The Perfect Resume Formula

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome, or welcome back. Today on the podcast, I’m answering a question that has come in from a longtime listener of this podcast, and also a listener of my radio shows. And the question is, “I have been looking for a job for a long time now. And I think my resume doesn’t represent who I am. I’ve heard you talk about this multiple times on your radio shows. I’ve also gotten some emails from you. I could not attend your career webinar. But is there any way you can help me put together a good resume so that I can get myself hired?” Incredible question. And the reason why I’m making this question, like a podcast episode, is because I think all of us, at some point, have struggled with this. Or we may end up struggling with this.

Now, how can we put together a resume? I can do that very, very quickly, how can it be done. So hopefully, this is going to be of value to you, even though you’re not looking for a job. Now, there are three to four things we address, when it comes down to putting together a good resume a perfect resume, I call it a perfect resume. The first one is you got to decide whether you want a functional resume, a chronological resume, or a combination resume. All these three things have their own relevance, and they are applicable to that individual. For example, let’s say you are very good in something, you are excellent in something, and it’s better for you to put together a functional resume. You don’t have a lot of experience, you don’t have long tenure and doing something, that means you don’t have a long duration. But then you’re very good at doing one thing, then that one thing, which is a function that has to be highlighted. So you should create or you could create a functional resume.

Now, let’s say you have 20, 15, or 10 years of experience, you have been constantly employed, and you have a track record that you can speak to, then you can put together a chronological resume. Now, sometimes you can combine these two, also, a combination resume shows your functional expertise, and also shows that you have worked across 10, 15, 20 years, across multiple companies, all that so you have two Knology, you have a function. And that’s the combination resume. So three options to go with, let’s say you took a sabbatical. If you’re coming into the job market after maybe five or six years, and you don’t have in duration to show on your resume, then it’s better to go with a functional resume. So now that we have that out of our way, let’s talk about what should a resume have. Now, every role that you played should show that you were hired, because there was a problem going on. You came in, you produced the outcome. So the problem was there. It was intense. Nobody could solve it. You are hired, you came in. After 5, 6, and 7 months, the problem is gone. So question is, what did you do to eliminate the problem or three as the problem? That’s the question, every role, or every claim you make in the resume needs to address. What’s the problem? What’s the outcome? How did you get to the outcome? What did you do? Problem outcome, how now, that’s the second part in putting together a perfect resume.

The third part is, that every resume should show 80% performance, and 20% of your persona, 80% performance. If you use words in the resume that amplify big words, abstract words, a lot of hype in the resume. I’ve seen that. And I’ve seen, in fact, many of my coaching clients initially looking at the resume as all hype, you don’t need that much hype, all you need to do is make sure that you have 80% of performance and 20% of your personality, your persona, your character in the resume, that’s it. You don’t need to hype it up with any other words, any other things. So the 80/20 rule applies here also. And then the last one of putting together a perfect resume is that your resume has to be skills and action-oriented. It has to be visually focused.
It shouldn’t be scannable, maybe a page or two long. And it should be conveying significance and relevance, significance to you. And the relevance to others’ significance means that when you look at your resume, and when you read it, you should feel good about your resume, you need to feel wow, okay, this makes sense. This is what I want to say this reflects me my character, my thoughts, my intent, and my experience in words. You need to feel good about your resume. That’s the point. So significance is for you. Relevancy is to the reader. Whoever reads your resume. They should feel, “Yeah, make sense. This makes sense. These are the components that I need to have in a resume. And this is what I drive when I’m working with people.” Now the question was, how can I put a resume very, very quickly.

Now, here’s the secret to putting together a resume. literally overnight, all you have to do is go pull 10 resumes, of people who you think are the best, who you think you should have had their career, pull their resumes, and look at every word that is common across all those 10 resumes. So print them out, put them on a table next to each other, and start rounding the words that are consistent across all the term resumes. If a single word is there, in every resume, let’s say five words are common, or six words are common, that word has to be in your resume, somehow, this doesn’t fix the underlying problem. But this will definitely help you to compete, or at least get you to a level where you feel good about yourself, you don’t want to be in situations where you think that you’re putting a resume out of nowhere out of a blank sheet. And you don’t know people in your industry, how they’re going to accept your resume or your position, or the way you are trying to convey. So it’s better to get the words, put them all together, and make sure that all the words are in your resume.

