“I don’t want anymore black hole resumes,” she said emphatically.

For her to be able to speak with such clarity, even while recovering from the shock of being let go, was a cause for celebration. It was a huge step forward because in taking it she was rejecting the idea of another job in favor of work, as a consultant, free agent, business owner.

To fully embrace self-employment she will need to give up the false sense of safety associated with being an employee (which lingers, for no logical reason, even when you’ve just lost your job!) and replace it with a faith in her own capacity to generate work and create her own infrastructure of support.

In astronomy, a black hole is defined as an area in space whose gravitational pull is so strong that its escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, that means that nothing that goes in can ever come out.

We use the term metaphorically to describe a place where things disappear without a trace—how many billions of resumes have disappeared into the job-search black hole of bureaucratic systems that swallow up individual initiative?

My client has a wealth of initiative. She worked her way up from an administrative role to a senior team position; mastered, on her own, complex processes and technology; uprooted and re-established herself to work on projects all over the world; and in-between, restored a Victorian home.

Her decision not to seek another corporate position feels like a huge leap. When she speaks of being a consultant or starting her own business, she talks about it as if she were describing entering another world.

Yet in a very real sense she has been functioning as a free agent all along—moving from project to project, quickly acculturating herself to new sets of players and places, using what she has learned from one assignment to add value to another.

There is a huge leap here but it has nothing to do with her ability to excel as an entrepreneur. It has to do with security.

To fully embrace self-employment she will need to give up the false sense of safety associated with being an employee (which lingers, for no logical reason, even when you’ve just lost your job!) and replace it with a faith in her own capacity to generate work and create her own infrastructure of support.

Which leads me to politics, and how sick to my soul I am of hearing politicians in both camps talking about “creating jobs,” as if we still lived in the age of 9 to 5 manufacturing, as if people could count on being employed by any one company for more than a few years at most, as if free agents didn’t already outnumber those who work for corporations.

Why aren’t any of the candidates talking about ways to shift the focus of law and policy from the corporation to the individual, about how government can help create opportunities for self-employment, about workplace policies, especially around health insurance, which allow for mobility.

In 2001, Daniel Pink expressed these thoughts in his groundbreaking book, Free Agent Nation, and yet now, over ten years later, after a financial crisis that has exacerbated fundamental changes in the nature of work that are as transformational as the shift from agriculture to the industrial era starting in the early 1800s, we’re still hearing nothing but job-jabber from our presidential candidates.

The people who claim they can lead us into the future are living in the past.

My client doesn’t need a job to be created for her. But it would help affirm her decision to hear the voice of a leader who is courageous enough to define reality the way she has in making the decision not to waste her energy by pouring it down a black hole.

The actual history of Thanksgiving is far more complex, both messier and richer, than the story everyone knows about the Pilgrims inviting the Indians to dinner.

We hear very little about how the Pilgrims stole seed corn from the Nauset Indians of Cape Cod a few days after they arrived, or the fact that the land around Plymouth had already been cleared and cultivated by Pokanokets who had been wiped out by disease shortly before the newcomers arrived, or that when Native American neighbors came to help the Pilgrims they usually showed up naked!

We cheat ourselves when we settle for an oversimplified view of history because the arrival of the Mayflower in Plymouth represents a nitty-gritty struggle for survival which is as relevant today as it was for the residents of Plymouth in the 1620s.

In the economic turmoil of our times the same steps apply: ask for help, build a community, and start a business (which is another way of saying create something out of nothing).

I recently visited the Mayflower II, moored in Plymouth harbor, on a cold, raw, rainy day, and afterward, while looking for a place to get a hot beverage (and reflecting that the Pilgrims had not had that privilege), I happened to park in front of the Court Street Thrift Boutique.

Venturing inside, I discovered a thriving enterprise—a twelve-room house filled with creatively displayed used clothing, furniture, kitchenware and holiday decorations.

I was immediately welcomed by a courteous volunteer (who offered a level of customer service far exceeding what I received shopping for a MacBook Air).

She showed me the layout of the store and explained that all proceeds went to support domestic violence programs run by the South Shore Women’s Resource Center.

It was then that it struck me that the people who need their services have much in common with the Pilgrims.

When the Mayflower left in April, 1621, the Pilgrim women and children standing on Cole’s Hill watching it depart faced a world full of uncertainty and peril.

The women and children of domestic abuse also experience danger, fear and hardship. They too have watched their former lives disappear, and have had to start over with only such possessions they could carry with them.

The Pilgrims survived through the good will and generosity of strangers, the Native population, and they were able to sustain themselves by forming a strong community of mutual support and initiating an entrepreneurial endeavor, Plimoth Plantation.

Almost four hundred years later the spirit of the First Colony lives on at Court Street which offers a helping hand to victims of domestic abuse and sustains itself by a community business.

Whatever employment or unemployment situation you find yourself in this Christmas season, whatever you hope to accomplish in your professional life the coming year, I hope you will pause for a moment to think about the best of what the Pilgrims modeled and how their spirit is being perpetuated only a short distance away from the harbor where they landed.

In the economic turmoil of our times the same steps apply: ask for help, build a community, and start a business (which is another way of saying create something out of nothing).

