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Episode 223 - Beyond Comfort: Activating Your Inner Drive for Career Advancement

In our quest for professional fulfillment, the interplay of internal forces significantly shapes our thoughts, decisions, and ultimately, our career trajectories. As a career coach working with managers and executives, I’ve witnessed how these forces influence decision-making and personal growth. In this podcast episode I delve into how you can better understand and leverage from these dynamics forces to craft a career path that resonates with your true aspirations.

Understanding Internal Career Drivers

Our career paths are significantly influenced by two contrasting internal forces. One leans towards accepting life’s course passively, while the other urges us toward self-determination and risk-taking. Recognizing and balancing these forces is vital in steering your professional journey.

The Catalyst of Aggressive Drive

My experience with clients reveals that a predominant motivator in seeking career advancement is what I term the ‘aggressive drive.’ This drive often emerges from a place of dissatisfaction, propelling individuals out of their comfort zones and into transformative career phases.

Pleasure Drive vs. Aggressive Drive

Although we start our careers with a natural inclination towards an aggressive, proactive drive, societal conditioning frequently nudges us towards a more pleasure-oriented, passive stance. Reconnecting with intrinsic motivations is essential to reactivate the aggressive drive, which is crucial for achieving ambitious career goals.

A Reflective Exercise in Self-Discovery

One effective method to discern your dominant drive is through visualization. Try this exercise: Contemplate what you envision for your career goals: is it the journey of achieving your goals or the final outcome? This introspection can reveal much about your deep-seated career motivations.

The Power of Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation, underpinned by feelings of competence, autonomy, and connection to one’s work, is a critical psychological need. These attributes not only enhance personal fulfillment but also make one stand out in the competitive job market.

Empowering Your Career Trajectory

Engaging your aggressive drive is fundamental to forging your own career path. Over-reliance on external factors, such as employer-driven career progression, can be limiting. Building self-confidence and competence is key to successfully navigating the complexities of modern career landscapes.

Small Steps, Significant Impact

Transformative change in careers doesn’t necessitate drastic actions. Even modest, incremental steps can have a profound impact. A productive mindset, when applied methodically to real-life scenarios, can yield remarkable results. Assistance from models, frameworks, or coaching can be instrumental in translating aspirations into achievements.

Unearthing Your True Calling

Identifying and nurturing your true calling, often muffled by internal conflicts, is akin to strengthening a muscle. This process involves recognizing and cultivating your unique professional aspirations, thereby reinforcing your career trajectory.

Invitation to Explore Further

In my podcast, we explore these themes in greater depth, providing actionable insights and strategies for career advancement. I hope you join me for this interesting chat, and that it helps you achieve your full potential.

Renata Bernarde

About the Host, Renata Bernarde

Hello, I’m Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I’m also an executive coach, job hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach professionals (corporate, non-profit, and public) the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.

 

If you are an ambitious professional who is keen to develop a robust career plan, if you are looking to find your next job or promotion, or if you want to keep a finger on the pulse of the job market so that when you are ready, and an opportunity arises, you can hit the ground running, then this podcast is for you.

 

In addition to The Job Hunting Podcast, on my website, I have developed a range of courses and services for professionals in career or job transition. And, of course, I also coach private clients

Timestamps to Guide Your Listening

  • 01:39 – Introduction: Understanding Career Dynamics

  • 02:20 – The Dual Forces Within: Aggressive vs. Pleasure Drives

  • 06:01 – Intrinsic Motivation: The Key to Authentic Career Growth

  • 11:24 – Overcoming Career Bottlenecks: Capability, Control, and Connection

  • 29:56 – Practical Steps for Career Advancement

  • 41:53 – Conclusion: A Call to Action for Authentic Career Development

So today, the question that I have for you is: What type of life do you want to create for yourself? Do you want to create your own story, your own career, or are you comfortable letting life take you wherever it may? These are two opposite forces inside each one of us. Think of them as two levers.

 

We all have them, and they are set from birth at different levels. Other factors, as we grow, start affecting those levers, influencing them. Let’s say, adding more oil so that it’s easier for you to maneuver one of them, or rusting up the other one. Okay, now, tell me this: Do you think of yourself as a productive person?

 

Are you a person who can deal with change in your career, in your professional life, in your life overall? Do you have the will to pursue your career goals? If these questions interest you and you want to dig deeper, then you’re going to enjoy this episode. Keep listening, and let’s go.

