Self-Preservation - A Sense of Wonder at Work:

Okay, everything is certainly not okay. You just lost your job…

I’ve been an outplacement consultant and career coach since 1998. During this time I have worked with hundreds of grieving people bereft of their livelihood. Many people say that what I do must be awful; with a look a bit like they’re talking to the taxman. The truth is that I love what I do because I care about people and want to minimise the blow.

Up to the age of 32 my career caused me a lot of pain. I had no clue about how much pain I used to be in until I discovered my calling. And looked-back. I’ve written mountains of stuff on my own transformation and how my life turned around. The point is, I empathise. I know how it feels to lose your job and fear for how the bills are going to be paid come Friday.

I’m working with a guy at the moment who has had the sword of redundancy over his head for months and months. It's painful to watch. The firm thought it might be kinder to give him a lot of advance warning because of the many decades of loyalty he has invested in them. In reply he has mirrored their ‘kindness’ and works tirelessly to make sure the department he runs doesn’t miss a beat in order that he can walk away in a few months’ time with his head held high, conscience clear, dignity and integrity intact.

During the many decades since he joined The World of Work has changed beyond recognition. A big part of the relationship between employee and employer used to be loyalty; sometimes referred to as the ‘psychological contract’. It basically states that a paternalistic and caring employer will provide pay, job stability and nurturing environment in return for conscientiousness, reliability and commitment.

About 10 years ago, possibly longer, younger workers entering employment could see the instability of employment and recognise a power-shift arising from the huge skills shortages at play in the labour market. This meant the market changed and younger workers would take whatever training and development they could from one employer and leverage it with the next. I found their skills of assertiveness compelling. Whereas in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s a good CV/resume might have one or two employers listed, a good CV in the 2000s will show many along the making of an enviable career trajectory.

Traditional sense of loyalties can therefore be misplaced:

If you are being made redundant take stock – this is happening. And it is not your fault. But your company don’t think they need you anymore. Perhaps they’re on hard times too. But they cannot afford you. Or your role has become obsolete. Similar to the anguish of losing a loved-one, there comes a time to move-on.

The focus of your concern is now upon you. Who else is going to help you? Metaphorically-speaking, the plane is depressurizing, the oxygen mask has dropped in front of your face and it is time to act calmly and put it over your mouth to ensure your survival.

Fear is a natural instinct:

Recognising your fear when losing your job is an integral factor in your ability to survive the trauma. You can only manage what you recognise. Fear of the unknown is a natural phenomenon. And this is the nub of the point of this blog: Fear is a symptom / Convention is the cause.

Convention is a particular belief among people as to how things should be done; or how we ought to behave. Conventions are helpful when teaching a child to stay out of the road – because collisions with cars are extremely dangerous. Conventions are unhelpful however when they perpetuate an unhelpful myth or obsolete attitude.

The Number 1 job-search convention is that we must get straight back to permanent work as quickly as possible. Part of this convention is that we’ll be happy to do anything even if it means doing a menial job many rungs in the ladder below where we stepped off. Another part of this convention is that we just fire at whatever jobs are available in the labour market and something will land.

Because fear can act like a set of blinkers on our strategy, it can massively limit our potential for success. Because of our misplaced loyalty, when we’re investing time helping our employers when we should be investing in ourselves, fear is, again, distinctly limiting. We must exercise our decision-making muscles, accurately identify our career attributes and the corresponding job target. 

As I’ve written before and I’ll no doubt write again, The Path of Least Resistance is about tuning into to ‘wonder’. Don’t wander, wonder. Getting future hirers inspired about us involves triggering rapport. There is no better mechanism for sparking rapport than passion, enthusiasm and wonder. And this must be evident in all of our self-marketing materials: CV, covering letters and interview scripts. 

Could it be that you’ve gone stale and have forgotten what it was the filled you with excitement in the workplace? Did you ever enjoy a sense of wonder in your work? Now is the time to get in touch with your working passions and infect others with your enthusiasm. If you don't do it somebody else will. There aren't limitless number of jobs available; the labour market is set to become increasingly Darwinian. 

Craftsmen and craftswomen never consider the long hours they invest in their work because they don’t consider applying themselves to what they love to do to be work. As our economy melts-down and the dole queue lengthens the Number 1 antidote is to tune-in to what it is that you love to do. Learn to be selfish for a time and invest in your own wellbeing. Should the time come, and you have to help others, they will only thank you for ensuring you are fit and well.