If they can do it, so can you.

A good starting point in keeping our minds from spinning out of control is to learn how to “drop the shock and awe.” We do this by making a choice not to be surprised—once again—by behavior that we know from past experience is consistent with a particular person.

Because we already know what to expect, we can eliminate, or at least shorten, the time we spend trying to build a case for why we find another person’s thinking, words or actions unacceptable.

Sometimes, when I hear clients talk about all the draining interpersonal dynamics at work, I wonder how they get anything done!

For example: a man takes his lunch to the park on a lovely spring day, and just as he is settling down on a bench in the sun and unwrapping his sandwich, a pigeon lands a few inches away and proceeds to do what pigeons do. Infuriated, he screams at the bird and storms back to his office.

What happened was only the work of one brief moment in time, but his outrage over it robs him of his lunch hour, spoils the rest of his afternoon, and is still with him that night at the dinner table when he tells his wife about what happened.

Surely, anyone living in an urban environment has had enough experience with pigeons to know what to expect of them, but he reacts as if it were a personal affront.

And we all do this, repeatedly, diverting our energy from the work at hand and keeping us from feeling good about our accomplishments.

One of my clients recently left a consulting practice to take a position with a rapidly growing nonprofit where she hopes to use her knowledge to improve strategic planning and communication.

Although she was well aware of her staff’s resistance to the new ways of thinking she brings to the organization, she immediately started to react when the inevitable happened and one of her suggestions was subtly sabotaged in a passive aggressive way.

She remembered my advice to “drop the shock and awe” and emailed me, before she got hooked into anger, to ask how she should respond.

I replied, “How much energy do you want to give this?”

“5% of zero,” she wrote back, and went on with the rest of her day.

Sometimes, when I hear clients talk about all the draining interpersonal dynamics at work, I wonder how they get anything done!

Making the choice not to get side-tracked or slip into feeling sorry for ourselves because of what a colleague or boss is doing or not doing offers us the freedom to live more productive and satisfying work lives.

Every incident that comes up is a opportunity to experiment with a new approach. We already know how to do outrage at them—why not try gentleness with ourselves?

After all, who suffered the consequences of what happened in the park—the man or the pigeon?

Yes, there are very real conflicts in the workplace, but self-leadership means choosing not to create a lot of drama in ourselves about them so that they don’t become debilitating.

It means that you just get out your handkerchief, so to speak, and wipe off the seat and accept that pigeons poop.

What leads to frustration, sometimes despair, are those difficult or even hostile exchanges with specific people in the work environment, often the boss. These interactions play out in predictable patterns which one of my clients recently described in great detail.

The scene was all-too-familiar: her boss kept calling her again and again, each time with a new demand, neither asking nor caring how the interruption would affect what she was currently working on, expecting her to be able to shift gears immediately, insisting that everything was urgent. It was making her numb.

Where there is professional dysfunction (and it abounds), we are incapable of changing the other person, but we can change our part in the dance.

While it wasn’t hard for her to see what was happening or how it was affecting her, she was at a loss as to know what to do about it. She felt stuck in a situation that was sapping her motivation, energy and confidence, and she could see only two possibilities, to continue to suffer or to resign, both of them unacceptable. The conflict had become about her, the victim, and her boss, the victimizer, and there was no place to go except down a slippery slope or out the door. No wonder she felt paralyzed!

But what if her situation was actually not black-and-white, but gray, and there was a middle ground?

What if, as hard as it might be for her to admit, both parties had a part in creating it?

What if instead of seeing herself and the difficult person as solo performers who periodically collided, she could realize that the two of them were actually dance partners who hadn’t yet learned how not to step on each other’s toes?

If she could begin to see the painful interpersonal situation not as something that was being being perpetrated on her but as an opportunity to claim more freedom of movement, leadership authority and self-respect, a whole new world would open up to her.

This is this cornerstone of the work I do with clients.

I began by having her move back from the brink of reacting habitually, e.g., bitching to others, but not confronting the situation directly, or wallowing in regret and self-recrimination.

Reacting to a situation blocks out possibilities, and if she could stop doing it, she would find that she had more choices than she could have ever imagined. She could then create and execute a reasoned response which preserved her position, values and dignity.

In telling me about how her boss would constantly bombard her with new priorities, all of them having to be done yesterday, she admitted, “I know what’s coming as soon as I see the caller ID on the telephone display.”

I suggested she might use this information for her own benefit and protection by asking herself, “Can I handle a call from this person right now? Am I up to it?” If the answer was no, the solution was simple: don’t take the call.

We also discussed her tendency to take it all on and how she could ask early on in the conversation whether the new task being laid on her was to take precedence over the one she was currently engaged in and point out that a consequence of switching gears abruptly would be that it would take more time to restart.

As she began to see how she could exercise choice over when she allowed herself to be interrupted, and to shift the decision-making responsibility to her boss where it belonged, she took back leadership over herself.

Where there is professional dysfunction (and it abounds), we are incapable of changing the other person, but we can change our part in the dance.

When we can get beyond feeling beat up, badgered and bullied, and respond from a place of knowing who we are and the value we bring, we make our professional lives healthier, one incident at a time.