 

Ultimately, this chat is about the type of life you want to create for yourself, the type I want to create for myself. It’s more than a career chat; it’s more than a job-hunting chat as well. It’s a chat about… It’s hard for me to keep talking about job hunting in isolation because the drivers behind it are so important for me in understanding my clients as a coach, as a career coach.

 

Different clients come to me with different career drivers, different needs, wants, and passions. And I can usually differentiate between these two forces inside of us. One force will pull you to be more reflexive, automatically accepting your fate. We hear this all the time in recruitment and selection, as job candidates and as coaches.

 

“Oh, it wasn’t to be. It was not supposed to be.” Right? We hear that so much, that fate, you know, it’s probably for the best. “If it didn’t happen, it wasn’t supposed to happen.” This is the reflective, accepting-your-fate force that you have inside you. The other one pushes you forward towards freedom, choice, taking risks, and makes you a little bit angry if you don’t get the job, right?

 

You know, “How come? This isn’t right. I was the best candidate. I can’t understand why I wasn’t interviewed or why I didn’t get the position.” And I also see that happening when I work with clients. It can be that the same person will sometimes accept their fate and other times be a bit more angry and upset about their fate. What I see mostly is individuals who have a tendency to always be more accepting and others who tend to always be more angry.

 

And I say “angry” here with caution because I don’t want you to feel like this is a negative way of being. It’s not. I want people to have that force inside them, that force that takes them forward and wants them to do better, if you use it for good. And this is what we’re going to talk about here today.

 

If you use it for good, it can actually be very helpful for your career. So, we’re going to talk about these two forces, but I want to know: Do you agree? Which one resonates more with you? Can you think about situations and examples in the past where you’ve used one force and not the other? Which personality, the sort of two Yin-Yang kind of personalities, do you feel you fit more towards?

 

I will tell you that I’m more of the force that pushes you forward towards freedom, choice, and risks. I have friends and family members who feel like they are more of the reflexive, automatically accepting-their-fate kind of people. We’ve had that discussion before, and it’s the sort of chat that I like to have with people.

 

So, I would love to know what you think. If you’re following me on social media, send me a private message or comment on one of my posts, and I’d love to hear from you about this. If you subscribe to the newsletter, I can always reply back. I’m still small enough that I get your emails and read them when they come.

 

Thank you for sending feedback to me because that really helps a lot. And these forces are about the choices we make. They really do influence the choices we make and they influence motivation, right? These forces, they drive you. Do you enjoy creating something new that doesn’t exist, or do you enjoy the pleasures and the comfort of what you have achieved?

 

I’m kind of extrapolating here from the two forces, but I want to explain it a little bit further. In psychology, we explain these two forces as the pleasure drive and the aggressive drive. This is a very old concept in psychology. They’re very Freudian, and I know things have evolved, but they’re still a classic.

 

And they’re still very valid. The pleasure drive, the one that helps us meet our biological needs, is an important drive to have. It’s the drive to rest, take a break, enjoy life, eat, and absorb all the pleasures in your life. The other is the aggressive drive, which helps us deal with danger, take risks, and evolve and grow in learning and developing. It makes us want more for ourselves and others around us.

 

These two drives are important, opposites of each other, but they coexist inside all of us. It’s important for you to start thinking, “What am I activating right now sitting here watching this Netflix series? And what am I activating here, trying really hard to advance my career, putting effort into it?”

 

What is driving me to do this, right? It’s definitely not the pleasure drive, I don’t think. It’s really about you dealing with challenges and wanting more for yourself, understanding the risks you’re taking, and advancing and developing as a person and as a professional. So, try to pay attention to those and see which ones you’re tapping into – the pleasure drive or the aggressive drive.

 

The other thing that I think is great as well is to understand when they are activated inside you in terms of your body clock and your weekly clock. I have an annual clock. It’s much harder for me to work in winter than in summer. For some people, I know it’s easier to work in winter than in summer, but for me, it’s the opposite.

 

I prefer to work in summer. I have tried to work in winter. It would make more sense because it’s cold outside. I don’t really enjoy being out in the cold, but I am very lethargic in winter. And I’ve kind of understood that now. I read this beautiful book called “Wintering.” Let me just write it down.

