How my first job change helped me discover the key to job searching

I remember how frustrated I felt the first time I looked to change jobs.

The year was 2016. I was living in Peoria, Illinois. The same city I went to college in.?

I had a good job as a Compensation and HRIS Analyst working for a company I’d landed an internship with just before my senior year.

I’d gotten good at my role thanks to great mentorship from my boss and being given the chance to succeed and fail in my role. But I wasn’t happy.

A few years earlier, I realized I didn’t want to do my job forever.?

I rediscovered my childhood love for writing and began writing a few action thriller novels that I’d later publish in 2019. But besides my career confusion, I had another problem:

I was lonely.

My family was back home in the Quad Cities where I grew up. All my friends had moved to Chicago after college graduation. I was basically on an island by myself.?

But despite my loneliness, I was terrified to look for a new job.?

I feared asking old bosses I hadn’t spoken to in years for a reference or putting myself out there in front of recruiters and hiring managers in a new city.

These fears prevented me from finding the happiness I deserved. Plus, I was under the grand delusion that I'd become the next Stephen King with my fiction and assumed I’d be rolling in the dough with book royalties. Eventually, though, my loneliness won out.

At the end of 2016, I decided to look for a new job in Chicago.

At first, it was nothing but suffering.?

I applied for a few jobs and grew irritated and upset when I didn’t hear a peep after a few weeks. I started wondering if I’d ever find a job and be able to move to Chicago. Through tears, I remember explaining my fears to my mom, wondering if I’d ever escape my loneliness.?

On a Friday night in early February 2017, I stumbled upon a new job listing on LinkedIn.?

Immediately, I was intrigued.

I visited the company’s website and found myself drawn to the mission almost immediately. It was a healthcare company dedicated to transforming healthcare for older adults. As a health and fitness enthusiast, I was very motivated to join the company and be part of their long-term success.

It was a much different feeling from how I felt about applying for many of the other roles I’d found.

Aside from the rewarding mission, the job itself spoke exactly to what I was looking for.?

In the job I was in at the time, I took on more work during my boss’s maternity leave. Taking on more work and representing the compensation function in more of a leadership capacity gave me the confidence to apply for this new role. The new job would be the first Compensation professional at the company, and I was motivated to help build compensation processes from the ground up.

I had friends coming to see me that weekend, so I didn’t apply right away.?

But as soon as they left, I raced to put together a resume and cover letter that would show I was the perfect person for the job. My experience fit the job description almost to the letter.

Instead of approaching this job from a place of desperation, begging and pleading to get this role so I could move, I approached it with non-attachment. When you approach something with non-attachment, you have ambition for achieving a goal, but you don’t get caught up in the outcome. You’re able to move toward something whole-heartedly and not be broken if it doesn’t work out. Non-attachment was the key I needed to finally unlock success in my job search.?

Non-attachment let me pursue this new job from a place of creation, being able to ask the interview panel what problems they were facing and offer solutions as the expert partner that they needed.

I took this positive, creative energy into the interview process, landed the job, and finally fulfilled my dream of moving to Chicago.

So what can you learn from this?

Don’t get attached to any job you are applying for. Instead, find something about the role you can actually get excited about. Whether it’s the company’s mission, the job duties, how you plan to solve problems, or all of the above. Approach the job search with non-attachment and from a place of creative energy. You’ll be far more likely to land the right job for you.

Tomorrow, I’ll share how you can position yourself as the perfect solution for the employer’s job “problem.”

Have you approached non-attachment in your job search? What was that like for you? Let me know in the comments!