Now, there was also another question identical to this, where I responded to that question saying, yes, you can hire resume writers. But the problem with resume writers is that they do not reflect your values and beliefs. They just cannot bring you to the forefront. If I do not know you. There is no way I can represent you. You can send me your resume. I can rewrite your resume, but I cannot represent you. That’s my wording. That’s my language. It’s like ghostwriting a book. A ghostwriter has to still take your ideas, your concepts, and they can amplify them. But they cannot create the absolute branding around you. It’s hard. Yes, you can use writers to write your resume, but then they need to know you well. And I don’t think by simply asking questions, you can get to know people, they should have spent some time with you. So it’s hard to have writers write your resume, even though Resume Writing is a huge industry, big industry. I’ve seen people succeed in it. But for some reason I have not been able to get my resume written I tried in the past. I don’t know if any of my clients have succeeded in getting resumes written that truly represent who they are. So my suggestion is you write your resume, and all these techniques will help you kind of guide you so that you become good at it. Will you become good at it overnight now? Will it take some time? Yes.

So I hope I answered your question. I hope this is helpful in general, to everyone who is either listening or watching this. This podcast episode is available on all the podcasting platforms. And as of yesterday, this is available on my YouTube channel. So you can look me up on YouTube with the same name which is Success with Srini and you should be able to watch this podcast episode as a video. That’s all for now. Have a wonderful, wonderful day and I will catch you sooner than you can think which is as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned. Thank you.

Don’t Change God, Change Your Mind Instead

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome, or welcome back to Success with Srini. Happy Tuesday morning to you. Before I get into today’s podcast episode, I have an announcement to make. And that is, starting today, officially, this podcast is available on YouTube, on my YouTube channel. For a long time, we have been struggling. I have been struggling, my team had been struggling to somehow take the audio podcast and make it available as a video on YouTube. It’s very hard to sync the two because the video is what YouTube is all about. And the podcast is all about audio. So it’s very hard to kind of mix these two but officially starting today we are available on YouTube. It’s not the absolute best way to do it, but somehow we figured this out. I’ve been trying to do this for a while now and some of the earlier podcast episodes are also available as a video now on YouTube. So I want you to go to my YouTube channel, all you have to do is go to youtube.com or open up your YouTube app on your smart device and search for SUCCESS WITH SRINI. And check out today’s podcast, as a video, I want you to check it out. And you can leave me a comment on my video on my YouTube channel.

So that being said, let’s get into today’s podcast, which is about having a prayer in place. It’s about having communication with the divine. It’s about expressing our emotions or thoughts or feelings to the Almighty. Now, whether you believe in God, or you do not believe in God, it doesn’t matter. All of us, each one of us, have our own higher power, we have our own God, whatever that is, to each one of us. But then the discussion is that there has to be a communication that has to be a word or an exchange of thoughts, ideas, concepts, feelings, emotions, and thoughts, with the higher power, and there is power in doing it. And that is the message on today’s podcast. And why I’m doing this is because somebody asked me a question about this recently. And I was thinking, how can I bring that question into this podcast. And turns out that years ago, when I was running my practice, I had an office, I had people coming to see me and I was running a hypnosis practice. And I remember this individual walking in and complaining about how they tried everything, and nothing worked. And they’re giving hypnosis the last chance the last try. And if hypnosis doesn’t work, they’re going to completely leave. They’re going to completely quit pursuing the solution to the problem, which was very funny. And I said, “let’s assume for a second, let’s consider the fact that hypnosis will not work for you. What will you do?” And he said, “I’ll go back, praying.” Interesting. You will go back to prayer. I said, “Have you stopped praying?” “Oh no, no, I have not stopped praying. But I’ll go back to prayer. Because prayer seems to work.”