 

I’ve spoken about it before, but I will put it in the episode show notes for you. And it made me understand and be okay with being this sort of polar bear personality, where I just want to stop working in winter. I can’t complain; in 2023, I’m recording this at the beginning of 2024. In 2023, I basically had no winter because I went to Europe during winter.

 

I’m based in Melbourne. So, I had summer, and then, you know, January, February, March, May, it started getting cold. In June, I went to Europe, and it was super hot. Then after that, after five weeks, I went to Brazil, which is my home country. You can tell I have an accent. And I was there for four weeks. And even though it’s also winter in Brazil, in July, August, it’s never really cold. So, it was warm and I went for swims. I went to the beach and all of that. So, I felt really drained by the end of the year, really tired. And I think I did not give myself permission to do the wintering that I need to recharge my battery.

 

So, it’s this sort of endless summer, which so many people chase. I wonder if I can do it. I don’t think I can because I’m so proactive and high-energy during summer, I probably need a break. So, understanding that pleasure drive and the aggressive drive, when they happen to you during the day…

 

And giving yourself permission to tap into those drives and use them when they’re easier to use, and other times, like, for example, it would be very hard for me to work very early in the morning. I’ve wanted that for years, but I have my pleasure drive early in the morning. I need to meet my biological needs of going out, eating slowly, starting my day in a very pleasurable way. I don’t like this sort of stuff that I see online that I know suits a lot of people, jumping out of bed with an alarm clock at 5 am. I think it’s Mel Robbins who does that in a lot of her videos. I find that excruciating. I couldn’t do it. You know, my neighbor, who’s a lovely person, we’re becoming good friends…

 

And she’s like, “Let’s go for a swim at 6 am.” I’m like, “Sarah, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. It’s just not in my body. I love to go for a swim, but can we do it a bit later in the day? I just need that pleasure in the beginning of the day.” And then I become really aggressive and I can go on until late at night, about 8 PM.

 

I can still be, and that’s when I slow down. So, understanding what your body clock is important. I know it’s possible to change it, but at least identify how you are naturally and then try to change if you need to or want to. I want to share a few secrets with you in this episode. I’ve highlighted three secrets that I decided to share.

 

The first one is this: Usually, my clients come to me using their aggressive drive, right? That makes total sense to you now, right? They feel irritated. They feel they need to do something about it. Their reaching out to me is the result of an irritation, a response to something they are experiencing within themselves, a dissatisfaction with where they are in their careers, or externally in how they have been treated by work or during the recruitment process.

 

‘If they’ve done that without me, it’s not fair. I haven’t been promoted. I haven’t been given any chance, or I’ve been doing this recruitment process and it’s not working. I don’t know why.’ So, that aggressive response creates something into being. That’s what I was saying before. I’m using the word ‘aggressive’ here and ‘angry,’ but I don’t want you to be put off by it because it’s a creative force. It’s a productive drive and it pulls you out of that gravitational pool of pleasure. You know, that sort of, ‘Oh, but it’s so comfortable here on my couch watching this series that never ends.’ If you’ve been following my newsletter at this point in time, you know I’m watching ‘The Wire.’

 

I know I’m like 20 years late, but I love it. And the episodes are like an hour long. It’s really, really long. And oh, it’s taking forever to pull me out of that gravitational pull of my couch and the wonderful series that I’m watching. I need to have some sort of dissatisfaction in my life that brings me to, ‘Okay, let’s get out of this funk and let’s go and do and get things done.’

 

Let’s record this episode because people need to hear these ideas. Right? So I am very passionate about serving you. Being of service is my goal too. Like I know it’s kind of ‘woo-woo’ to say that, but it’s true, you know, and I think it’s also genetic. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, was a man of great service.

 

My grandfather was a man of great service from my dad’s side. They were both Rotarians, governors, and founders of Rotary clubs. And so, I feel very much that I tap into that. And I need to do it. I need to get these ideas out. It bothers me if an idea I have for a podcast takes forever for me to put out there for you; it makes me angry with myself.

 

So there you go. That aggressive response really does create something into being. It’s a creative, productive energy that pulls you out of that gravitational pull of the pleasurable life, the state of change and transformation that you need to engage in career transition, career change, and getting a new job.

 

And that’s why it’s so hard for people to go through job search by themselves because the lack of accountability just pulls you back to the couch, and the pursuit for a better job and career needs to begin with the aggressive drive and people don’t realize that. Then I have a second secret for you that I want to share.

