Brain
Power = Job Hunting
The moment you
enter the job-changing arena, you engage in a game of mental gymnastics. You
may be looking for a new position, but the interviewer has a different set of
priorities. Most interviewers have no idea who to hire. When this occurs, they resort
to the sport of letting applicants
eliminate themselves.
Mindless job
hunters are not aware of this. They stumble into the interview believing that
all they have to do is present a résumé, answer a few simply questions, fill out the
job application and voilà; a job offer will magically materialize. Only under
menial and perfunctory openings does this occur. For substantive
positions, you will encounter competition.
To be a viable
candidate you need to out-think the interviewer(s), and you have to out-smooch
your competition. Another way of viewing it is that you are simultaneously engaging
in two activities—get the interviewer(s) to like you, and beat out your competition. If by chance you think this is an easy task, you are only fooling yourself.
Successful job
hunting and interviewing is akin to playing two separate spots at the same
time. To be successful, you have to remain super-mentally focused. To remain super-mentally
focused, however, requires brain power.
Your brain is a
complex, highly sensitive organ. The brain functions on what you feed it. Feed your
brain what it needs, and your brain will return the favor many times over. The
opposite, however, is equally true. Feed your brain sugar poison and it will punish
you severely.
In my quest to provide
my clients with the best job-seeking strategies available, I constantly search
for quintessential information that will benefit them. Recently, while thumbing
through Dr. Amen’s book, Use Your Brain
To Change Your Age, by sheer happenstance, I flipped open his book to page 87.
He had written the following:
Sugar is not your
friend. We have often heard of sugar being called “empty calories.” In fact, it
(sugar) is so damaging to your brain and body that I call it anti-nutrition or
toxic calories. Sugar increases inflammation in your body, increases erratic brain cell firing, and sends
your blood sugar levels on a roller-coaster ride. Moreover, new research shows that sugar is
addictive and can even be more
addictive than cocaine.
(Italics and bracket added for emphasis and
clarity.)
For those unfamiliar
with Dr. Amen, he is the foremost authority on applying brain imaging science as
it relates to psychiatric practice. He is also a fourfold New York Times bestselling author. His clinics maintain the world’s
largest database on brain scans.
Over
the years, I have harangued endlessly to clients about the health hazards of
consuming sugar-related substances in one’s eating habits. As bad as sugar is,
high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is sugar on steroids, and thus, many times worse.
This unregulated poison shows up in products everywhere. It is most commonly found
in soda pop and candy, but it is also added to sauces, salad dressings, jells, mustard and ketchup—you name it.
The agrochemical industry has come to realize that label-reading shoppers are s
avoiding products containing high amounts of sugar and HFCS. As a result, the
industry engages in duplicitous semantics to disguise the poison. They sneak in
words like sorbitol, maltose, maltodextrin and galactose
to avoid using terms you might otherwise recognize.
This has been
mentioned in my previous blogs, but it bears repeating: If you don’t know what the
ingredient is or you cannot pronounce it—don’t
eat it! If you are serious about achieving job-hunting success, you are reminded
that you and your brain are the sum total of what you consume. Therefore, what
you consume directly affects your job hunting and interviewing performance.