If you’ve decided to launch a new business venture, you’ll find plenty of books telling you how to go about writing a business plan, securing financing, setting up payroll, etc.
Likewise, if you’ve been laid off or you’ve decided you want to make a change, there’s no lack of information on how to start a job search.
But where do you turn when your start-up activities are completed, and things aren’t going so well, when the initial excitement you felt at owning your own business has cooled, and no one is walking in the door, or you’ve perfected your career marketing package, and the phone isn’t ringing. There are far fewer resources for dealing with the low points in our professional lives.
Fortunately, however, there is The Art of Possibility by Roz and Ben Zander. Ben Zander is conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, professor of music at New England Conservatory, and a speaker on leadership and creativity. His wife Roz is an executive coach and family systems therapist.
Taking responsibility for “the way things are” means neither giving into despair nor pretending it isn’t there. It means understanding that the fear of scarcity (“What if business doesn’t pick up in the spring?” “What if I’m still unemployed when the taxes come due?”) is different from scarcity itself.
Regular readers will remember that in last November’s column, I recommended The Art of Possibility as an antidote to Barbara Ehrenreich’s dismal book on the supposed futility of job search, Bait and Switch.
In Ehrenreich’s view, the middle-class has been suckered into believing that a good education and hard work will bring success, while in fact the situation is actually hopeless, and there just are no opportunities any more.
The Zanders, on the other hand, would find wonderful new possibilities in the elimination of the job “boxes” that limit our freedom to invent ourselves in exciting new ways.
The epigraph to the first chapter of The Art of Possibility sums up the difference between these two diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world:
A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region in Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,
SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES
The other writes back triumphantly,
GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES
Which of these approaches you choose when you hit a rough patch in your professional life makes all the difference in the world.
NEW PERSPECTIVE
In times when everything isn’t going according to plan, reading a book like The Art of Possibility and applying its simple principles provides just what is most needed—a new way to think about what you are experiencing. Only then will you be receptive enough to interpret your situation differently, which brings with it the potential for being transformed by the unexpected.
There is an example from the book that illustrates this perfectly.
Ben Zander was invited to speak on the topic, “New Possibilities”, at a home for the elderly, but as the day approached, he found himself regretting he had agreed to do it. Yet as he shared stories and laughed and sang with his 80+ year old audience, an obligation that had felt burdensome became a celebration of life. He ended up staying an hour later than he planned.
Let’s consider how this could apply to a business owner going through a slow period or to someone who has been looking for work for some time. It’s not easy to keep at it when the store is empty or you’re waiting for responses that aren’t forthcoming, especially when there are so many other things you’d rather be doing.
But what would happen if you made a conscious choice to make the most of this time? What could the experience become if you decided not to see it as an ordeal, or to feel you weren’t being productive unless you were generating X dollars of revenue or getting X number of interviews?
What if you decided your goal for the day was simply, in Zanders’ words, to “be a contribution” by shifting your attention from yourself to others.
For the work seeker, this could mean asking the people you’re networking with about their needs and making your primary objective to be of help.
For the business owner it might mean exploring ways to be of service to the community, not with a self-serving agenda, but simply because it offers an opportunity to connect with the people around you.
I recently agreed to sit on the advisory board of a regional technical school for exactly that reason. In my first official capacity, I was treated to a gourmet dinner prepared by their culinary arts students, while enjoying the company of a math teacher who told me she had decided on a career in vocational education because it was “relevant”. Like Ben Zander after his visit to the nursing home, I left there feeling renewed.
LEADERS DEFINE REALITY
These activities don’t change (at least not immediately) the facts of the situation, but they do help you to reclaim your role as leader of your destiny rather than as a victim of circumstances.
Taking responsibility for “the way things are” means neither giving into despair nor pretending it isn’t there. It means understanding that the fear of scarcity (“What if business doesn’t pick up in the spring?” “What if I’m still unemployed when the taxes come due?”) is different from scarcity itself.
It means having the “courage and persistence to distinguish the downward spiral from the radiant realm of possibility in the face of challenge,” and framing the conversations you have with others as well as the ones that take place in your own head in the light of that possibility.
If the only thing you consciously did when you were facing a professional challenge was to ask yourself the question:
you would be taking a huge step toward shaping a positive future (diagram adapted from The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Ben Zander.)
GIVING YOURSELF AN “A”
I’d like to suggest that when you’re in a slump you adopt a practice that Ben Zanders uses with his students. It’s called giving yourself an “A”. You honor your potential to learn and grow by giving yourself a top grade for how you will perform in a situation before you have gone through the experience. The only requirement for this instant success is that a week or two after you’ve given yourself the A, you sit down and write a postdated letter in which you describe what you did to earn it. For example:
If I’m looking for work, and I give myself an “A” for how well I will conduct my job search, when I come to write my postdated letter justifying the grade, I can’t just say I was busy posting my resume on websites. I will have to talk about how I overcame my resistance to calling people I don’t know to set up face-to-face meetings.
If I’m a business owner facing a lean period, and I give myself an “A” for getting through it, when I write my letter it’s not enough to say that I trimmed expenses here and there. I’ll need to talk about how I finally accepted that my ideas about promoting my business were out- of-date, and I took a course or hired a consultant to help me develop a marketing plan.
This practice benefits your professional development in two ways. It cushions your natural tendencies to be hard on yourself when results aren’t forthcoming or you make mistakes. And it makes you accountable for creating a more complete view of exactly what you need to do to align your efforts to the desired outcome.
