Starting Your Flow-Guided Job Search

I am 100% sure that this is the first time I've ever started exactly on time for your LinkedIn live and sister podcast, the Mindset Rx. This is Dr. Robyn McKay and welcome. It's your place to be, if you are an emotionally intelligent leader who is ready to set the tone for a positive, productive and purposeful week, month, year, life, legacy, all the things. And this year in 2022, I'm focusing on career Rx, actually, I'm focusing on finding your best job.

I know that we're in the middle of what's being called the Great Resignation, in some cases it's being called the Quiet Resignation, and for a lot of the technical professionals who are emotionally intelligent, who have been having this sense over the last couple of years that they want to do something really meaningful at work that's in alignment with their values, that's in alignment with their creativity, that they can make the greatest contribution, to basically do work that matters in the world and to be compensated for their contributions in a way that's in alignment with what they value as well.

These are the things that I've been talking about privately with my clients who are working with me and my company on finding their dream jobs, and I'm sharing some of that with you today because I think it's important to start having conversations about job searches that are quite different than perhaps the conversations we're having even a couple of years ago before the pandemic and before the existential conundrums and before the realizations that a lot of my colleagues and friends and clients are having about what they wanna be doing with the rest of their lives and maybe that's you too. So whether you're here with me live on LinkedIn, I'd love to hear it from you, so say hello here.

If you're listening to the recording or to the sister podcast, say hello. You can reach out to me at robyn@drrobynmckay.com and let me know, what are your top takeaways from today? Where are you at in your own career path? Are you looking for a new position? Are you? Are you thinking about it? Probably, if you're here with me, you're at least thinking about it. So hopefully today you'll walk away with a couple of good tips in terms of how to start thinking about your job search differently than probably what you learned. Well, definitely what you learned when you were in undergrad at the career center, but even as we get more experienced and have different information come to us about job searches, this is a little bit different as well. So let's go ahead and start today like we always do. I love to just slow down for just a second, take a breath, if you can, put away everything else and just give yourself the gift of the next 10-15 minutes to be here, to be present with yourself with your hopes, with your dreams, with your most deeply held desires when it comes to making your contribution in this world right now.

So breathe in and breathe out. And let's dive in today to this topic of flow-based job searches. I was thinking about this topic today. I always tune in to kind of what's going on in the world when I'm making decisions about what I'm gonna be talking about today, and that was the thing that came forward for me this week, because a lot of the people I've been talking with and working with have had the sense of frustration when it comes to job searches, because they know what they don't want, they know that they don't want a job where they have to work harder or work longer hours or... It's not necessarily about the responsibility but the idea of having to work longer, harder for more pay or for greater status in the organization feels heavy. It feels heavy. And what I tell them is that what got you here to this position in your career is not going to be enough to get you to the next level, that doesn't mean that they're not enough, they certainly are more than enough, but there are some mindsets and practices that you need to learn now for this time, for this job search, that you didn't need to get to where you were. If you needed them, you would have already had them in place.

So let me start by talking just a little bit about flow. Flow is a consciousness stage that's associated with creativity, it's where you lose track of time, you become completely absorbed and engaged in the activity, your ability, skills and talents rise to meet whatever challenge is in front of you during this flow state. Writers will find flow when they're writing, musicians when they're performing or when they're composing music, engineers find flow when they're doing problem solving, strategy, figuring things out, making sense of things, generating ideas, designing. Surgeons find flow when they're the surgery, when they're operating on somebody. And one of the things I think is missing in job searches, even for executives, is that question of, where do you find your flow? Because here's the thing, when you're in flow, whatever you're doing isn't hard work, in other words, it can be intense, it can be requiring high focus on your part, but it's not hard work, it's somehow effortless, even in the effort, even in the focus that you are putting out.

The problem for most people today is that our attention is split in a million different directions, we have competing priorities, and even from moment to moment, even as we've been sitting here now for the last six minutes talking about flow-based job searches, you have probably pulled your attention away several times during this conversation.

