Who Decides?

When teaching job search classes I ask early on (and continue asking to drive the point home) “Who decides your success in securing employment?”

No one gets the answer I’m looking for. Never. Typical responses: the employer, the interviewer, me (myself, the captain of my own ship, etc.). Nope, not where I’m headed and not where I want them to be. These answers are not incorrect however they are way too close to the ground.  

The view from 35,000 feet is what’s needed. Initially. From this height, all the details fade and blur. Personalizing the situation becomes difficult, impossible.  

The answer I seek? The Marketplace. The huge pond in which we all swim or sink.  

Prying people from their own narrow reality is critical. Take it up, way up and away from as many limiting and unhelpful self-held concepts as possible. Look, really look from your mind’s eye at the vast landscape spread out below. How significant do you feel now? How important in the overall scheme of things are your concerns? Exactly.  

Now imagine the sprawling countryside laid out below to be one big Marketplace with each of us buried somewhere within it. Its a dispassionate, open-schmoppen, free-for-all, where, like it or not, we all have to compete.  

I want people to “get it” - get that we all must take stock of just how unimportant, unspecial and insignificant each of us really is when viewed from cruising altitude. And how unnoticeable we are to a Marketplace that cares not, feels not ... UNLESS we do something about it!

The first step is to recognize that each of us is a Free Agent. Next comes the realization that we must compete in the Marketplace. And you might say, so what’s the big deal about this? What’s the grand revelation here? 

Well there must be some small kernel of merit in it because so many people walk around as if others were in charge of their lives and as if somehow they were immune to the ebb and flow of the Marketplace. Seriously.  

Travel well.
John Jeffrey Lundell