Playing Head Games

or recruiting. I started out in music. I started playing music in sixth grade, and my first instrument was the saxophone, and I did that for a couple of years, but I was always really, really drawn to the drums, and my parents did not really have faith in me to stick with something. I was the typical kid, you know, I had started and quit multiple things, like Cub Scouts. I took karate for about three years, where I got the crap kicked out of me Tuesdays and Thursdays for three years of

my life. Taught me a lot, but it wasn't that pleasant, so I dropped out of that, and here I am telling my parents, hey, you know, I don't want to play the drums. And they were like, yeah, right, sure. Okay, whatever, buddy. But I just persisted. You know when, when a kid wants something and they stick with it? You know, parents are all over the place and unfocused, but children, when they want something, they're very focused, so they can sort of wear you down. And that's what I did.

Kept bringing it up to my parents over and over again, and, you know, finally they agreed to get me a set, but not before I basically practiced air drums in my room to MTV for a year, and then they finally got me the set. And the first set they got me was really cheap, and I beat it into the ground in like six months. But that was the beginnings of a probably

close to 30 years in the music business. Got two degrees in music, got a master's degree from the Eastman School of Music, lived and taught music and played music and helped to run a music business in New York City for about 12 years. And you know, been talking with my family about New York. It's a very tough place to live, very expensive. Now, there's really two New Yorks. There's the New York that you go to when you're a tourist, and then there's the New York that you are in when

you have to live and pay bills. And those are two different New Yorks. Then it just became apparent that it was at the time, it was time for a change. So we sort of started plotting to get back to Tennessee, and we got back, and I'm kind of trying to figure out, like, what am I going to do? You know, I had done some HR functions within the company I was in New York. But of course, there was nothing down here, like what I was doing up there, which was traveling to schools all over New York City,

Philadelphia. So I just kind of started applying to jobs online, kind of what we tell people not to do. I did everything through the internet. Got no results, got discouraged, and I started going to a group in town called the National Career Transition group. And I met a guy there, and I was talking to him about my background and things that I had done, and he said, you know, maybe you should go into recruiting, you know, like third

party recruiting. And he goes, You know, I'm I'm not really hiring right now, but I know somebody that it might be good for you to meet, and it just happened to be thinking ahead, and as I move forward now, after being here for over 11 years, you know, this has just been a very good place to me that I did not expect. And that's kind of how I got from music business in New York City to head hunting in Nashville. I joined the energy team because that was the opening that we had. I'd

actually interviewed for nonprofit a year before that. So what we do here in the energy practices, we work with substation and transmission engineers, and these are the people that design the stuff. These are the people that build it, highly paid people with PE licenses and bachelor's and master's degrees. And we've also branched out into renewables

engineers and also environmental engineers. It's been really, really fun for me, you know, working with all the people that we work with, and clients and candidates, but also our teammates. There's really no place like this. I've learned a lot. So wanted to talk today about head game, you know, and Stephanie. And when you're teaching and training, you break down what we do into four categories, recruiting, biz dev, planning and the head game. And I've had some definite doozies

and tests with the head game over the course of my life. I broke down the head game into five categories that I think can apply to almost anything or anyone, no matter what you're dealing with, whether it's a personal thing, whether it's a professional thing. Something at work. And so I'm just going to talk about each one of those, and I'll try to include a little example of how that applied to me. So the first thing in the

head game. So let's just assume that you're in a you're in a you're in a pickle, you know, you're in a situation, you're you're losing the game, you're you're back sliding in some way in your life, the situation that you're in, it's not going the way that you thought it would go and, you know, we go through different stages of how we deal with that emotionally. You know, the five stages of grief you talk about, I guess the main

three, you know, denial, anger and acceptance. That can definitely happen when you're when you're going through something difficult, you sort of deny that it's happening, or maybe you you don't see that it's happening, and then you get you get mad, you know, and you're just angry at the situation or yourself, you know, a lot of people go into self blame at that point, and then at some point, you accept that,

