Today I had the wonderful experience of writing a cover letter in 5 minutes. The words flowed, the experience came together in a coherent picture of a young man who was ready to take on the world from his potential seat in a high-rise in downtown Calgary. I sold myself by identifying the right idiosyncrasies and painting them as exactly what the company needed. Lately, writing a cover letter has not been so easy.
There is something very disconcerting about not being able to write an effective cover letter about yourself. Human adults spend more of their waking hours working than engaged in any other activity (and for most of us, working surpasses sleep as well), and we define ourselves partially by our work life. So, when try you to sit down and put your good qualities on paper, and you fail, it does not feel good. You try to think of what would make you a good employee, and you come up short. What is happening is that, in essence, you have lost faith in yourself as a worker.
When you write your cover letter despite this feeling, your negativity will show through. For myself, I go through the rigmarole of stating my experience and how it ties into what the employer is looking for. Of course, this is what you are supposed to do, but it ends up looking uninspired. Instead of weaving a narrative about your experience, it ends up reading like a truncated list of unnatural connections between experience and expectations. With more and more companies using the Internet as their primary source of potential candidates, the cover letter is your first line of attack; it's the only place your personality can shine through. An uninspired cover letter doesn't exactly .. ahem.. inspire a positive response. So what happens is a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a lack of response to your jobs undermines the same confidence that you need to write a good cover letter. This is unfortunately the pattern I have been stuck in for a little while. Does anybody else know what this feels like?
Thank goodness then for the occasional flash of inspiration that allows you to rise above this. The cover letter I wrote today happened in a mere 5 minutes. I proofread it twice and then sent it off. I know it's good. I know it's good precisely because it only took 5 minutes. I had that sort of intense, pleasurable concentration you feel when you are doing something you truly enjoy. For me, that usually comes when I am wall-climbing, or reading an inspiring book, or even writing this blog right now, but today it happened when I was writing a cover letter.
That's not to say that you should write a cover letter in 5 minutes. Never underestimate the value of planning what you are going to say ahead of time, and even outlining your cover letter (or any formal correspondence) before you start writing. It only took my five minutes because I have been writing 3-6 cover letters per week for about 3 months now, and even though many of them were uninspired, I still have a good idea of what I want to say. In fact, I am sure that part of my inspiration came from all of the mundane practice I have had at writing cover letters over the past while.
The point of all of this is that even when we are caught in negative patterns, I believe there is always a way to overcome them. If the bad news is that sometimes we get trapped in these negative-feedback loops, then the good news is that chances are inspiration will come one day and help us out. But don't sit there waiting for it. Inspiration is not a flash of lightning that strikes, coming out of nowhere and changing your life forever all in one moment. Inspiration is the culmination of hard work and practice and hard work and practice. Whatever your goal is, whatever your current equivalent of my cover letters is right now, you have it in your power to succeed.
