During my first job search I equated success to landing a new position.  It seemed a reasonable position, in that it’s what I was trying to accomplish.

Before continuing to read, how have you defined success in your job search?

As my search carried on, I never seemed to have a sense of satisfaction.  When I was working, I gained satisfaction from completed items or witnessed success.  But it took a meeting with a colleague to help me realize that I did not feel the same in search simply because of my definition of success.

A friend of mine, Jim Rasmussen, who has spent his career in Sales and Sales coaching, clued me into the mindset of a Rainmaker.  While ultimately judged on completing the sale, the Rainmaker knows the sales cycle can be long – so they look at the accomplishments that get them closer to a decision as victories. 

This viewpoint is important to maintaining your best work as the sales process can be long, tedious, filled with stalls and capricious behavior of the corporate buyers.  (Feel familiar my fellow job seekers?)

Jim’s lesson was that these little victories add up over time and celebrating these victories is important to keeping your psyche strong.  Once I adopted my new definition of ‘success’, I got greater satisfaction in networking and job search.

Professional sales folks have a variety of tools to track their success, so I tried to figure out how to ‘track’ my search.  I searched around for a simple solution and found the Daily Point System devised by Jeffrey Fox for his book “How to Become a Rainmaker”.   I made a few adaptations for search and sent a copy to Jeffrey and asked if could share it – thankfully he agreed.

The goal of the point system is time management and to help focus your networking on those that move you closer to a decision maker.  After using it for about three weeks, I found my successes were more rapid – simply because I was networking with the appropriate people.  I was doing the same amount of networking; I just got more out of it.

Another practice I adopted was every Friday to write down three successes I had during the week.   I kept a running list and it served a good boost to the psyche as I added to the list.

To see Jim’s profile or the “Daily Point System”, please see the links below.

Good luck today!

Mark

Jim’s profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimras/

Daily Point System: http://candidateschair.com/tools/ – See Tool #11.