It was interesting. When this individual said this, I said, “okay, fine. Prayer works.” “Yeah, prayer works.” So great. “What do you do in your prayer? How do you pray?” That was my question. They were like, “Yeah, you know, I do this, I do that, I ask, sometimes I get angry, why God is not doing these things for me, I’m the best child of God.” I said, “amazing, you know, now there’s nothing wrong to get angry at God. You have all the right as a child, as His child or her child to get angry, makes sense. Makes perfect sense. In fact, I should be getting angrier in my prayers, which I don’t do.” This was me telling them, and this individual walks me through the prayer sequence and asked for the sequence. “What do you do? How do you start? Do you go to a place of worship? Or do you sit down anywhere? How do you do this?” “Well, I go to a place of worship, and I do these things.” So they walked me through the entire sequence. And I said, “Listen, it sounds to me, that you are changing God’s mind about you, isn’t it? And you agree with me that God already knows who you are, understands your pain understands your suffering, and it’s taken care of the whole world, the whole universe? Is that a fair assessment? Is that a fair statement to make?” And this individual says, “yes, yes, that’s true.” “If that is true, aren’t you trying to change God’s mind about you with your prayer? At least that’s how it sounds to me.” And to say yes. “Isn’t it true, that instead, you should be changing your mind about God with a prayer?” “Yeah, I think so.”

“Is it okay with you if I spent the rest of the time with you, and help you change your mind about God with your prayer? Is it okay if I reconstruct your prayer?” And they agreed, I’ll tell you why I did this. In fact, they were not there in the room asking me to help them with their prayer. That was not the ask. The reason why I went there is that as a hypnotherapist as any therapist, for that matter. One of the elements that we look for is how can we use the existing belief system of a client or a subject and work with their belief system to create the results, rather than enforcing our belief systems into them, or onto them. So a good therapist always uses the existing belief system and works with it. Obviously, I could see that that belief system was tied to prayer, they have given up on everything. And they’re trying hypnosis as the only way. So my job is not to promote hypnosis, but to help them use whatever they already know. And build a few elements of hypnosis into it. So I did.

Now, the reason why I’m sharing this on this podcast is that I see this many people that have their prayer sequence incorrect. Prayer is a very powerful mechanism. It’s a connection with the Divine. And it’s communication within which you are communicating with something that’s not going to respond to you, or not in a way that you expect or not at a level at a pace that you expect. So there is no immediate response. I do radio shows, I get an immediate response. I do podcasts, this podcast, I get some response, not immediately, but some response. So there is a response to everything we do in normal life. There is no response, or at least immediate response that we do, specifically in a prayer situation, or things that we tell ourselves or that we tell to our higher self. Now, why do people pray? Prayer, in general, is used for guidance is used for strength. It’s used for protection. And you go back in time, 100, 200, 300 years ago, prayer was used to fight diseases, to heal the human body. And you go into shamanic rituals, you go into different cultures, and you see that prayer was used. And I made this point multiple times here on this podcast, to people used to chant and drum, all these acts are to heal the human body. And when you tie that into a prayer mechanism, it’s powerful. So the mindset behind the prayer is, that the Divine is your friend. Whatever that higher power is, the Divine is that your friend, and we are conveying that having a conversation with a friend. And in a conversation with a friend, it’s natural for us to become angry, it’s natural for us to become pensive, it’s natural to become also a little bit defensive and also offensive if need be. It’s natural. It’s a friendship. So there was nothing wrong with the way this individual was communicating, or the way they expressed their prayer, the sequence, nothing wrong with it. In fact, a prayer, there’s nothing right or wrong with prayer, it can be done by anyone in any format anywhere. But the idea is that with a prayer, you go inward into yourself rather than outward to the outer world. So I don’t go into a prayer, asking for things, or making the world change, according to me, and asking for everything to happen for me rather,

