Top Takeaways: 6 Job Seeking & Mental Fitness Tips for Midlife Professionals

Top Takeaways: 6 Job Seeking & Mental Fitness Tips for Midlife Professionals

On August 13, illume hire hosted our first Happy Hour event with Dorianna Phillips and she provided some great tips to help mid career professionals cope during this time.  

She was the Director of Talent Acquisition for Stoel Rives law firm which is one of the largest law firms in the Pacific Northwest and now she has her own consulting and coaching firm called I.N. SPIRE Consulting. She coaches teams and empowers people to identify their strengths, build their mental fitness, and achieve peak performance. 

During our live interview, she provided tips from a talent acquisition perspective when hiring someone in mid-career. She also talked about different ways that a mid-career professional can take control of your mind using mental fitness tips. The following are some of the tools she shared to help people during a job search in a pandemic.

  1. Operate from Your Strengths: Embracing what you know you’re good at and enjoy is a start.  This takes self-awareness and the willingness to ask friends what they believe are your strengths.  These strengths can be illustrated using storytelling during an interview when it aligns with the job description.
  2. Daily Gratitude:  Having a journal and writing down every morning three aspects of gratitude will set the tone for your day. Those three things are the following: gratitude about something in your personal life, gratitude about something in your professional life, and gratitude about something in your environment.
  3. Self Saboteurs (Self Sabotaging Voices): Everyone has doubts and fears but when we focus on something terrible, we aren’t doing ourselves any favors. Dorianna said we have the power to change that ongoing voice in our heads. She recommends calling out our fears and negative thoughts out loud. By doing this, she says, it removes the power they have over us.
  4. PQ Pinch: There was a point in the interview when we all stopped, closed our eyes and pressed our thumb to our index finger in order to think of something calming. She calls it the “Positive Intelligence Pinch” or “PQ” for short. “Positive Intelligence” is a book by Shirzad Charmine that she highly recommends. Sometimes our minds get hijacked and when we’re filled with overwhelming thoughts, she recommends redirecting our mind by doing this simple exercise. It’s research-based and she said it works for people who get overly stressed. Something I think we all need during a pandemic.
  5. Know your Why:  This is your key for knowing your personal brand and will give you clarity when looking for your next gig.  Simon Sinek wrote a book called, “Start with Why” which talks about this as the main differentiator for yourself and for your business. Know your purpose, your cause, and your beliefs and this will guide you in life and it will also inspire others along the way.
  6. Grace:  Dorianna referred to grace as being easy on yourself.  We’re all going through different challenges now and it can be difficult. She talks about giving yourself grace as you learn new things and as you face obstacles.  

Our next event is on September 17th at 5:00 pm PST and the focus is “3 Tips to Find Your Hidden Strengths” by Amy Krakowski, an executive coach. Space is limited so reserve your spot here:

https://www.illumehire.com/events/