 

Even if you feel that you are more inclined to be comfortable in the pleasure drive, which is fine. It’s a natural thing that happened to you in your DNA. We are all naturally aggressive drive mode driven as well. We are all naturally generative. That’s what they say in science. Because when we are young, we need to learn how to walk.

 

We need to know how to tie our shoes. We need to learn the alphabet. We need to know how to talk. We need to, you know, there are lots of things that we need to know. And that aggressive drive mode of falling down and trying again to walk, of writing something wrong and then correcting yourself and writing it better and becoming better at your calligraphy.

 

I mean, that shows my age. I don’t think people worry about calligraphy anymore, but you know, just learning things like I was just discussing this with my husband a few days ago, remember trying to learn the hours using a clock. I don’t know how parents do it now because everything now is digitalized, but I remember finding it so hard and being so angry that I didn’t understand how the clock worked.

 

And I really wanted to understand. And that is natural to us. That’s what makes us learn that aggressive mode to be better, to learn and to grow. What happens then, and that’s the secret, we learn the system beats that energy out of us. The system beats that energy out of us. We learn to comply. We learn to behave.

 

We learn social orders and cultural rules and values. We become less motivated by what we want to do intrinsically and more motivated by what society and family and friends and government through government policies expect of us. They become our extrinsic motivation. We don’t even notice this sort of switch because it happens so slowly throughout our childhood, in teenage years, and early adulthood. We don’t notice them, but we are influenced by external factors and they become extrinsic motivations for us.

 

So for example, when I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. I remember this so clearly. I lived in an Air Force base. My dad was an academic. He taught at the university there, the Air Force University. And we lived there and our next-door neighbor had these rockets in his dining room and, you know, men had just gone to the moon and back. I was born in the seventies. So I was really fascinated by space. I still am. You know this if you’ve been reading my newsletter that my favorite TV series of all time is ‘The Expanse.’

 

If you haven’t watched it, go watch it. It’s not just my favorite. Everybody’s favorite, like, you know, really important people love ‘The Expanse’ for a reason. It’s so well-made and so accurate, as accurate as it can be in terms of going out into space. Anywho, that was beaten out of me because I was first Brazilian, second a woman.

 

And third, you know all the things I can’t even remember, but I remember people, my mom telling me, and I don’t blame her. It was just, you know, it was just what people did, you know, like, ‘I don’t think you can be an astronaut. You know, you’re Brazilian and you’re a woman and that doesn’t happen here.’

 

Like, I don’t remember being incentivized to pursue my intrinsic motivation. I remember being incentivized to pursue extrinsic motivation and I fought really hard against it for a long time. And I was, I would say, a bit of a rebel, but I accidentally did not notice the extrinsic motivation driving my career in the beginning, so I ended up doing two degrees that I did not finish.

 

I dropped out and found passion for travel accidentally and coincidentally, so accidentally because I traveled overseas with friends of mine who insisted I had to go with them. It wasn’t even my sort of pursuit, they just, it wasn’t as extrinsic motivation for sure, but once I traveled, I was fascinated by the world and then coincidentally met my husband who worked for airlines and I started my travel business and I loved it, you know, and for many years I loved it and that became my passion.

 

A passion that became a business that was completely intrinsic motivation and motivated. Nobody believed it was going to work. The business is still running. I sold it to my employees, but I moved on to other passions, right? So, it’s really interesting if you can think about what has driven your life in your career.

 

Has it come from inside you? Has it come from outside? If it has come from outside, has it worked for you? Because many times it works for a long time and then all of a sudden you have a crisis, a crisis of faith in yourself, a crisis of all of a sudden you find yourself unmotivated, but some people can go on forever because they have, you know, maybe a career that was extrinsically motivated.

 

So they were told to be an engineer or an accountant, but they had other loves in life. They love to go camping. They love to travel or they have a hobby that is intrinsically special to them and the job then becomes a way to bootstrap the rest of their lives.

 

And it’s fine. And people do sort of manage those relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But I want you to consider those things that are happening if they are happening in your life and try to identify them, write them down and analyze them.

 

So, depending on your nature and nurture, right, what you’ve learned naturally, you might find that you will be more inclined to tap into that aggressive force. Okay, some people find it easy. I find it easy, so I have to admit, but that is good for you because if you decide to work with me, I will make you accountable and I’ll help you find your drive, right?