Frequently they come to light in an exercise where clients write stories about experiences in their lives which gave them a deep sense of personal satisfaction, e.g., this description of a drawing class written by a woman who manages construction projects:  “I loved how I felt when I was doing these drawings. There was a connection between my soul and the paper.”

Occasionally, the need to put hands to clay or pen to paper has become so important to a client that the failure to be able to do it become the focal point of our discussion. This is always exciting to me because it is an unconscious recognition of the link between the artistic urge and transforming a work life.

In my clients’ frustration I hear the struggle to claim the creative space which is essential to a genuine transition. The challenge for them (and for me) is to actuate these seemingly non-productive, impractical pursuits to serve the longer term goal of professional fulfillment.

Honoring your own creativity is the bridge from a dead-end job or burnout to a role in which you thrive. It is also essential to your professional survival.

How do those of us who have to get all our work done before we can play make time and space for things which nurture originality and innovation, especially as work demands keep piling on?

If you’ve been schooled as a corporate professional to consider anything without direct impact on the bottom line as frivolous, where does feeding your creativity fall as a priority—below a round of golf?

There are, however, voices crying out in the wilderness of our automated, outsourced, stagnant economy, and they’re telling us that our employment security depends on our creative skills.

In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink writes, “We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands.”

He then makes suggestions to help us cultivate the right brain attributes associated with being an artist—design, story, symphony, empathy, play, meaning.

Seth Godin, in his book, Linchpin, speaks to the difference between doing your job (what you are told to do) and practicing your art (taking personal responsibility) and warns that we can no longer afford to be afraid to be artists. “The economy is ruthlessly punishing the fearful, and increasing the benefits to the few who are brave enough to create art and generous enough to give it.”

Honoring your own creativity is the bridge from a dead-end job or burnout to a role in which you thrive. It is also essential to your professional survival.

RESISTANCE
But even if you accept the case for making creative activities a regular part of your life, there will still be roadblocks. We often find it difficult to give to ourselves what we most want to do.

I watched myself struggle with this before I sat down to write this column. I couldn’t wait to have a free morning to write, and yet instead of getting to it, I did every chore in the kitchen I could think of, including sanitizing the sponges!

I can tell I’m in procrastination mode when I want to be writing but I’m watering the plants or pulling out the vacuum, a chore I normally delegate to my husband.

What I’ve learned from watching myself is that neither forcing myself to write (I end up re-working the first paragraph 20 times) nor making up excuses why I can’t works. I have to find a middle way.

For me that comes in the form of beginning, not with the task of completing a column or an essay, but with something smaller. I give myself permission to make incremental progress, enter a few notes, fiddle around with no serious intent and see what comes up, reread a piece I haven’t looked at in months.

It’s similar to what I do when it’s freezing cold outside and I don’t want to take my usual daily walk. “Just to the end of the street,” I say, and it usually becomes a longer outing and I always come back refreshed by the brisk air and change of scene.

Recently I heard this middle way perfectly described by a client who is interested in teaching therapeutic poetry. When I asked her how she was doing with her goal of working on her poetry, she told me she was setting aside 15 minutes a day to write, “more often than not.”

The way I see it, nurturing our creative desires with the intention of doing them, even for small chunks of time—more often than not—has the potential for re-shaping our lives.

Nor would they be likely to see the connection between their arrival and my need to get away.

Initially our annual mid-summer escape was motivated by the desire to leave our tourists behind and become tourists ourselves.

We have come, however, like many others, to love the meandering coastline of Maine, with its rugged coves, smooth-as-glass inlets, and sailboat-dotted harbors.

We have grown particularly fond of the panoramic, almost three-hundred-and-sixty degree view of Penobscot Bay from Owls Head Light. It has become for us a must-go-to-whenever-we’re-there destination.

This year we made it the last stop, a place to pause to take in the beauty of the natural world before turning our backs on the sea and facing the five-and-a-half hours of highway ahead of us.

Some places never disappoint, and when you know this, it adds to the joyful anticipation of returning.

When the marriage to work eclipses the marriage to self, we fall into “a false form of maturity, which is actually a form of nonparticipation, of not seeing, not hearing and not imagining.”

I could feel my excitement grow as we followed route 73 beyond the restaurants and shops of Rockland.

Passing through the sparsely populated neighborhoods of modest homes to the center of the town of Owls Head (which consists of a general store and the smallest, most charming post office I’ve ever seen), and finally out past the boatyard to the entrance of the state park, my heart soared with gratitude for once again being able to come to this sacred place.

We parked the car and walked uphill through pines framing the brilliant, sparkling blue of sea and sky. A steep cliff edged with swaying daylilies, Queen Anne’s lace and dried grasses dropped off on our right, and on the left a flight of stone steps took us to the promontory where the lighthouse sits.

We parked the car and walked uphill through pines framing the brilliant, sparkling blue of sea and sky. A steep cliff edged with swaying daylilies, Queen Anne’s lace and dried grasses dropped off on our right, and on the left a flight of stone steps took us to the promontory where the lighthouse sits.

