St.Louis Business Journal
SELLING SELF WHILE JOB HUNTING CAN BE DIFFICULT FOR SOME PEOPLE

By Anna Navarro

December 2006  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.

Sometimes people who are great at selling ideas or advocating on behalf of others have a great deal of trouble selling themselves. It's not an unusual phenomenon, though the source of the problem seems to vary with the individual.

Edith was in charge of product development for a major biotech company. Her job was to come up with new uses for proprietary technology by developing strategic alliances with other companies. She was a go-getter and her ambition was to keep climbing the corporate ladder.

In the beginning, her boss, the CFO, encouraged her and gave her a great deal of latitude. But in the last couple of years it seemed she could do nothing right. She’d tried everything she could think of -- working long hours, making him look good with the CEO, humoring him, flattering him, volunteering for tough assignments. It got her nowhere. In fact, the harder she tried, the more constraints he seemed to put on her. The crowning blow came when he promoted a less qualified peer to a newly created corporate development position she really wanted.

She realized after that incident that it was time to get out . . . but the thought of job hunting made this usually assertive and astute individual freeze in her tracks. She came to see me because she was hitting a brick wall within herself and didn't know how to get past it.

I honestly wasn’t sure at first whether I could help her. I am not a psychologist, counselor or therapist, and I explained that if this involved deep emotional issues, I'd have to refer her to someone else. But I did agree to explore the problem with her and help her find the right resource if I couldn’t help her.

I started by asking her to describe what happened when she had to do a hiring interview. She said she had a minor speech impediment that surfaced when the spotlight was on her as a person. It didn’t seem to be a problem when she was making a business presentation, or even negotiating deals. But selling herself was a different matter. She would start to stutter slightly and her self-consciousness about that would disable her clarity of thinking, making it hard to interview well. It was this automatic cascade of events that made her dread job hunting.

She said the stuttering problem went back to some painful events of being bullied when she was a schoolgirl. That was just the clue we needed. In my bag of tools as a career strategist are some very powerful methods called “emotional freedom techniques” that are particularly useful in helping people overcome the long term effects of fearful experiences. If the reason she was having trouble interviewing had been different, I might not have proposed using them.

The technique is a purely mechanical one involving tapping acupuncture points, doing rapid eye movements and several other quick physical procedures while focussing on the problem. It is definitely a very odd approach, but I had had great results helping several clients through difficult situations with it.

I explained to Edith how the process works, and gave her some background reading. She agreed the technique sounded very odd, but she was game to try. So we scheduled a two-hour session and set about applying the techniques to her situation. To her amazement, by the time we finished the session the old memories of bullying no longer evoked discomfort for her, and she no longer dreaded the idea of interviewing.

Several weeks later she had her first interview and it went smoothly. As is typical of the techniques we used, she could hardly remember why she had dreaded interviewing in the past. Her normally intelligent and articulate self took over and her past trauma and its effects simply fell away. With this problem out of the way, Edith quickly found a great job that was challenging and promised room for future advancement.

Later she told me that she had only decided to go ahead with this approach because she was desperate. I admire Edith for responding in such an open- minded way to the crisis she was experiencing instead of retrenching at the idea of trying something new and different. Sometimes that's what it takes to get through a brick wall.