How To Prepare Ourselves Psychologically For A Competitive Job?

Jobs have undergone a remarkable change in recent decades. Before the work was more mechanical, routine and less competitive, which required more physical effort from workers, but less mental. Surely you have heard your parents and grandparents say that before you did not need as many vacations as now and that this stress is nothing more than an invention to justify that now we work less and complain more.

It may be that less vacations will be needed before than now, but this too has a psychological and scientific explanation. The abrupt change that has occurred between current jobs and those of a few decades ago can be explained by many reasons. A relatively short time ago, the economy was based on agriculture and manual jobs, these jobs made it easier for workers to eliminate the stress they produced.

The transformation of the labor market

Currently these jobs have been replaced by machinery and technological advances, which has given way to competitive planning, organization, analysis and market work. Even jobs that remain purely mechanical, employees are informally required to meet societal expectations. Current jobs require many cognitive abilities, but few physical ones, a fact that makes daily stress accumulate.

To this must be added the profound change in the labor market. Current economic policies base their growth on brutal competition between companies and employees. You always have to be the best to get any job, better resume, better work experience. And if we are lucky enough to find a job this will not stop, we will always have to innovate and continue training.

With all this, it is not surprising that now there is more stress, more pressure and more competitiveness. We have a more educated and competitive society. Before, if you were a good worker, it would be worth what you initially learned, this current competitiveness did not exist. And most importantly, through the physical effort that was made with mechanical jobs, the neurotransmitter that generates stress, cortisol, was burned.

Characteristics to enhance to deal with competitiveness

There are a series of psychological characteristics that, although they did not guarantee us success, they did guarantee us to give the best of ourselves in a competitive job. One of the characteristics common to competitive success is the psychological variable called determination, and it is nothing other than the ability we have to do everything necessary in order to achieve our dreams.

Another characteristic to take into account is the training in our mental capacities. Being able to control our thoughts and emotions will give us the timely perspective to get our work done. Due to our thoughts we can face a problem as if it were a dangerous situation and inevitably on an emotional level we will feel anguish and other negative emotions that will hinder our work.

All of us can have ups and downs in our confidence. However, it must be emphasized that, to reach the top, we have all had to overcome great adversities. Obstacles that would not have fallen if we had not had faith in our possibilities

Finally, to get the most competitive performance in any job you have to focus and concentrate on what is truly important. This means that we can all make mistakes, but what they cannot do is paralyze us or distract us. If so, chances are a few more will add to the initial error.

Sport as an example of transformation

Sport is a mirror in which we can see a transformational parallel to what the world of work has suffered. Before, athletes spent hours and hours training their physique. Rest, eat, and physically pound himself, this was his routine. However, now top-level athletes have added one more part to their training: mental preparation.

Psychological training or mental training is the complement of physical training for those athletes who participate in competition and want to optimize their performance. This training is not punctual, it is carried out throughout the season and in parallel with the physical preparation. It can be done individually or as a team.

It consists of a structured program of sessions in which the main psychological skills required by a specific sport are worked on. The aim is to exercise the psychological abilities of athletes and learn new ones, to promote their performance and adapt satisfactorily to the different situations of sports practice, especially competition.

Some athletes need individualized psychological treatment to solve specific psychological problems and internal discomfort related to their sports practice or its completion. It would be indicated for people who suffer from competitive anxiety, burnout or sports overtraining syndrome, depressive symptoms, eating disorders, psychological consequences of injuries and lack of self-esteem among others.

To confront competition with guarantees both in life, at work and in sport, we have to know how to identify our strengths. Once identified, we must work on our mental abilities to control negative thoughts, learn to concentrate, and persevere in the face of adversity, facing pressure and showing great determination to achieve our goals.

Images courtesy of Special Photo and Scott Kelby