We all know stress is not good for you or anyone else for that matter.  But what if you could use it for your benefit?  What if stress were your friend?  If you could harness the energy that comes from the nervous knot in your stomach, you might be able to use it to your advantage when the competition heats up and you need that extra push towards achieving your goal

It’s what you tell yourself when things are not going your way and when every job interview turns into a form of rejection.  It’s what you want to believe because it’s easier sometimes to feel sorry for yourself instead of maybe doing something about it.  It’s how you feel when you hear over and again how others are getting the coveted job offers and you are still wondering why you can’t lock down an interview.

Second-guessing is a natural part of the process especially when you’ve been out of the job search game for a while.  Or, maybe you are so sure of yourself that you know what you want and don’t feel the need to waste your time on networking outside of your comfort zone?  It’s okay, no one is judging you, however, when it comes to knowing what you want from what you don’t want, it’s always a good idea to take the meeting to help you figure it out.

I know you know what you are talking about but does anyone else?  We often say things to sound prolific, savvy, or with it, but do you know how it sounds to the person sitting on the other side of the desk?  It would be nice to walk around with a tape recorder all the time and hit “playback” to listen to the pearls of wisdom that trickle from your lips especially when you are in an interview.  Trying to impress is one thing, but sounding like a moron is another. Here are five unexpected side effects when you open your mouth in an interview.

Having the common sense to know how to properly lay out your professional background without relying on a template you’ve pulled off the internet, is going to save you a lot of time and aggravation in the long run when it comes to writing a smart, concise and relevant resume-even if at times you feel like no one is reading it!

You may think you’ve done this enough times to know what you know and how best to interview for your dream job.  Sure, practice is everything.  But sometimes you get so comfortable in our habits of how you dress or show up for a meeting, or how you prepare by maybe even carrying a lucky talisman around, that you might appear a bit “auto-tron” in your delivery.  It’s not that you are getting set in your ways, but changing it up is never a bad thing especially when you are out to impress.

When you are in doubt, despair, or you just plain can’t do it anymore like the song says, “There will be an answer, Let it be.”  Sometimes you just don’t know where the answer will come from but chances are, when you are at your most concerned, the answer will appear if you just “let it be.”

Living life large may not have been in the cards for you when you accepted the job offer, but sometimes you feel that your survival depends on how well you can play the career game when the rules inevitably change over time.  It’s not just about keeping up anymore or doing a good job.  You have to be very astute and understand the hidden dynamics of any workplace environment whether you have your eye on the corner office or not.

Like the popular Gallagher family on Showtime’s “Shameless,” do you ever ask yourself what lengths you would go to get and keep the job you want?  It’s a scary thought but with the way the world is rolling these days, despite the decrease in unemployment, how you get and keep the job you want is becoming like a game show challenge with one contestant trying to beat out the other under the most extreme and at times obscene circumstances.

When it comes to finding and ACCEPTING a job offer we all have our lists.  It may be that your list contains what you would and would not want from your next job much like a list you’d create if you were picking the perfect mate.  But we all have our limits of what we would accept from a job regardless of how great it all sounds.  Even if you’ve been at this for a while, you still have standards, whether you choose to lower them or not is entirely a different matter. I’m not judging you by any means.  Let’s face it as we get older we seem less inclined to be as picky about certain things as when we were eager beavers graduating school wanting to take the world by it’s job-balls!