Is There a Better Way To Plan Your Future Than Chasing That Killer Resume?
Author: Brian McCallister Source: BrazenCareerist
Your resume isn’t much different than your social media profile. While it may omit some embarrassing pictures, your resume represents a carefully curated persona. It reduces your complex virtues into shiny marketing collateral.
But the problem with resumes isn’t that we brand and sell ourselves — it’s that the experiences we tout on our resumes often don’t reflect what we want to do with our lives. They represent a bunch of things we thought we should do.
A resume is no longer just bullet points in Arial font. It’s become a totalitarian dictator, coercing us into chasing things that conflict with our hopes and dreams just because those things look nice on paper.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can build lives we want to live. And by pursuing career goals that excite us, we’ll end up building impressive resumes in the process.
Here’s how.
Shed expectations and listen to your gut
There’s a soundtrack to the world we live in. It’s an ambient, barely discernible noise that constantly tells us who we should be and what we should want. From Photoshopped ads showing us what to strive for, to Instagram posts that make us feel inadequate, to articles on the highest-paying careers — we’re immersed in propaganda that pressures us to follow other people’s ideas of success.
These external ideas often overpower our internal aspirations and push us down paths that aren’t our own choosing. We’re pressured to attend medical school (even though we love design); to take that prestigious job offer (despite having no interest in the field); to scale back our “impractical” dreams. Either way, blindly heeding this noise is a ticket to career disillusionment and spending your work days covertly browsing websites until you’ve read and watched the entire Internet.
Analyze the advice you’re hearing and determine whether it matches what you really want. If you follow it, will you be bored with your work? Will you be living for weekends and Netflix binges? Will you have been true to yourself? If all signs are pointing to “I’m going to be a zombie,” mute outside influences and listen to yourself.
#whatyouneedtoknow #Tips #jobsearch #Work #help #Life #ResumeTips #Success #CareerAdvice #Advice #pointers