I go inward and say, “What can I do to happen for others? Or what can I do? So things could happen for me? What is that I can do? How can you help me strengthen helped me become powerful helped me become more meaningful, help me so that I can? Please do it for me so that I can please make everything else happen for me so that I can you see that the sequencing we are talking about here, that’s the kind of a mindset we’re talking about here.” Now, there is a scientific way to look into this. And I want to put a little bit of science into this discussion and give a different angle, different perspective. You see, every time we speak, we speak with some intent. And I’m doing this podcast, I had an intent before I started recording this. And as a part of that intent, I’m the sender. And what am I sending, I’m sending an idea. I’m sending, maybe a thought maybe a feeling, maybe a suggestion, or maybe I’m ordering something, something I’m doing. So I’m a sender, I have an idea. And then I’m encoding that idea, with some words, maybe some pictures, if you’re watching this on YouTube, that means I’m encoding this for the video. So there are words that are pictures that are videos, or there are some other actions. So something I’m encoding the message with something. And this podcast happens to be my words and coding this with words, specifically in this example. And then I’m using a channel, a channel is this podcast or channel is the YouTube so that I can get it out to the receiver. And the receiver is going to receive this which is you by the way, and you’re going to now decode this. You’re gonna get my expression. If I’ve done this, right. You’ll understand where I’m coming from and what I’m trying to say and if you want to Turn on my feelings, you will understand my thoughts. If you do this, if I come across to you, that means I have done everything right. So you have successfully decoded this, the only way I’ll come to know that you have successfully decoded this is when you acknowledge it back to me. That means you write a review, you write a comment, you ask a question, that’s how I will come to know that you have successfully decoded this. If not, I would not know, this is how prayer works. Let me put myself as the individual who’s praying, so I have intent. And I have to turn that intent, I’m the sender of the prayer. And I have a thought, I have an idea, I have a request, I have an ask, I have a complaint, I have an appreciation, whatever it is, I have that in my mind. That’s the idea. And I’m going to encode this in words, maybe in some pictures, maybe in some videos, I mean, there’s no way to do that in videos, but I’m gonna encode that into words, maybe into rhymes, or maybe into prose. I don’t know. I’m gonna encode this. Typically, when we talk about prayer, we talk about words and phrases.

These words and phrases have emotions or emotions in them, thoughts in them, requests in them, or complaints in them. And who are we sending to? Well, we are sending the Divine to the higher power, and we need a channel, what is the channel, the channel is wherever, at a place of worship, or in the open, or wherever you want to do it. That’s the channel and the receiver is the higher power, the god your God, whatever God is, that’s who is receiving this, he or she, whoever that is receiving this, and they will decode this. And they will acknowledge a prayer, you’re using a channel you’re sending it, you don’t know, if they’re going to be decoding this, you don’t know if they’re going to acknowledge but here’s what we know, the more you pray, the more you take the divine, seriously interesting. And whatever it is, if the Divine is listening to you, or not listening to you, at some point, as a part of the proceedings on this earth, things will happen for you. If things happen for you, then you say, yes, the divine the higher power, the God has responded acknowledged, if they are not happening, and you’re doing this, seriously, over and over and over again, for a long amount of time, it means your time has not come. As simple as that. But something beautiful is happening while you’re not getting that acknowledgment and that is that you are going more and more inward. That means you’re giving more and more attention to yourself. When you give attention to yourself. That means you are making yourself more and more responsible for the outcomes. It’s amazing. The more you pray, the more powerful you become. This was the gist of the conversation I had with this individual. I wanted to share this with you on the podcast. And I’m hoping that today’s podcast will make you take prayer seriously regardless of your belief system. And further you believe in God, you don’t believe in God, that’s not the point.

The point is that when you go and you follow a simple sender idea and coding channel, receiving the recording, acknowledging you follow this formula, then you go more and more inward. And I’ll tell you something interesting. And I said this multiple times, which is that the path to the Divine is through the unconscious mind. So the more you activate the unconscious mind, the higher the chances that you will reach and you will convey and you will converse and you will have a conversation with the divine. That’s all for now. Wherever you are, be safe. And I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Stay tuned.

The Retrospect-Commit Loop

Here is the complete transcript of the podcast

Welcome back to Success with Srini. Happy Monday morning to you. This morning on the podcast, we are talking about morning routines. If there is one thing that I have done ever since this podcast started as a daily podcast, from the beginning of this year, over the last five months, the only one thing that I have done is consistently kept on tweaking my morning routine. Why? When you have a successful morning routine, you control the day, the first 60 minutes will control the next quantity of three hours, very, very powerful. You get control of the first 60, 90, and 120 minutes of the day. Well, you can define your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual state as powerful, it’s amazing. Go back in time, study all the successful people, study the successful people that you have. Now, in the news, in the media, and in the current times, all of them are successful, because they have good morning routines. Hence, I kept on tweaking, changing modifying to get to a level where I have full control over my whole day. Recently, I made a quick, and this week, I call it the retrospect comic loop, I’m going to break it up each word. And I’ll explain each word in its entirety.