And listen, I know I'm scintillating but still, even though you have a scintillating host, it can still be distracting with all of the other things going on in the world. Even for me, even as I'm in flow here and doing this, I can hear my husband in his office having a phone conversation with a client. We are having our house painted this week, so I'm aware that there are people outside of my house working on that project. So we have all of these distractions, but even in the midst of that, we can find flow and use flow as our home base, use flow as the place where we can come to, return to, stay in, and when we're there we actually make the greatest contribution at work, that's where we make the greatest contribution, is when we're in flow. And I can almost hear you, the frustration rising, "I know where my flow is, but I have so many other things to do, but I'm over-scheduled, but my kid is coming into my office right now and distracting me." There are a million things that are going to be distracting us and yet that quiet place of flow is a place that we wanna go, not just for job searches, but for the job itself.

So when you're in your job search, of course you're going to polish your resume or your CV, of course you're going to up-level your LinkedIn profile and optimize that, of course you're going to rattle your network and let them know that you are in the market for a new position. So those are all external things, but the internal shift that I want to talk about today is the mindset that is important for you to take as you're doing this work, and that is actually what's gonna elicit flow for you during the job search. First mindset is curiosity. I wonder what's out there. Second mindset is, I'm not gonna take just anything. You remember when you were a kid and you were looking for your first job and you're like, "I don't care, I'll do anything, just pay me." And then when you got your first job out of undergrad or your first job out of your professional school, how it was really kind of...

It felt kind of like a crapshoot, didn't it? It felt pretty random, where you landed, most likely, and because it felt so random in the past, your intellect, your brain is thinking, "Well, it's gonna seem random this time as well," but the more intentional and the more focused you get on, this is what I want for my next position and I know that I don't want these things over here for my next position. One of the things that I wanna encourage you to want more of in your next position is more opportunities to be in flow, which means that you're prioritizing your greatest strengths, your greatest assets in your job, and you're putting in their proper place, those things that you have to do, those details that are of course responsibilities like, I don't know, if you have an inbox zero policy, if that's a thing that you wanna do, that's maybe a detail, but we don't want to forsake our flow for the details, we don't wanna forsake our flow for the details. We don't wanna forsake flow for busyness.

All of us are so busy and that busyness energy is actually disruptive to the flow process, whether you're looking for your job or you're in your job, the busyness is a disruption to flow. So another part of the mindset and practice is as best you can, allowing yourself to tune into something other than busyness, 'cause a lot of times the mindset around busyness is why I look busy, I'm so busy, but you can be busy spinning your wheels in the mud and not getting anywhere. But when we tune into your flow consciousness for your job search, for your job, now you're no longer busy, now you're in flow, now you're productive, now you're efficient in your productivity. And I want you to just tune in here for just a second, 'cause I'm just even noticing a relaxed, focused experience coming over my body, my body is even relaxing to step out of the habit of busyness and to restore my relationship with the flow, and that's the same for you as you are doing the job search, restore your relationship with flow. So as you're doing your job search, the mindset, the belief that I want you to start practicing is the belief that I can find a position where I can be in flow, there is one out there.

Rumi whose... I always forget what century Rumi was in. I'm gonna just spitball it and say I think he was 14th century, but I'm not sure, but Rumi said, "What you seek is seeking you. What you seek is seeking you." And when you operate from that place, that belief that what I seek is seeking me, that job that I seek is seeking me, that manager, supervisor, boss, leader who I'm seeking is seeking me, that project, that idea that I'm seeking is seeking me, it takes a load of pressure off the job search itself, because now you know you don't have to throw a spaghetti at the wall and and see what sticks, you can be very targeted and focused in your curiosity about your job search, and you'll only apply for jobs that are in alignment with your most deeply held values, that are in alignment with, as far as you can tell, with your capacity to experience flow in that particular job.

So I would say to my clients who work with me privately on next leveling their job, it's usually director level, people who want to move into an executive, like a VP position or VP positions who want to move into the C-suite, that's usually where people are in the process. But when I work with them, what I tell them about even applying for a job, if it's not an absolute yes, it's a no, and that eliminates so many of those kind of lukewarm possibilities and attunes your mind and your heart to be more like a heat-seeking missile for those positions that are, "Oh my God, I would love to be in that position."