When we arrived, there were several others on the small path that encircled the base of the light, so I retreated to a rock nearby to honor my reverence by sitting cross-legged in openness and silent reflection.

Seconds later, I felt as if I’d been shot from a cannon back into the world of cubicles, computers, and clients, as the gentle off-shore breeze carried what seemed like a never ending business conversation to ears of everyone standing within a fifty yard radius. A middle age executive, posing as a tourist, had destroyed the moment by reaching into his pocket for his cell phone.

BLESSING OR CURSE
This could easily become a diatribe about the general lack of courtesy in public cell phone use, which, truth be told, is what occupied my thoughts for a good portion of the trip home.

In fact, even before we left the light, I’d already decided I would get even by writing a column about the offender—a significant step back from my first impulse, which was to tackle him from behind in the hope that the peace-shattering instrument in his hand would pop out, bounce down the rocky cliff, and be swallowed up by the sea.

But the real question is not about where cell phone use should and should not be permitted, but rather, do we use technology in a way that is respectful of ourselves as well as others? Does it improve our lives or distract us from fully living it?

THREE MARRIAGES
In The Three Marriages, poet David Whyte explores what he calls the three marriages which we commit to in our lifetimes—to a partner, to work or a vocation, and to ourselves, the “hidden marriage to a core conversation [within].”

Our task in life is to integrate, not balance, these three marriages, for as Wythe warns, “To neglect one … is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs in the world.”

The behavior of the man on the cell phone at Owls Head clearly indicated that his marriage to work had come, at least in that moment, to dominate his life. His surroundings, rather than providing self-renewal, were a backdrop, like the view out the window of an office or conference room.

Ironically, it’s likely that he needed the renewal the vista offered more than he needed to reassure the client he was speaking to of his availability, which he did multiple times during the conversation.

After all, he hadn’t climbed the stairs to the light just to make a phone call! And yet when he got there he was unable to give his undivided attention to himself.

In the best definition of burnout I’ve ever read, Whyte explains the condition as the state in which “we erect a barrier inside ourselves which lets things out” but blocks our capacity to allow anything back in. We cut off our ability to receive, to be fed and truly refreshed just when we most need it.

When the marriage to work eclipses the marriage to self, we fall into “a false form of maturity, which is actually a form of nonparticipation, of not seeing, not hearing and not imagining.”

P.S. When I got back to the office there were four emails from a client engaged in the final stages of a negotiation.

By this time I had stopped obsessing about the cell phone interruption, and, grateful that I was able to choose the better portion, I replied unapologetically that I’d been away for a few days, unplugged.

For I know that I serve my clients best when I regularly draw from my own well.

After years of trying without success, this Spring my husband announced that he was giving up, and he was going to put down mulch because he was sick of mowing dirt.

I have a strong preference for the natural look, so I balked at the idea of covering what little green we have with brown—or worse yet, red—mulch.

We compromised on ground cover and shrubs in the front, but what to do on side of the house remained unsettled until I had a wild idea in the middle of the night—we could build a labyrinth.

A labyrinth is an ancient symbol for wholeness. It combines the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path representing a journey to one’s own center and back again into the world.

By surrounding himself with like-minded people, he has made the work of creating work for himself enjoyable rather than burdensome.

I first experienced a labyrinth on vacation some years ago in Lewes, Delaware. Across the street from the inn where we were staying there was an old church with what looked at first to me like a circle of weather-worn headstones. When I went to explore it, I discovered a twisting and turning path leading to the center of the circle and back out by the same route.

I walked it without really knowing what I was doing, yet I felt there was something valuable in the experience.

When I began to think about my own labyrinth, I went first to the Internet where I found images, designs, instructions, and stories about how other people had organized and executed a labyrinth building project. There was a lot of information which guided our process and helped us maneuver around obstacles.

As I shared my idea with others, more resources surfaced, including a book a friend had purchased as a tool to educate children about labyrinths which proved to be very helpful.

There were times, however, when people thought we were crazy.

I’m sure the young man who waited on us at the garden center when we were trying to decide what to fill the pathways with, pebbles, stone dust, or shells, by listening to what it sounded like to walk on each, is still telling his fellow employees about that weird couple who wanted to build a path that went in circles!

And the stonemason who watched us sit on various rocks with our legs crossed until we finally selected a piece of red Pennsylvania fieldstone to use as a meditation seat in the center of the labyrinth is probably still shaking his head.

One of the sites I checked pointed out that laying the stones for even a modest labyrinth (ours has half the complexity of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral and required well over five-hundred stones) can be a major task, so after the large pallet of rocks arrived, my husband and I invited friends to come and help us put them down to mark the borders of the paths (see photos here—and thanks to our friend Gwynne Guzzeau for the slideshow). What would have taken us hours was accomplished in less than forty-five minutes, and the work was both fun and mutually enriching.

What has this to do with career, you ask?

The three basic steps we followed to make it happen apply equally well to work search.

1. Seek out an innovative solution.
2. Use information-gathering to help refine your idea and plan a strategy.
3. Build a community to help you execute your plan.

Talented people with excellent employment records are having as much difficulty finding a job in fields which have dried up as my husband was trying to get grass to grow in sand.