Let’s talk about commitment. See, you made a commitment a long time ago when you set goals. But did you set goals or you did not set goals, you made some kind of a commitment, and in today’s life, whatever you have is a reflection of a commitment that you made or you did not make. So let’s assume for a second that you didn’t make a commitment, you set a goal for yourself at the beginning of this year, or maybe at the beginning of this month, or maybe at the beginning of this week. And you are working every day, you’re taking action towards achieving the goal. So there is a commitment, how we and how strong is that commitment? That’s debatable. But let’s assume that you do have a commitment in place to achieve a certain outcome to achieve a certain result. This is what I found out. When I get up in the morning. And I renew my commitment to the goals. It seems I have better control over my day and my observation. So I look into all the goals that I have set for myself, I have several goals that I’ve set for myself that are temporary, that means that immediate, and some that are a little bit longer. And some that have a long duration. I revisit those goals every day in the morning.

Lately, in the last six weeks, I’ve been doing these incredible results. What happens and why this is different? Well, it turns out that in the past, every time I set some goals, and I was working, I was missing the emotional component, I was missing the emotional element. So there were a set of dominant emotions at the beginning. That’s why I set the goal. So there were some emotions that were leading me to set that goal. So I did set that goal. But then I forgot about those emotions. And now I become mechanical. Every day I wake up and I do what I have to do to get to that goal, and I don’t feel it anymore. So renewing my commitment on a daily basis, gives me aligns me, gives me a purpose, obviously, but then aligns me and keeps me in the game. So the first step is to renew my commitment to my goals every day, I wake up, so I want you to try this. The second thing, which is the pursuit is to connect the emotions to the goals. It’s not about the pursuit of the goal. The pursuit of the goal is happening anyway. But then I take the first few minutes. And I want to connect, recollect that emotion, and connect that emotion to my goal. And then everything thereafter becomes easier. So the action that I’m taking, or I was taking in the past, was sometimes strenuous. Sometimes it was hard. But now the same action today, with this emotion being connected to the goal. And me taking the action, that action is less painful, less strenuous on me. Big, big difference. I hope I’m coming across.

Now let’s talk about the retrospect for a second. What is the retrospect? Well, this is also a small little thing that I do now as a part of my morning routine, which is I look at my past successes. I wake up in the morning at some point in time in the first 60 minutes. I look into all the past successes I had. And then I also look into some of the recent wins, the recent wins, recent successes that I had, and then some of the failures and some of the lessons as a result of those failures. I want to revisit them. I do these three things. When I look into my past successes, they strengthen my self-esteem. When I look at my recent wins, that gives me confidence, my confidence increases or is held intact. And then when I look into my recent lessons that I took, or failures I encountered, and as a result of that, there is a lesson I took, that establishes my growth pattern kind of puts the seed of growth into my thinking. So growth, confidence, and self-esteem. Three things as a part of my retrospect.

Now, where does this retrospect come from? This retrospect comes from product management, specifically from agile methodology inside product management, as a part of the scrum practice, they do retrospectives at the end of one week or two weeks, or three weeks, if you are in software development specifically, or in it, you may know this. So what happens is, as a project, all the project members come together, and once a week, or maybe once every two weeks, they do a retrospective, where, technically they’re introspecting. So they look into things. They asked three questions, they say, you know, what has worked in the last two weeks or last one week? What did not work? And why did not work? See questions. I took that principle of asking those three questions. And I started applying them in self-improvement in my life. And it does many things. But then by looking into your past successes and your recent wins, the frame is very powerful. Early in the morning, the brain strengthens in a different way. And the rest of the day becomes easier because now you’re leading it by connecting your emotions to the goals. And I do this multiple times. That’s why I call it a loop. So I want you to try this, or try it in some bits and pieces. And I want you to let me know, if you’re a subscriber to this podcast, then do let me know that you know, yeah, I listened to all the past episodes, and I listened to this episode. And I did try this in I got this result. So I will wait for your feedback. And that’s all have a wonderful Monday, and I’ll catch you tomorrow. Take care. Bye now.