How to have a healthy relationship with your job applications

You know those people that get carried away by relationships? They go on a few dates with somebody and suddenly they’re building castles in the sky – planning their wedding, doodling names on their notebook and mentally planning out their life for the next thirty or forty years. Next thing you know they’re sobbing on your shoulder because the other person got freaked out by the intensity and broke it off.

Photo by Mendhak via flickr

Well, it turns out that when it comes to jobs that’s exactly the kind of person I am: as soon as I know I’ve got an interview (arguably the first date of the job hunting process) I get carried away imagining my life if I got the job; I look at possible places to live, think about how I’d get to work and work out where I’d meet up with my friends. I even plan holidays I could take on the salary available. Just like the over-keen person in a relationship I go too far, too fast when there’s no guarantee that the outcome of the situation will be the one I want. As a result, I leave myself completely emotionally vulnerable for the (seemingly) inevitable rejection that ensues.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly if your job hunt is just beginning or not going well: in the former situation every application seems like a dazzling pathway to a better future and you get carried away by the fantasy and in the latter each opportunity provides a glimmer of hope that this time the search might be over and you’ll finally get your life sorted. Either way, you get attached to the vision of the future rather than the job itself, meaning that when you’re unsuccessful you don’t just lose the job, you lose all the plans and dreams that go along with it.

While this may not seem like the worst thing in the world, I’ve learned the hard way that if you keep repeating this pattern with each application you get extremely disheartened about the job hunt and depressed about your future opportunities.

Instead of focusing completely on one role at a time therefore, make sure you have a number of applications on the go at any one time – put the same amount of effort in but don’t dwell on the possibilities inherent in each position. The more positions you apply for, the more possible futures there are, making it less likely you’ll get overly invested in any of them. In addition to this, when you come back from an interview get straight on with the next application – it can be tempting to give yourself a break but resist: taking a break often means you are subconsciously relying on getting the job whereas continuing the process prevents you becoming too emotionally involved with the future that success could provide.

Are you a needy job hunter? Do you get too attached to the possibilities each job provides? Let me know in the comments. For more job hunting information click here.