One of my clients, a skilled technical writer, had to face the fact that, despite his best efforts at traditional job-search, nothing was taking root because there are far fewer jobs available and there is a glut of candidates vying for them.

He took the time to reflect on the breadth of his interests and experience using the model presented in What Color is Your Parachute? and supplemented it with exercises I recommend in my book.

He was able to identify a consistent theme, support for social causes, and began to use his research skills for himself to explore how his writing abilities might fit into the non-profit world.

Eventually he had an aha moment, like the one I had in the middle of the night when I thought of the labyrinth—he would try grant writing.

Once he had a clear vision of a solution in mind, he put a plan in place to learn as much as he could about grant writing, and he enlisted the help of his network community in making connections within organizations that support causes he feels passionate about.

By surrounding himself with like-minded people, he has made the work of creating work for himself enjoyable rather than burdensome.

He is now interning at both a large social service center and a small environmental advocacy organization and has been invited to participate with other staff in grant development training.

Just as we built our labyrinth one stone at a time, he is building credentials one grant at a time. “I feel really, really on track and in my authenticity,” he recently shared with me in an email. He’s walking his career labyrinth.

In the window of a convenience store near my house there is a sign which announces, “Cape Cod Ice Sold Here.”

The Cape offers many wonderful things—clam chowder, lobsters, glorious beaches, and cranberries, to name a few—but no one ever returned from a vacation here saying, “I can’t wait to go back next year for some more of that fabulous Cape Cod ice.” Give me a break!

I have nothing against marketing per se. The connection between a product and how it is presented can be useful, but only if it is genuine.

I love the Cape Cod Baseball League because it started here, has stayed here and thrives here, and I don’t hesitate to recommend tours of the Cape Cod Potato Chip factory because, even though the company was bought out by Anheuser-Busch in 1985, it was started by local entrepreneurs.

I don’t even have a problem with using the magic words “Cape Cod” to promote salt water taffy made in Los Angeles or beach plum jelly canned in New Jersey because old timers here still tell stories about taffy pulls and I am able to watch countless beach plum bushes progress from blossom to fruit on my daily walks.

But sometimes marketing goes too far. If everything is special, nothing is, and we’re left with the kind of sameness you find in big city airports where the concourse shops are all the same and the only way you can tell where you are is by the sports team logos on the sweatshirts and baseball caps (which are, ironically, often promoting some franchise without deep roots in the city, like the poor Expos who after thirty-five years in Montreal suddenly became the Washington Nationals six years ago).

I have nothing against marketing per se. The connection between a product and how it is presented can be useful, but only if it is genuine.

In gloomy economic times when finding work is more difficult, you have to do everything possible to market yourself effectively. There is, however, the risk of trying too hard.

When you feel a sense of urgency or a lack of confidence, the way you present yourself can be awkward at best and counterproductive at worst.

I see this in clients who just have to come up with the perfect elevator speech and the correct answer to interview questions, or who resist going to networking events because they fear they won’t be able to say the right thing to someone they meet there.

It’s natural to feel uneasy in such situations, and it’s appropriate to do some work to prepare.

But following a script means that the spiel dominates and you, the talented, vibrant, interesting person that you are, get lost.

Consider what happens when someone who dreads public speaking memorizes every word of a talk. It may make them feel more comfortable, but in choosing to deliver what they have to say by rote, they miss out on the opportunity to energize their audience with a spontaneous remark or connect with them in a more meaningful and direct way.

We know instinctively when someone is giving us a presentation that has been memorized. The difference between a real conversation and an elevator pitch is palpable.

Instead of agonizing over what you are going to say, reflect on three or four things which connect you to the role you’d like to fulfill.

The things about you that are real—like the chowder and the cranberries her—can be shared with ease and good energy, the same way you’d give a friend the highlights of your summer vacation.

Use simple phrases which can be illustrated with sound bites from your own rich history.

For example: “I love working with data and numbers. I found this out early in my career when I was part of a team that computerized telephone records. Later I had the lead responsibility for developing data management procedures for a major corporation. Now, not surprisingly, I’m thinking I’d like to be involved with the digitization of medical records.”

Aim for making every word such an authentic description of your best stuff that there’s no need to memorize it.

Telling people who you are with comfort and conviction is the best possible way to make a natural connection.

The world is craving for things that are one-of-a-kind and real. They are at a premium, and this is your chance to provide them.

 
 
As Dave Barry once observed:

Gatorade is now making water. I know this because I saw a Gatorade commercial that asks an intriguing question: “What if Gatorade made water?”

Of course, when I say that they “make” water, what I mean is that they do not make water. There’s no need to actually make water, because there’s water all over the planet—water in lakes, water in rivers, water falling from the sky, water in your home plumbing system, water escaping from your home plumbing system, causing your ceiling to collapse when you’re away on vacation, water just everywhere.

What the bottled water companies do is get some of this water, put it into bottles, give it a brand name, sell it to consumers, then smack themselves in their corporate foreheads and say, “We can’t believe we’re getting away with this! Do you think they’d buy air? How about dirt?”

After I spoke, a panel made up of career counselors from the university and a former executive recruiter answered questions from the audience and talked about how they managed their own professional lives.