Connecting with Hirers is key:

However, every now and again stop to consider whether it is realistic for you to connect with the 'Wonder of your Work' and work for someone else at the same time. Often, discovering wonder in our work, involves working for ourselves. Although this is indeed a challenging path to tread; sometimes it offers a ‘Path of Least Resistance’. The rewards for courage, independence of thinking and the ability to take charge of our destiny can often justify the risk.

Here again, we will need to understand the presence of 'Wonder in our Work' if we are to succeed. Rest assured, if you can do the painstaking detective work to identify your authentic vocational identity and take it forward to a place where it will harbour and grow, you will have given society a sense of wonder that will likely remain your legacy long after you are gone.

Look around you, what is it you wonder at? What caused wonder before, will again. 

The Art of Outstanding Job Search

Or, alternatively:

Why job seekers welded to conventional job search strategies are doomed to failure:

Why is it that the most common approach to solving a problem is so rarely the most effective one? I have worked with thousands of clients over the years who believe that their next job is going to come from sitting applying to jobs using traditional methods such as responding to: newspaper ads, internet job sites and recruitment agencies. Then they wonder why, along with about another 1,000 applicants, they end up filed under ‘B’ (for bin).

I regret to inform you that traditional job search methods are for clueless people with no idea who they are, what they want to do or where they’re going to find it - Painful to watch and absolute agony to experience. After 15 years in the field of career development, a frequent metaphor I use is to liken great potential to fire hoses; they need firm direction to do their job or they risk damaging the bearer (or the person who let go of their responsibility). Have you ever seen how much damage a ‘wild’ fire hose can do?!

It’s extreme. The same damage can be done by anyone holding great potential and not knowing what to do with it. In fact, possessing great potential and misdirecting it can be the root-cause of substance abuse, self-harm and delinquency. Can you remember those kids at school with heaps of personality, brimming-over with cleverness and seemingly always in possession of the right answer? Yet we bump into them 20 years later to find them a shuffling wreck of uncertainty and broken. The bearer of the most potential may also experience the most risk of failure because the potential for disappointment is greater.

As I have written many times before in various guises, people lacking a sense of purpose are palpably going nowhere (because possessing potential can make knowing where to take it all the more challenging). Therefore they lack the positive energy required to get hired. Hirers - either overtly or on a subliminal level - are looking to be engaged with. They’re looking to be seduced by the candidate’s passion for the subject and forced to visualise that person doing the job so convincingly that they would be a fool not to hire them. It would be foolhardy for any company to let a talent escape them as they risk joining the competition and helping them do well.

The majority of people I work with take as long as 1 to 2 months to have this very important penny drop. Successful job search strategy is all about research and getting to grips with the specialist knowledge you require to land a job that you love. It’s the enthusiasm that proves so attractive in the interview. Self-belief is a form of charisma and very hard to resist. It is also the keystone in rapport-building and I defy anyone to get hired at interview without the magic ingredient of rapport.

Strange, for many people, is the fact that quite a few of my clients don’t even use a CV to get hired. CVs, or resumés as they call them in North America, are a deeply subjective veneer of who a person might be. CVs are rarely what clinches the job. At best they might open the door to the interview. But why would an experienced hiring manger place too much faith on the legitimacy of an un-vetted – and generic - employment history?

In his world’s bestselling job hunter’s bible ‘What color is your parachute?’, Dick Bolles uses an up-turned triangle diagram called: ‘Many if not Most Employers Hunt for Job-Hunters in the Exact Opposite Way from How Most Job-Hunters Hunt for Them’ in Chapter 5‘The Best and Worst Ways to Look for Those Job Vacancies That Are Out There’.  Savvy hirers are looking to promote people whose work they have already seen. Or whose reputation is already evident from recommendations they have received from their network. Hiring blind is a flawed approach and increasingly unsustainable strategy.

So what are you going to do about modifying your job search from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’?

Start with seeking to understand yourself, your skill-set and your experience. Extrapolate this information into the future and work hard to visualise what kind of organisation needs this profile. Don’t forget that your value system and your interests are key ingredients in deciphering ‘best fit’ and helping you whittle-down the list of potential employers. If you don’t understand yourself, or you are blind to your various career attributes, seek-out informational meetings with people whose jobs you are interested in knowing more about. Ask them what they like about their jobs? Ask what skills they make the most use of? What subjects they enjoyed (and didn’t enjoy) in school or university? Ask them if they could introduce you to someone else they know who might be able to help you you’re your quest for information?