 

So it’s good for coaches to have that. Other people find it less so, but they can find a way around it and other people find it really hard and I have clients that have the drive. They are the easiest clients to deal with. I have to admit, I’ll be frank with you. I have clients that once I give them the personal portfolio, which is my journaling system and I give them the job hunting made simple framework, which all of my clients get, you know, sometimes people get confused thinking it’s just my group coaching.

 

No, no, no. All of my clients get my frame. It’s my framework to get you where you want to go. All right. So I built that and I designed it. Once they get it, they are like a dog with a bone. They just go for it and use the sessions to bounce back ideas and redirect. The sessions provide that continuous improvement opportunity, and it’s just perfect.

 

It’s just great, a great sweet spot. Other clients I have found use the sessions to reignite the habit and the discipline. They may have fallen off the wagon a bit and might need the session for me to reinstate and maybe identify the gaps or the reasons why they’ve fallen off the wagon. And then we go again, and it’s completely fine.

 

And then other clients find it really, really hard to tap into that aggressive mode. They are usually very uncertain about their motivations, their intrinsic motivations. They find it hard to tap into that, and it could have happened over time that they just lost themselves. Usually, when I work with clients like that, they’re very burnt out and their brains are on survival mode. So fight and flight mode. And what I do is ask them to take a break and say, let’s take a break. Sometimes the break idea comes from them, which is great. I have clients who say, okay, I’m going to pay you. I want to start, you know, six months from now or three months from now. It’s paid for because I want to guarantee my spot.

 

But I need a break. Like, I can’t even talk about it right now. Like, I’m so exhausted. And that has happened quite a few times, immediately after the lockdowns and the pandemic. But I still get clients where I say, look, it’s not the right frame of mind to start job hunting when you are like this.

 

So why don’t you take a holiday? Can you afford it? Is it possible? So we kind of slow down a little bit so that the person recovers their brain. You may have experienced this. Please let me know that it’s not just my sample of clients. I have a feeling usually when I go and I teach career planning to master’s students.

 

We discuss this with, you know, a very big cohort, usually over a hundred students, and I find that that happens to them as well. So I’d love to hear from you if you think I’m speaking to you and if it’s resonating. So, for that reason, I think it would be great for you to do this exercise to understand what drives you. Think about what you visualize before you go to sleep. Making something, the process of going through the step-by-step of getting a project done, or do you visualize the actual achievement and you enjoying the achievements?

 

I’ll give you an example. When I am about to sleep and I am thinking about things, I’m usually thinking about the process. So I mentioned to you before that last year I went traveling and I remember going to bed, you know, in the months, not just the weeks or days, the months before the travel and thinking about the step-by-step of me getting ready to travel.

 

What I had to pack, what I had to buy, what I had to do, the sort of things that I would do when I was there in terms of the process of setting myself up to work from overseas, which was a big thing for me. I worked throughout my two and a bit months away. And I enjoy that visualization, right?

 

Whereas other people tell me, and sometimes it happens to me as well, but other people visualize themselves enjoying the actual trip, you know, being on a beach and drinking a piña colada, or walking in the streets of Paris or just enjoying the actual achievement of being there or doing something, and I find that boring every time that I try. I find that so boring.

 

I can do that for five minutes and it’s done. I don’t want to do that anymore. Even if I’m thinking about amazing things like winning the lottery, I am thinking about what I would do, how would I split the money, who would get money from me, what sort of investments I would make.

 

It’s not me enjoying the life of a millionaire. Are you like me? I don’t know. I’ve had this discussion with people before and I am made to feel a bit of a weirdo. So let me know if there are other people like me out there. And I’ve listened to a podcast episode where the father and son, I’ll put the link below.

 

One is a doctor. The other, I actually don’t know what he does, but it’s such a good show. I’ll put the link below. And it’s where I got the inspiration to do this episode for you. And the son is more of the achievement visualization and the father was more like me, the process visualization. I want you to think about what you visualize when you go to bed.

 

If you haven’t been visualizing anything recently, I understand. Think about it. You know, when you were a child, maybe younger, it’s even better because then you really know that sort of inner you that might have been masked by extrinsic motivations. And if it’s the process of making things then you can link that to that aggressive, generative, productive drive, that mode of pursuit that will help you, not only in career advancement and job hunting but other projects that are hard to engage with for some people, you might find it easier. If it’s the actual thing, then you are more tapped into the pleasure mode of enjoying the things that you’ve achieved in life and being comfortable with them, that calmness and the enjoyment of that. Both things are true.