okay, this is real. I'm dealing with this. You decided that this is real, and you're looking at this, and she said, Okay, I gotta do something here. So I think the first thing I would say is, get going. Get going. Get started. Move. One example that comes to mind for me is, you know, it's teaching music. And I was working for a company that provided instrumental lessons and the instruments to Catholic schools all over New York City. So it's our business. Had well over 12,000 kids that

were customers of ours. And one of the things we did was every year we would get the best kids from the school, from each school, and we'd get them together, and it was called Honor Band. And in New York City alone, we had over 300 kids in the band. When you think about 300 kids playing music at the same time, these are six to 12 graders. They are at various levels. Some kids are superstars. Some kids probably

got invited so their feelings wouldn't get hurt. They got various stages of intonation, how to put the instrument together, their quality of their sound, they're just overall musicianship. And all of a sudden, you're standing in front of these 300 kids, and they you start the first song, and I'll never forget like and it was an easy song, and I could not tell what was happening. It was such a monstrosity of sound. It was

such a wall of chaos. And all these kids were blaring into their instruments at the same time, with no regard to playing with each other, listening to the beat, watching my conducting your knee. That was just total chaos. And I just remember, and I had my superiors were watching me. You know, it's like I was almost like being observed. I kind of felt like I was on trial. I mean, it was super intense. You know, you stop the band because it's terrible. It sounds awful, and you stop them,

and then the kids are like, all quiet. They're looking at you, 300 kids, 600 eyes, and they're like, what's he gonna say? You know, what's he gonna tell us to do? Is he can tell us it was good. And I froze. I didn't know what to say. I just stood there. And the more I didn't speak, the more pressure I felt, and I felt my colleagues staring at me, and it was not a great moment, but eventually I just said, You know what flutes are at a tune or

something's off, so let's just run the flutes. And then I said, let's just run the clarinets, and let's just run the trumpets and just the act of starting somewhere, I started to build momentum off my own action. And that's one of the things I would say, is what you need to do if you're stuck is, get going. Get moving. Do something. Start small. Start anywhere but start. Don't sit in the unproductive energy of inertia, but get

going. Next thing, I would say, is one day at a time. So when you're dealing with a task, or you're dealing with a mountain that you have to climb, it's really, really easy to look at the totality of your task and get overwhelmed. And that's when negative self talk can creep in. You know, wow, look at this huge thing that I have to do. I'm not going to be able to do this. I can't do this. It's not going to happen. It's too big. The odds

are against me. Logically, it's crazy to think I can do this. And so we start convincing ourselves that we're not going to be able to do what we need to do to fix the situation. So just one day at a time, just kind of focuses on, okay, I'm here, I'm present, I'm in the moment, and I'm gonna decide and figure out what I can get done right now. And these are closely related, you know, so get going is about the right now, and so is one day

at a time. It's about being present in the moment, not overthinking the next week, the next week, or even, really, tomorrow. And you know, my faith also tells me that I'm not supposed to worry about tomorrow. And that is a skill, that is a skill that will not come naturally. We are all inclined to look forward and stress out. So the skill is, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stay here in the moment. But one of the things I do is I make a list of everything that's

freaking me out. So it could be a Word doc. You scribble it on a piece of paper. It doesn't really matter, but I make a list of the things that are swimming in my head that are negative, and I get really specific. So like, let's just say it was a financial thing. Like, right? Let's say I was kind of worried about money. And I will literally put not just I'm

worried about money, but I'm. Worried about paying XYZ bill, and then I just go through and I make the list, and one of the things I notice when I do that is that the list is never as bad as I thought. You know, when I'm looking at it on paper, it's never as bad as what I had swimming in my head. Is it just gets it out of me, and I'm not sitting with that negativity. So one day at a time, the next one is, remember your most successful times, or remember your wins. And when I think

about that, I think about my time in New York. I'd been there for about a year, and I was a teacher, so I was making like, 32k in New York City in the year, 2000 in a single income situation. So of course, I'm looking at the summer, and teachers don't get paid in the summer. And I'm like, What am I going to do? So I started looking through the New York Daily News, like the hard copy, and I saw that there was a job