The former recruiter had recently been elected to a leadership position with a volunteer organization serving professionals under 40 on Cape Cod (a minority here!) and each time she spoke, she would bring up some activity she had participated in with the group.

She talked with unrestrained enthusiasm about spending time the previous weekend, restoring the landscape around one of the Cape’s precious kettle ponds, and then she announced:

“If you’re looking for a job, go plant trees. You’ll probably find yourself digging in the dirt with a bank president or a business owner.”

I could barely contain myself!

The tendency of people looking for work is to overstate their features and understate their benefits.

It was so much in keeping with what I teach, and the way it was expressed was so stunning that I knew immediately I would have to share it.

“Go plant trees” is as good a slogan as I could hope for to encapsulate the basic tenets of the approach to finding work I advocate:

• Always connect as people first
• Drop the spiel and be real
• Make your work search as comfortable as possible
• Look for ways to be helpful
• Let go of the agenda—people can tell the difference
• Build community to assure a secure professional future

To prove her point, the panel’s tree-planting advocate then proceeded to explain how she had gotten her current job.

The owner of the company she now works for knew her from social and civic activities they had participated in together. She was hired without a formal interview because who she was and what she stood for was more important to the employer than what she’d done in the past.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS
There was a lot of good advice at the career event about knowing and articulating your selling points, and as I compared it with the advice of the woman who said to go plant trees, I realized that two contrasting aspects of self-marketing were being discussed.

It’s like the classic marketing distinction between features and benefits.

A feature describes what a product is made of, its contents as listed on the label. I’m on vacation, traveling in the South, and I see a bag of grits in a specialty food shop. The package tells me it’s made from “cracked corn, stone ground by a time honored process.” This is a physical characteristic of what’s being sold.

A benefit, on the other hand, is about how I experience the product. When I purchase that 2 lb. bag of Charleston’s Favorite Stone Ground Grits what I’m buying is a chance to hold on to the memory of my stay in the South Carolina Low Country by reproducing in my own kitchen the best shrimp-and-grits I’ve ever tasted.

The capacity to effectively articulate both features and benefits is critical to any marketing campaign, and this is true whether the product is a bag of grits, or you, the work searcher.

But the tendency of people looking for work is to overstate their features and understate their benefits.

Remember the old Michelin ads with the baby playing inside the tire? They didn’t waste time talking about the quality of the rubber or the construction. They showed you why you’d spend more on tires.

Any time you have the opportunity to show people why you would be an excellent employee or consultant, you’re doing the same thing.

Which is why the “go plant trees” advice is so powerful.

Your resume tells a prospective employer about your “features,” i.e., your experience and your qualifications.

But it says little or nothing about your “benefits”—all the reasons it would be a pleasure to work with you.

In order for him to see that, you have to find some way for him to get to know you, about your whole life, your values, your commitment to your work, your family, your community.

What better way than by planting trees together, side by side?

Nothing replaces live, in-person interaction, with no agenda to interfere with building trust.

I hear it in ubiquitous phrases, like, “I’ve just been so busy, flat out, swamped, etc.”

I feel it in the genuine regret I experience when I have to say no to something I want to do or find myself postponing being with a friend or colleague whose company I enjoy because I’m booked solid.

Although it’s comforting to know I’m not alone, it’s also alarming to realize that the goal of living a more balanced rhythm is eluding so many of us.

Could over-scheduling be like global warming, sneaking up on us by degrees and threatening our well-being?

Fortunately, last October, after a period of trying to normalize my overextendedness resulted in failure, I became painfully aware that I was driving myself too hard.

Living in an age that upholds the myth that technological advancements expand our capacity to do more with less time—somebody show me an app for sleep or leisure—it’s no wonder we’ve become humans constantly doing, instead of humans seeking to become whole.

I finally stopped long enough to face the fact that I was in a pattern of physical, mental and spiritual depletion and it wasn’t a passing blip on the radar screen.

A hectic summer had become an event-filled fall, and I was heading into the stress of the holidays without any respite from the press of doing more than was reasonable for one person to accomplish.

Then, just as I was beginning to feel very much like a race car propelling myself around a dangerous track, unsure if I had enough gas to make it to the finish line, I brought a Prius.

ZEN CAR
It’s telling that I owned the new car for almost two weeks before I had enough space on my calendar to set up a time for my husband show me the difference between driving a hybrid and gas only vehicle.

The first thing I noticed was that it was so quiet. The sense of gliding noiselessly out of the driveway and coasting down inclines was calming, but the best part was when I started to understand the computer display on the dashboard which shows fuel consumption and battery use as you drive.

I discovered that when you apply the brake the battery recharges!

There it was, right in front of me, a fundamental truth—slowing down renews your energy. The lesson alone seemed almost worth the price of the car.

But there was more. The display clearly showed that you use less energy by accelerating gradually to full speed.

Did this mean that I could be more efficient by easing into even the most demanding day, starting with simple tasks, like filing the client folders from the day before or making a few notes related to upcoming appointments? For a while, I’ve observed that writing projects invariably go better when I allow myself to start out playing with a few thoughts before I get into that “overdrive,” have-to-get-it done mental state.