 

Both things are good and ideally, you would have a balance of those two in your life. Okay, so when you do your visualization, think about how you feel. Do you feel capable? Do you feel competent? Do you feel content? Right? I bet you do. Whatever it is that you’re visualizing. When I am visualizing these projects of mine, you know, the travel or things that I want to do.

 

I’m very competent. I’m identifying all of the steps and I’m doing all of the things and then life happens and it’s not as easy. The more you visualize, the better the actual practical life things will become. So the fact that I visualized my trip so much, probably more than I should, to be honest, made the trip really smooth because I had a lot of tools from those visualizations that enabled me to do what I wanted to do, which was to travel and work and know the challenges and sort of I had thought those things through.

 

Okay. And if you are more in the pleasurable mode, you are going to enjoy the things that you’re experiencing in that trip because you’ve enjoyed them before and then you will enjoy them again. I hope so. Let me know what you think. Now here are the three things that will help you overcome potential bottlenecks that make it hard for you to advance in your career.

 

Okay? And to create more aggressive, more productive, more creative energy to pursue your career dreams. It’s important for us to address these three things that I’m going to talk to you about now. Number one, it’s what I just said before: the importance of feeling capable. This idea of feeling capable and competent is very hard when you have little to no experience in something like job hunting or career advancement.

 

You may have been very good at your job, but the competency and the capability to ladder in an organization in the corporate world requires a different set of skills from actually doing the job. But feeling capable and competent is really important. Second is that feeling of being in control, having autonomy, and being able to choose what you want to do in life and pursue as a purpose.

 

So this is important because when you leave it all to fate, it’s out of your control. When you leave it all to external forces, you have no autonomy, you are unable to choose your future and take control of your career. So coming back to, you know, my favorite topic of choice, career planning, career design, career sustainability, you know, that feeling of being in control is important.

 

And third, having a connection with what you’re doing. What I have found is that a lot of people have lost a connection of purpose or value to what they do in life. I bet many of you can resonate with that. They come in, they do the work, they come out, they are not seeing the value. They don’t feel passionate about it anymore.

 

They don’t see other people having purpose and value around you in a sense that what you are investing time in is something that is intrinsically motivating you. It might be extrinsically motivating you because you’re earning money and getting a salary from what you’re doing and keeping the lights on and the bills paid and all of that.

 

It might be a job title that is extrinsically motivating because it looks good on paper and people value it and, and externally it all seems fine, but inside you, it’s eating you up. Okay, so let’s repeat. Here are the three things that will help you overcome the bottleneck that you may be experiencing in your career, making you unable to take your career forward.

 

One, you need to feel capable and competent to take a career forward. Two, you need to have a feeling of being in control and having autonomy and being able to choose what you want in life to take your career forward. And three, you need to be connected with what you’re doing. And this may sound like woo-woo, and I know there’s a lot of controversy about, ‘Oh, you’re not passionate about your work,’ or, ‘Oh, passion, that’s B.S.’

 

Guess what? You’re competing with other people. And if they show up in an interview competing with you, and show passion, purpose, and meaning, and you don’t, people will notice, and they will be chosen as the candidate, and you will not. If it’s only extrinsically motivating you to pursue this job that you’re applying for, and not intrinsically motivating you, your chances of success in a competition are smaller than you think, because there are different factors that make people make decisions in an interview format.

 

Some of them can’t even put their finger on it, but a person who is really aligned with the role in value and purpose, it inspires and it transpires in a job interview format. I feel like this is another secret. I should have called this a secret, but I didn’t.

 

Okay, so let’s call it a secret. I’ve changed my mind. So, secret number three: these three things I just spoke about are not just good to haves. They are important psychological needs that lead you to intrinsic motivation. Recruiters, bosses, your colleagues, your friends, people around you, they won’t be able to exactly put their finger on what it is that’s emanating from you. You know, if you’re intrinsically motivated and feel competent and in control, and you’re connected to that role that you’re applying for.

 

Let’s say it’s a job interview. You will be the preferred candidate for a job or a promotion. It’s usually a person who has these three things nailed down that gets the job. Okay, now my role as a career coach is to get my clients there, and I have my expertise, which is, you know, behind the walls of my client coaching program to develop these three things with my clients.

