On Monday I wrote about what it takes – from the point of view of the employer – to make a successful senior hire.  But what about the other side of the coin?   What if you’re looking for the right role for you and wondering quite how high to pitch your aspirations at this time of economic downturn?

I found myself reflecting on this question after meeting with one of several coaching clients who are all currently looking for a job.  One thing I notice about friends, colleagues and clients who are currently searching for jobs is a tendency to scale back their aspirations in order to guard themselves against possible disappointment.  This is a tendency some have at any time (after all, it doesn’t do to get ideas above your station and modesty is a virtue, right?).  It’s also a tendency that is somehow magnified by the idea that in a downturn, organisations have few vacancies at senior levels and are inundated with applications from highly talented candidates for the job.

Rather than scale back their aspirations, I have been encouraging clients to dream big and to embody their dreams in advance in order to make it more likely that they will apply for and successfully find the perfect job for them.  After all, as well as coaching senior executives when they are looking for or (more usually) in big jobs, I also have experience over a number of years of assessing candidates for senior roles.  I find that the complaint that organisations have “too much talent to choose from” is rare.

So how can you step into that senior role ahead of time and in such a way as to provide clarity about what you’re looking for and to boost your confidence as you undertake your search?  Neurolinguistic programming (or NLP) has encoded some of the things we do quite naturally and these can be used to help us to explore what we are really wanting and to make our aspirations more vivid and compelling.  In this series of postings I offer just a few approaches from the NLP toolkit to help you to develop a felt sense of your perfect job.  You can try any or all of these to build your perfect job “muscle”.