Under pressure, it may sometimes be necessary to take a “heavy-footed” approach, but when I think about the days which are both productive and enjoyable, I can see that they are times I have built momentum slowly.

There’s still one more lesson I learned from the hybrid. When I’m cruising, in order to maintain a certain speed, I don’t have to press down on the accelerator as hard or as often as I think.

The same principle applies to life as well—I can ease up and still keep going forward.

PEOPLE ARE HYBRIDS, TOO
How easy it is to get caught up in treating ourselves as if we were some kind of machine. Just fill us up with enough food, water, caffeine, etc. and we will keeping chugging along.

Living in an age that upholds the myth that technological advancements expand our capacity to do more with less time—somebody show me an app for sleep or leisure—it’s no wonder we’ve become humans constantly doing, instead of humans seeking to become whole.

Yes, our bodies will respond to being tanked up with a power bar or a caffeine charged drink or a latte, but the parts of us that operate on spiritual energy—our creativity, empathy, enlightenment—don’t work that way. They will keep running down, like a battery.

We’re not gas driven. We’re hybrids.

Both comments expressed the concern that people at the lower end of the employment spectrum would not be capable of grasping and utilizing an entrepreneurial approach to work-search, nor would they be likely to benefit from it if they did. They suggested that my thinking about the entrepreneurial mindset was all very well and good for some people but not for those with very few resources and a lot going on in their lives.

We don’t know yet whether doing these things will result in my client finding work, but I do know that by putting something constructive, positive and self-renewing into the void, she has taken the first steps on the path of learning how to generate her own work instead of depending on others for it.

These are valid questions coming from people who work on the front lines with those who are struggling to find a job in order to survive, and yet I would ask:

• Are new ways of thinking which have the potential to empower people limited to certain economic groups?
• How can we not offer every possible concept and tool to the least advantaged among us?
• In making a decision that something is “too advanced or sophisticated” for someone are we protecting them from failure or excluding them based on our own preconceptions?

PROTECTION OR DISCRIMINATION
The movie, Stand and Deliver, tells the true story of Jaime Escalante, a gifted teacher who teaches calculus to students who initially seem unable to do even basic math in a Los Angeles high school which has already given up on them.

Of course there are those who question whether students with so much against them can succeed when challenged to a higher level of thinking.

The father of one of them believes that his daughter is better suited for waiting tables in his restaurant than going to medical school as she hopes.

Escalante’s supervisor, the head of the math department, a veteran of urban schools, tells him that the idea of teaching calculus to such kids is a “joke,” exhibiting what President George Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson called, “The soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The department head’s objections are misguided, yet they are intended to be protective. “I’m thinking about those kids,” she pleads. “What if they try and don’t succeed? You’ll shatter what little confidence they have. These are not the types that bounce back.”

It’s a statement that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think of the hardships these kids face every day, the stringent demands on their personal lives and the way they are forced to step up to the adult responsibilities of living in poor urban families.

Escalante, who sees the inner strengths and undeveloped capacities of the students, responds by saying, “The students will rise to the level of expectation,” and he is correct.

In the film—as in real life—the students, all eighteen of them, go on to prove the naysayers and the handwringers wrong by passing the Advanced Placement Examination in calculus with some of the highest scores in the state of California.

Given a chance to think and act beyond their current circumstances, they are able to use the resilience and determination they have gained from their difficult lives for their own betterment.

THE REAL WORLD
This of course is a movie, where the facts are greatly simplified for dramatic effect. Not surprisingly, there’s more to the story (although Escalante himself did claim that the film is 90% accurate). The achievements depicted are real, but the timeframe is greatly compressed.

Escalante was at Garfield High for several years before he even began teaching calculus, and it took him ten years to build the math enrichment programs in the lower grades which fed his high school AP classes. It required a lot of extra effort to develop students not as skilled in basic math as their suburban counterparts, but in the end he was able to prove that they were just as capable.

In my experience, the same is true for people who have limited business experience or have not yet been given the opportunity to develop confidence in themselves. Nothing prevents them from learning to think entrepreneurially.

A woman I have been working with for the last few months became a certified nursing assistant (CNA) after caring for her husband during a prolonged terminal illness.

She has been looking for a job through the normal channels—the unemployment office, the placement department at the school where she earned her certification, online postings at nursing homes—and getting nowhere. She has been in danger of slipping into despair.

It is at this point, when someone has been doing the traditional activities and nothing is happening that the basic principles of the entrepreneurial mindset—know your product, know your market, and match the two—have the greatest potential to empower. And, just like math, these principles can be taught step-by-step.

For my CNA client, knowing her product started with defining and articulating her credentials, her selling points—five years’ experience caring for someone with a degenerative condition, the use of specialized equipment, a caring demeanor—and putting them together in a simple bio.

Knowing her market took the form of listing places within a radius she was willing to travel where people who might need her services congregate, e.g. senior centers, assistant living facilities.

Matching the two resulted in a plan to visit senior centers to post her credentials on bulletin boards and ask that her name be placed on their resource lists.