"Oh my God, I would love to work for that company," that's the energy and the spirit of flow that we want you to be in while you are doing the job search. So the mindset shift, the inner work is what's very important right now, for those of you who are seeking new positions right now, it's less about the things that you can do, we can see that from your resume, we can see that from your credentials, it's less about that and more about who you're being, it's more about how you're thinking about things. And in part, it's about letting go of that old habit of busyness and really practicing and cultivating that experience every single day of flow. Now here's where I will end today, 'cause I have a feeling this is coming up for you too, and I'm smiling, if you can't see me, I'm smiling and chuckling to myself because we live in a world where there's so much busyness and there are so many competing priorities, and you look around your lived reality right now and you're like, "Doc, nothing is even close to what you're talking about."

And it can feel frustrating, it can feel dejecting, disappointing and almost impossible to move yourself out of that when your reality is so different from what I'm talking about.

There's such a big contrast between what Robyn's talking about over here with flow-based work, where I could be contributing my very best and minimizing the details, the distractions and the busyness. I would love that, but my current reality does not look like that. So here's where we're gonna get a little bit more esoteric and this is important.

I know you're emotionally intelligent and I wouldn't be sharing this with you if I didn't think you could handle it, if I didn't think that you were ready for it. So I study and I've worked in universal law for a long, long time, and there's one universal law that's really important here, and that is the universal law of clarity. And basically, in a nutshell, here's what the universal law of clarity says, it says, God or the universe didn't create half of anything, there's no half of an elephant and there's no half of a giraffe, and in more nebulous concepts like jobs, the universe didn't just create toil and chaos and busyness. That's one side.

That's one side of the pole. On the other side of the pole, the polar opposite, that is flow, peace, contribution, well-being at work. So what my teachers have always said to me is that when you're not experiencing that thing that you want, which in this case would be, I would say flow-based work, flow-based job search, flow-based life, when you're not experiencing that, you're just on the other side of the pole, you're on the polar opposite, frequency, you're on the other end of the spectrum. And that's okay. You just have to know that that's where you are. Once you know that that's where you are, and now you can start looking and gradually and incrementally moving in the direction that you know also exists, it has to, because there's no half of anything, there's dark and light, isn't there? There's busyness and peace, isn't there? So if you're sitting on the end of the spectrum that has busyness and frustration and disruptions and pressure that's unnecessary or unwarranted, just know that that's the side of the pole you're on. That's okay. No judgment about it, but also know there's freedom, isn't there, in knowing that there is an opposite.

So when you're on your job search, if you're on the end of the job search that's saying to you, there's no jobs, or that it's really hard to get a job or it's really hard, especially at an executive level, to find the position that I'm looking for. That's the experience that you're most likely to have, what you're focusing on, you're going to receive. Makes sense, doesn't it? 

So my encouragement for you today is, for closing, this time together is to start looking for the opposite of what you're experiencing. I've even on occasion told my executive job search clients to ignore their reality. I'm not talking about burying their head in the sand or anything like that, but just act as if and begin to be the person... What kind of person? Who are you when you have this beautiful job that's allowing you to make your greatest contributions? That's allowing you to lead in the way that you know that your heart wants to lead, that's allowing you to invent the things that you most desire to invent or to contribute. Who is that person? It's a version of you. So if you can start being real curious about that, the version of you who you are becoming, that's going to help clear some of these disruptive energies and experiences that you're having, so you can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You can start to see the polar opposite of what you've been experiencing at work, and you can just course correct yourself and start deciding... Start deciding that you're going to look for opportunities to see more of the things that you want, even in your current position, not to mention the job that is seeking you. That's all I have for now.

It's been my joy to be here with you today, I've been in flow, and I hope that you had a couple of moments of flow too as you were listening to me. I will see you next week. If you wanna get in touch with me, shoot me an email, robyn@drrobynmckay.com, tell me what's on your mind and let me know, I'm happy to be of service either to your teams or to yourself as you're going through your own experience in finding that flow-based job. All my best. See you next week.