest thing can trigger anger and an emotional outburst. The tendency is to begin to view the world as a “them” vs. “me” place, which often leads you right into a bunker mentality. Which is, of course, where you don’t want to be.

One side result of this type of thinking is that you (a) tend to have a slight edge to your voice, a tone that indicates hostility to those with whom you communicate, and that will really sink you during an interview or any situation in which you’re interacting with another person; and (b) another result is that you tend to be impatient with everyone, and begin to want things to be happening on your timetable, not someone else’s.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a fair world. It isn’t a nice world. It isn’t even a particularly rational world. What I mean by this is that it’s inevitable that you’re going to be encountering people who are rude, people who are unprofessional, people who have absolutely no empathy for your particular plight. The people you deal with may be emotionally immature or just downright stupid, frankly. They certainly do not have your interests at heart.

Some of the complaints I’ve heard include:

• “They’re really impolite; they didn’t get back to me to tell me whether they hired someone else or not. The least they could have done was send me a postcard. I finally found out they filled the position from someone I know in the field.”

• “I had a call from them, and then nothing…”

• “I must have sent off thirty resumes, and no company, not one, acknowledged they received them and none of them responded to them.”

• “I could tell, from the moment I walked in, that they wanted someone younger.”

• “The person I was talking to was younger than me by twenty years and didn’t really even have the experience I do.”

• “The person who interviewed me on the phone couldn’t describe the job and told me they didn’t have a job description they could send me.”

• “They don’t return phone calls…”

• “They’re asking for the moon but all they want to pay is a junior level salary.”

And more… A long litany of complaints, all of them perfectly justified. But the problem with thinking this way is that, as the incidents begin to mount up, your resentment increases and you can begin to build such a case against these potential employers that it ultimately becomes corrosive and damaging to your effort to find that next good job.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, the people I’m referring to here are basically very capable individuals who more often than not get asked to come in for interviews. Because they want a job so badly, they fall prey to disappointment when they don’t get called back, or when they receive no notification about the job’s having been filled. That’s when this cycle of building resentment starts.

So what can be done about it?

• First, it’s important to realize how destructive it can be to begin resenting the way a potential employer does business. Empathy helps here. Perhaps, as in many companies today, the HR Department is short-handed and over-worked and can’t find the resources to send out notification that the job has been filled and that the position is now closed. Try to see things from the employer’s viewpoint.

• Second, don’t sweat the small stuff. The important things, such as moving on and keeping a steady stream of resumes going out that respond to all of the new qualified job listing, merit your attention, your energy and emotions. You want to keep a positive attitude so you can be at your best, despite any real or imagined slights. When the “right” position comes along, you want to be at your best because the competition will be fierce.

• Third, you want to be patient. We know that every week the money in your savings account decreases. But, as the old maxim states, you can’t push the river. A baseball player with a batting average of .300 is doing damned well, yet we often forget to recognize that what this means is that he has missed 70% of the balls thrown at him. If he loses his patience because of this, in all probability he’ll increase the probability that he will miss the next ball or hit it badly.

• Fourth, you want to be realistic. We can speed up the process of getting a new job but we can’t make it an overnight occurrence. How often I have heard a job seeker say, “I need to find a job in four weeks” without understanding what it actually takes to find that type of job in today’s job market, without having any foundation of fact underneath that estimate. It reminds me of when I used to be a V.P. of Sales, when a rookie salesman would say, “I’m closing that sale in three weeks”; when, realistically, the prospective company’s buying cycle (the time it took to buy something it wanted or needed) was sixteen weeks at minimum.

I wrote the paragraphs above because I also teach clients to network, and time and again the biggest hurdle they have to get over is expecting instant response. If you go out and network with five people, that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically in the “hidden job” market and jobs will automatically begin to be offered to you. Yet, with a slight bit of exaggeration, that’s the expectation. “I saw five people, which was a lot of work, and I’m no further along than I was when I started, so why should I continue to network?” is the type of reasoning that I often hear.

In analyzing it, I find that it is impatience that really scuttles any chance of really getting into, and making a success of, networking. Because of impatience, because of the lack of immediate results, far too many people give up on networking and kill their chances of getting into the hidden job market. Yes, a certain amount of knowledge, of how-to-do-it, is involved. But the overwhelming mistake, at least in my experience, is a lack of patience to allow your efforts to work.

Networking and job hunting is like fishing. You can’t fish and be impatient. It just won’t work. You can’t network and be impatient. It just won’t work.

So that’s what’s wrong with being impatient. It’s not understanding the time element and why certain things take as long as they do that will scuttle your efforts. You can’t afford to generate unrealistic time pressures, creating unrealistic deadlines, and still maintain the stamina for a long-term job-hunting effort.

I now tell clients that it takes networking with one hundred people to begin to penetrate the hidden job market.

So, please, don’t set unrealistic deadlines. Please, don’t get yourself to the point that you lose patience with the process and with people. I know it’s frustrating but : Patience is, I hate to say it and as trite as it sounds, a virtue.