Hi, I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, the head coach for JobSearch.Community, and I got a great question. I thought I would use this as my video for the day, and that is: “How do I avoid self-sabotage and find a new job?”

Now, I think the answer to that question is in two parts. Number one is: someone gave you this psychological label that I think is absolutely useless. You know, self-sabotage, it’s as though you’re going into these interviews and intentionally trying to screw up, or you have a deep-rooted psychological issue that’s causing you to make these mistakes that are proving so costly. And instead, you know, it’s not necessarily self-sabotage. What it is is you may not really have a lot of experience in interviewing and you need to improve.

You see, what’s happened in modern times is there’s a lot of labels that get thrown around conveniently that I think traumatize people, and I think the label “self-sabotage” is one of those labels. It causes people to think that the problems are deep-seated when in fact they could be really very simple. And the simple solution to messing up on interviews is practice. How many times have you been practicing for the rest of you? And when you start thinking about practice and the impact of lack of practice, there’s a real issue.

You see, we’ve all heard of the 10,000-hour rule, but most job hunters have about, oh, half an hour of practice, maybe, if they’re lucky. They go on the interview, they think they can kind of wing it, and they screw up, and they screw up on the next one, and they screw up on the third one, and they will suddenly have a label: “They’re self-sabotaging.” But in fact, they don’t have experience.

So I want to encourage you: get some experience interviewing. Work with friends. Join jobsearchcoachinghq.com. Practice answers to the interview questions that we have there. It will go a long way toward eliminating this issue of being, you know, inexperienced and amateurish. I have to say “amateurish” because professionals practice. Don’t believe me? Look at every athlete that’s at the Olympics, every professional athlete, they’re all out, the amateur, successful amateurs, they’re all practicing, and you’re not. So that’s the biggest issue there. It’s not some deep-seated psychological thing that’s causing you to mess up. It’s your lack of experience doing this and your amateurish behavior that’s saying, “I don’t have to do this.” So wake up, start doing the work, and you’ll start getting the results. Hope you have found this helpful. Have a great time, take care.