posting for a couple 100 bucks a week part time. I thought, well, if I can start now, this was in January of 2001 I thought, if I can start now, I can build up enough cash to get through the summer. So I found out it was a paper route for the New York Times, and I was waking up at two in the morning in Queens, and I was driving to Hell's Kitchen to a warehouse. I was putting together papers like 225 editions in the New York Times, loading them in my car, driving across 23rd Street to the east

side to four buildings called waterside Plaza. Each had 37 floors. You need to take the elevator all the way up to way up to the top stall the elevator with your push cart, run out and toss all the newspapers at the doorsteps of the people so that when they came out of their apartment, the newspaper would be there and pretty on their doormat. And that was four hours of work. And then I went and did my full time teaching job, and I

was working overtime with that. So I was basically working from 2am to 8pm I'd go home, eat a sandwich, go to sleep, wake up, do it all over again. I did that for a year, and I learned more about myself in that year than I ever have in my life, the things that I was capable of doing, the ability to push myself, the ability to believe in myself, and then again, tied to these other two right, one day at a time, and get going. So I was

able to do that. And I remember that a lot when I'm in a pickle, you know? I remember those times of of what that was like, and sometimes what you feel in the moment is the worst times can actually be the best times when you look back and you realize how you grew as a person, how you strengthened as a person, and and just the lessons that you learned and the memories that you made. So the fourth one I would say, is visualize winning. So remembering successes, that's about looking

back at winning. Visualizing winning is about looking forward and saying to yourself, Okay, what's going to happen when I win, not if I win, when I win, what's going to happen? What's that going to look like? And you go through that, and you visualize, okay, if I hit this goal, or if I get out of this situation, or if, obviously, in what we do, you know, if I make that placement, or if I get that billing, or if I win this new client, if I win the search, and you you start to let your

emotions fill in that picture in your mind. You start to visualize what that looks like, and everybody will react to that differently. You know, some people, that'll be great fuel for them to move forward. Somebody like me, I struggle with it a little bit. I'm not I'm not as good as visualizing what the future is going to be and how good it's going to feel. I do think that it's good to at least like. Think forward into

the future. Think about those positive pictures and what that's going to look like when you overcome, when you pull yourself out of this and when you win. So far, we have get going one day at a time. Remember your success is in visualize winning. And so that brings me to the last one, which is tune out the negative as much as you can, even if it's real.

So an example might be that you're in a situation and the odds are sort of long that you're going to win, you know, almost like an athletic event between a really good school and a sort of a not really good school, you know, the odds with that not so good school winning are slim, you know. And sometimes you might be in a situation where you have a slim

chance, or a less than 5050, chance. And sometimes people around you, even if they love you and they care about you, they'll point this out, you know, they'll, they'll try to be realist with you here, you know, we call it being a billionaire, and it's kind of like, hey, you know what? You got this thing going on. It's kind of a long shot. But hey, you know, do your best. You know, give it a go. We're pulling for you, you know,

we're praying for you, and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, sometimes you have to just tune all of that out, because if you focus on it, even if it's real, that's the key. It's not, I'm not just talking about people being negative. We all know that that's probably not good, you know, people being negative, but I'm talking about people being realist with you, and it's negative. You gotta tune that out, because it will

pull you back, and you'll start to give that life. You'll start to give those long odds life, and you have to tune it out and say, You know what? I'm not giving that anything. I'm not giving it any of my energy. I'm not giving it any of my time. I'm focusing on all these other things that are positive, and I'm going to believe in myself even when it doesn't make sense. Six if I don't believe in myself, why should anyone else

believe in me? So those are just some things that I have developed over the years, and I'm definitely not saying that I'm expert or sensei on that stuff, but I'll just hit them real quick again. So it's get going one day at a time. Remember success is visualize winning and tune out the negative, even if it's real.