Magic Moments

Great to see everyone at the Out of Work Chicago event last night! For those of you looking for more info on on to make Magic Moments a regular part of your job search, I have a blog post on the topic that captures it nicely (the blog post calls those Moments ‘Quality Events.’) Below is the opener, you can click through for the details. Email me or post in the forum if you’ve got questions! The post:

Some people have an ability to find inner peace even under intense pressure… like Tiger Woods, staring down a 12 foot putt on 18 to force a playoff in the 2008 US Open. Guys like this are able to master their fields precisely because of the way they internalize that pressure: they convert it into a moment of inner peace.

If pressure represents a reduction in the allowable margin of error, then the ability to handle pressure like this comes from the knowledge that you will execute flawlessly and don’t need the cushion that a margin of error provides. It comes from the ability to eliminate outside world, ignore all those eyes, erase the world from view, and remain perfectly committed to succeeding at the task at hand.

The ability to handle pressure can be learned. All it takes is a choice.

Think of an experience you have had, either at work or at home, where the moment was so perfect, so easy, and so all-encompassing that the moment itself still lives within you—it feels like it happened yesterday. Maybe you were laughing, maybe you were doing something mindless, perhaps you were feeling proud—whatever it was, you were in the flow. Time stopped and the moment stretched. You could anticipate what would happen next as sure as if everyone were playing from a script. You had no doubt.

You were having a Quality Event… a moment of intense personal satisfaction that was caused by the excellence of the experience.

When you have a Quality Event, the world melts away and you are alone in the moment. If you could create a Quality Event at will, then you could create the conditions you need to handle even the most intense pressure. In essence, you could raise your level of commitment to the point where you could almost guarantee your own success. And guess what: you <em>can</em> create those conditions. To create a Quality Event, you need only three ingredients: an objective (a purpose); an environment; and the right attitude. More on Quality Events