 

Without these three, it’s hard to pursue a project like a career advancement project or a new job or any other project. Okay? It’s not just about career. I want you to expand this learning into other aspects of your life. So by tapping into your aggressive drive, you become in charge and you start making your own path in life.

 

If you delegate that to others, your employer, for example, you are taking what is given to you without much option and without autonomy. It may be comfortable in the short term, but risky in the long term because it takes away the competence you need to engage with the world when things go south. Okay, so that was another secret that I needed to share with you.

 

That competence that people lack in job hunting is very similar for somebody that has stayed in an organization for a long, long time. I have clients that had been in the same organization for two decades. Okay. And that lack of competence in job hunting is very similar to somebody that has not had a job for seven years.

 

10 years. Okay. I have clients that have engaged me after staying home to raise kids, and they come back to the workforce and I find that that lack of competence very similar because if you’ve been in an organization for that long. You haven’t had to have that fight in you, that aggressive drive in you.

 

Okay? So confidence and competence you need to deal with change comes from you tapping into that lever of that aggressive drive where you are in charge and you make your own path in life. And people that have squiggly careers like myself know very well how hard it is to start over again and again and again, but it makes you stronger, more resilient.

 

If you’re able to spiral up by the challenges that you encounter and you see those challenges as steps instead of stones. So, we can change our minds to become more aggressive, generative, and pursue our career projects. You know, this is kind of meta, that you need to be generative with your own mind to be generative with your career.

 

Does that make sense? Like, what if I am more of an easy going person, you know, and I need that energy and it’s so hard for me to tap? How do I do it? Right? It’s okay. I have plenty of clients like that. And I think that it’s very, very possible to do, but be good to yourself. Do it slowly, gradually, and over time.

 

Don’t try to change too much all at once. People often underestimate the transformative power of small steps and they overestimate how much they can change in a month or two. Okay? So, take it slow, build it gradually over time. The second thing that you can do is, you are productive in your mind. I bet you are.

 

Everybody is in your mind. You get things done. You do things. You know, when you’re thinking about it now, you need to apply that to real life. You may need a model, a framework. That’s why sometimes working with a coach helps or doing a program helps because it can translate your projects into being with a bit of a sprinkle of pragmatism and reality into it.

 

Because sometimes when we visualize and we dream about things, we don’t take that to market to experiment. So having conversations with people to get advice, mentoring and coaching is a great way to engage your dreams with the world. And thirdly, listen to your calling. I don’t say listen to your inner voice because we have so many voices inside us.

 

Usually, they’re contradictory and not always helpful to us, but we often dampen our calling, we bottle it up and we need to find that calling and tap on it, build on it, strengthen it, like a muscle when you go to the gym, this is physiotherapy for your career pursuit, find the pain and make it stronger again, okay?

 

Like when you go to physiotherapy or when you go to the gym. So, what are your next steps? Let’s talk about next steps that you can do. Okay. to continue this pursuit for your aggressive drive and balancing it with your pleasure drive. I will continue to address these topics in my podcast and in many ways and in different ways, I have already addressed them in episodes in the past.

 

We have a huge archive now, over 200 episodes, So search our archives for great episodes, and I’m going to suggest 1 7 4 job search. Not going well? Here is why and how to fix it. You can look for all this, you know, just go and have a look at the names, but I would recommend you listen to that episode.

 

You can also sign up for my newsletter and I will continue to keep you accountable every Tuesday. You will get a newsletter from me. And that reminder will prompt you to listen to another episode, read what I have to say. You know, maybe I’m, You know, running a special free masterclass like I am this time when you’re watching this episode in the week that you’re watching the episode, I am running a free masterclass for job seekers.

 

I would 100 percent recommend you to attend the masterclass, engage, ask questions and consider looking at the other services and free resources that I have on my website, you know, engage with it. Use your aggressive drive that you have right now because you’ve listened to this very long episode and keep on going, get into the flow of it and use that aggressive drive as often as you can.

 

Okay. All right. That’s it for today’s episode and it’s been a pleasure. I’m so glad that it’s out there. And I can’t wait to see you again next time. Keep me posted on how things are going with you and sign up for the newsletter so that we can be in touch. Bye for now. And I will see you next time.

 

Bye.

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