As you gradually build information and distil it, your career passions with rise to the fore and your career strategy will become increasingly obvious. Your weather vane on knowing when you are onto something positive is your energy and interest levels go up. Constantly remind yourself that a rewarding and sustainable job is the kind of work where you draw upon as many of your career attributes as possible.

[Dead-end jobs are the kind of jobs where your skills are redundant and you have no interest in the subject matter. Remember one man’s poison could be another’s cure. No two people are the same and we should never judge where other people derive their sense of self-worth and livelihood. When faced with ‘job judgemental-ism’ I always hark back to the London Road Sweeper given the Freedom of The City of London because he did not miss a single day off work in over 40 years, you could eat your lunch off his pavements and singleton shopkeepers could set their watches by the punctuality of his dustcart as he called in to check on their safety. He was so evidently proud of a career some people might look down at.]

Next we picture the people and contacts we know in the kinds of companies that we can picture ourselves working in. I call this a ‘network audit’. Our contacts may stem from who we went to school with, their parents; who we play sport with, and their friends and families; who we went to college with and their contacts, our previous work colleagues and so-on.

This is why knowing what work we want to do and where we want to do it is crucial. A job search strategy without knowing this vital detail is lacking in the fuel required to last over a potentially long haul. There are those people who would fire-off many tens, maybe even hundreds, of CVs and résumés a month and wonder why they don’t get anywhere. A well-planned job search is all about firing at the labour market with a high velocity rifle and high-powered telescopic sight, taking time to be vigilant and well-prepared, to stalk our prey with patience and intelligence. It is not about point-blank rapid fire strategy with a sawn-off shotgun or, even worse, a machine gun!

Sadly, I pick the pieces up from this short-sighted approach all the time, when a great deal of damage has already been done, rendering the job search campaign untold harm. Over the years I have found that thought-less, fast pace and ill-prepared job search ends up with nowhere to go. Job searchers using this approach burn-up their potential pool of prospects at such a rate that they lose credibility with the hirers they do meet and never really possess the specificity of purpose to get hired in a job that really suits them.

As with most conventional wisdom and traditional ways of going about things, it is very difficult to challenge the status quo and successfully alter attitudes. Inadvertently, it is often the spouses who pressurise the job searcher into an ill-fitting and ill-considered machinegun approach. Perhaps it is because people tend to be fearful of trying something new and having their conformist ideas rattled; which is why the majority of people struggle to cope with change throughout.

This is why we need to work hard to manage our own expectations and those around us. Are we better taking a longer run at landing a job that we love, care for and can commit to; a job that will sustain us over a longer period? Or are we better off just landing any job in the shortest period of time possible; a job that risks the imprisonment of our most saleable career attributes? Those attributes which fuel a power-packed symbiosis between employee and employer over the long haul of a mutually energised relationship.

Experience has taught me that ill-considered and rash job search strategies aimed at landing any job quickly may solve a short-lived crisis today, but they’re unsustainable in the medium to long term because we start by making a big mistake – by not landing a job that we’re actually equipped to do well in. All this short-termist approach achieves is to increase the likelihood of us not performing to our maximum potential by trying to deliver on a role we’re not well-equipped for; increasing the risk of us getting fired and right back to square one on the virtual ‘Snakes & Ladders’ board of employment and unemployment – a soul-destroying experience for all involved. Ultimately, this is a very fraught and stressful recipe. 

I’ve seen too many people roll with these punches at a time when what they really deserve is a break and somebody who can empathise and help them build onwards and upwards. Job-loss is hard enough. The excruciating irony is that when we’ve just lost one job, the world’s expectation is that we market ourselves positively as if nothing happened. When people are recovering from the bereavement of job-loss, they need help not hindrance. This is one time in our careers when quality definitely outweighs quantity. Perhaps this is why it takes my clients an average of 3 to 4 months to land a job that they love; a one that 'fits' them well. 

What does job search success look like? 

Commit to getting hired at a job that you have the potential to do well. Commit to being bold. Get smart. Get prepared. Get connected. Get informed. Distil. Know what you are aiming at. And above all build your confidence by knowing what you’re interested in, what you are good at doing and doing what it takes to make it work. Above all, harness the power of positive thinking and visualise your goals. Make them real and turn them into reality.