You cannot possibly imagine how many times I go over each page to correct my many errors, and so I opened for this entry and discover "jon" instead of job. I trust you have already forgiven me.
Yesterday, well, earlier today, we were talking about preparing for the opportunities you will discover in the future. Now, we need to examine how you have prepared yourself for the future. I hope you were serious about examining your relationships with others as you were growing up. For most of us, it could have saved us years of fumbling abound trying to find the reasons we were not being as successful as we were trying to become.
In my case, for example, I never really knew my Father, but I had heard he was a very successful sales person. After graduating from college and discovering that opportunities in the Personnel area were few and far between, I tried Marketing as a potential career and started hating it within weeks of
being on my first job. I had been used to a military environment where everyone was expected to be on time, on cue and ready for anything that happened on our "watch". If you "goofed" up, you received a reprimand and more often that not, it was officially recorded. That meant that the promotion you had expected was going to be delayed. I excelled in staying out of trouble, performed on the job as my predecessor had taught me and as a result, was promoted rapidly. Now, in the "marketing" office, the norm seemed to be, if you made a mistake, you lied your way past being held responsible. I hated it and quit before my attitude got me in trouble.
I tried sales, my friends suggested that I was a "natural" but I would discover that I literally hated to call on potential customers, even though I was well prepared to talk about our products, I hated trying to start a conversation with people I did not know. As soon as they assigned me to a territory where I was calling on former customers, I began to excel. But those earlier failures lingered in my mind and when I began to believe I was not as competent as others, I quit.
I struggled with that attitude for a year or so when I came across a guy who was selling "enthusiasm" like it was a commodity and I bought into his philosophy of life - and sales, like a hungry dog chewing on a brand new bone. Selling became as natural to me as tying my shoes laces in the morning. It literally changed my life.
That is why I became successful as a employment counselor. I discovered how needy people were as they tried to explain the circumstances that led them to our offices. Some of my applicants were as competent in the skills they had to offer as any I had ever seen, but trying to convince them of that was like pulling teeth with tweezers. It didn't work. One Saturday morning I was in the office when three beautiful young women asked if we were open for business and I was not about to tell them that we were not. Each had a resume and it was apparent that their clerical skills were way above average. I called the office of one of the companies we dealt with regularly and happened to catch one of their executives at work. He gave me the home phone number of their Personnel Manager and after I told him of the skills, he told me that if their skills were as good as I had relayed to him, he would probably hire all three. And he did. I didn't have to sell them on the potential involved in the opportunities they were about to receive. They came, expecting to get hired on a Saturday morning.
I say all of the above because I often got the impression that applicants felt they were not worthy of the values you placed in them as competent workers. Far too often they failed at jobs where they were more far more competent than their confidence. I came to the conclusion that this attitude began long before they walked into our offices. Unfortunately, I did not take time to examine my own theories.
Years later, I came to a situation in my own life where it seemed that everything I thought I was really working, turned out to be little more than a complete waste of my time. My marriage came to an end and I realized I was losing the greatest opportunity in my life I had ever experienced when it seemed, my beloved children were turned against me. It seemed I had no other alternative, I returned to the faith that had once been a essential part of my life.
Regardless of the faith you have accepted for yourself, we all need to realize our birth was far more important than the result of our parents expressing their love for each other. Even though we might have born to parents who were not married to one another, we entered this world on purpose. The fact is, our lives were known long before we learned how to walk and talk. We were loved at the moment of conception. We have been loved continually right up until the moment you chose to read these words. We will be loved until we both have passed away.
I am not talking about the kind of love that you read about in books, or watch in movies, or on TV, or perhaps, learn about in churches or synagogues. I am not talking about a religion, I am talking about the fact that we are born so that we might make this planet all that it was meant to be from the very beginning. While I do have a personal faith, it is not created out of man made rules, the kinds that have continued to fail us, almost from the beginning.
That is why I am confident in my belief that as I have aged, I have come to realize the errors of my ways and that now, I am in a position to offer help to others, the kinds of help that I could have used myself along the way. To understand what this might mean to you, in your life, tomorrow, you need only to drop me a line at - sherwood8028@hotmail.com
Oh yes, I'll be here on Saturday.....
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