My client is definitely an entrepreneurial beginner, and to make these activities less intimidating, we have talked about a number of basic “how to” strategies—calling ahead to make sure that postings are allowed, knowing just who to speak to, bringing along a letter in an envelope addressed to that person in case they happen not to be there when she arrives, making a follow-up call.

“Tutoring” is as just as helpful in a work-search as it is in academic studies, especially with someone who is only beginning to learn how to act in her own behalf.

We don’t know yet whether doing these things will result in my client finding work, but I do know that by putting something constructive, positive and self-renewing into the void, she has taken the first steps on the path of learning how to generate her own work instead of depending on others for it.

The destination I chose was the port city of Salem, Massachusetts, with its abundance of historical sites and excellent museum. But I ended up seeing none of them.

The snow began the afternoon I arrived, and by the next day, over a foot and half had fallen on Salem, with layers of ice and freezing rain for good measure, in effect closing down the town. The new snow fell on top of an already substantial buildup from earlier storms, causing unexpected problems, such as what to do with all the additional “white stuff” (it’s against the law to dump it in the harbor) and roofs that collapsed from excess weight.

Watching people laboring to shovel a path between snow banks almost as tall as they were, or improvising a solution by hanging out a window to clear off a porch roof with a rake, it struck me that their efforts had a lot in common with long-term unemployment. The work is arduous and all too familiar; “caving in,” i.e., giving up, is a real danger; and it feels like spring will never come.

They overlook the importance of authenticity, knowing absolutely that you are just the right person to do a particular kind of work. They don’t see that it gives them a much stronger platform to stand on while they are searching, and the best possible competitive edge when they are being considered for a new position.

Like the long New England winter, unemployment takes a lot out of body, mind and spirit.

The person who weathers it best is the one who is able to look inside himself to discover the skills, attributes and aspirations which make him unique, and then set out to match his value to the needs of the marketplace. He does not expect a prospective employer to figure out where he belongs. He digs himself out!

GOING INSIDE
What I learned from being stranded in Salem is that there are two aspects to bad weather.

First there’s the part where you’re out in it, trudging through the snow and fighting the bitter wind, trying to find someplace open where you can get cup of coffee.

Then there’s being back inside with little to do except look out the window.

The same two modes exist for job searcher. There’s the staying busy part—looking for openings, submitting resumes, etc.—and then there’s the stuck-at-home, what-do-I-do-with-myself-now part.

At first, as I looked out at the snow piled up on the House of the Seven Gables, literally across the street from where I was staying, all I could think of was how disappointed I was that this place which I had so hoped to visit was closed to me.

Of course, it was closed to everyone else, but I took it personally, just as a job seeker in darker moments may feel the world of work is closed to him.

But then I had an important insight. I couldn’t physically enter where I wanted to be, but I could still engage.

I went to my computer and downloaded the Kindle edition of The House of the Seven Gables and spent the next two days reading it.

Denied access to the site which inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second novel, I fed my sense of identity as a lover of history and literature in another way. By the time I finished the book, I felt I’d gained more from it than by taking the tour of the house. I’d used the opportunity of unstructured time to learn about myself.

One of my clients, who recently found a job after a year and a half of looking, had kept her confidence up during the search by regularly getting together with former colleagues, taking refresher classes, and attending a business book club, activities which allowed her to constantly refine how she presented herself. Before doing these things, she had found herself in subtle ways becoming tentative about her performance, apologetic about being out of work, and disconnected from her own professional competency and energy.

Judging from what I see, read and hear, many people who are desperately seeking employment do not know how to take advantage of a stretch of economic bad weather. It makes them see themselves as an outsider because they have not found ways, like my client, to sustain and grow their sense of professionalism, even while out of work.

COMPETITIVE NECESSITY
When there are five or six people competing for every job opening, you simply cannot be competitive unless you have are willing to engage in an extensive self-exploration process to sharpen your appreciation for what you have to offer and develop your ability to articulate it spontaneously (not as if it were an elevator speech) and with enthusiasm because you know in your bones that every word is true.

Back in the eighties and nineties, in better economic times, clients would complain to me of feeling restless or unfulfilled in the corporate world, and when I suggested exploring other options, many of them saw the idea of doing something for a living that better matched their authentic self as a “luxury.” From their perspective, being on a secure career track, which was more the norm than the exception in those days, compensated for the sacrifice of authenticity.

Nowadays, people in the opposite situation, people who are dealing with a very high level of insecurity about work, are making the same mistake. In their urgency to find a job, any job, they don’t take the time to discover and fully own the best they have to offer.

They overlook the importance of authenticity, knowing absolutely that you are just the right person to do a particular kind of work. They don’t see that it gives them a much stronger platform to stand on while they are searching, and the best possible competitive edge when they are being considered for a new position.

A colleague recently told me about a candidate her staff had interviewed who stood head and shoulders above the others in a field of equally qualified contenders. The candidate had provided a chart outlining her understanding of the needs of the organization and the ways that her strengths and values matched those needs, and the alignment between what they were looking for and what she had to offer was so strong and clear that everyone in the room instantly wanted her.

This is the reward of bringing yourself up-to-date, gathering enough inside data about your product, i.e., you, and enough outside data about a role you are pursuing to be able to say with definitive surety, “I am the person to do this work.”