The Career Clinic Blog

Once upon a time the people ushering me from one rung to the next on AT&T’s corporate ladder gave me some coaching.

I was about to be interviewed for a midlevel management position, and the suggestions were specific: “Cut your hair. Wear a suit and top it off with one of those (silly) little ties. And whatever you do, tone down the bubbly personality!”

Which I did. I sat in the lobby of a swanky office building in Kansas City, petrified. The receptionist--who later became one of my best friends because she was a sweetheart and thought I was, too--took me in. And at first she decided, “What a (insert unflattering noun).”

I carried off that oh-so-cool corporate demeanor for--what?--about three hours once I got the job. I’m surprised I was hired, considering the receptionist had shared her first impression of me with anyone who’d listen.

I had a lot of fun during those couple of years in corporate America--flying to and from New York City, for one thing, to attend still another marketing meeting--even though I hated the actual work. Which mostly meant, to borrow from Dave Barry, keeping the blame balloon afloat. I wasn’t very good at that, to begin with--but we had a lot of laughs at my lame (and occasionally adequate) attempts.

Oh-so-cool is so not me.

The highlight of that job was after my boss told our staff he thought we had a very honest, open group. I turned to my nemesis and said, “I agree. I have to believe that what you say behind my back isn’t any worse than what you say to my face.” Everyone cracked up. My boss pulled me aside later to tell me he thought I was the reason the group was so much fun. An agent would echo that many years later: “You don’t have any filters.”

Okay, so that would suck if I aspired to be a poker player. But I hate playing games--except for Scrabble, and Tetris.

I’d rather play it straight.

You?

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You know what ADD is, right?

Barbara Winter doesn’t think you do. She thinks more of us suffer from adventure deficit disorder than anything.

What’s it going to be?

According to Helen Keller, life is either a daring adventure--or nothing.

I’ll take daring adventure, please.

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What do you do when you’re interviewing someone for what you’re sure is his first time? An about-to-be college graduate who wants to work at your company? The candidate doesn’t seem comfortable talking with you, and you wonder if he’ll come across that way with customers.

If you’re Dylan Schweitzer from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, you tell him what you’re feeling.

“I don’t know if you’re nervous,” Dylan often says, “but this job requires excellent communication skills. Just try to relax and talk with me the way you would a good friend.”

I don’t know why this surprised me, that an interviewer would be so nice. But it makes good business sense. You don’t want to miss out on a great employee just because nerves got the better of him.

What if you’re the candidate? How do you stay cool?

“Remember you’re also evaluating the company,” Dylan suggests. “You’re trying to decide if this is a place you’d like to work.” I like that suggestion. It puts you on more equal footing.

Dylan also hopes you’ve done your homework. Have three or four stories ready that will show the interviewer you have the skills and the passion the job requires. “Practice those,” Dylan suggests. “Over and over, until you’re comfortable with them.”

Rehearsing your stories in front of a mirror or with a friend will help you relax--and let your personality shine through.

Maybe you’ll click with the person who’s interviewing you. Maybe you won’t. But if you’re both honest about who you are, everyone wins. You’ll get hired or you won’t, but it will have been the right decision.

And as usual, advice for work--advice for life. You don’t want to be the girlfriend who pretends to love football, who becomes the wife who’s on the hook for watching it--or in a heap of trouble for resenting the time her husband does.

I wouldn’t know about that. I’m kind of the sports nut in our family. At least during March Madness. Something tells me Darrell knew what he was getting into, though…when he asked me what I wanted to do on our first date and I told him, “Watch Hoosiers.”

For what? The eleventh time?

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‘Tis the season for filling out forms.

I’ve been the midwife, at Katie’s request, for still another round of it in preparation for her big move this fall. The final piece was for some local scholarship money, and she was in that humble mode I have difficulty shaking her out of sometimes.

I reassured her it’s one of the things I love most about her. Then I said, “You’ll have lots of opportunities throughout your life to tone down your wonderfulness. This isn’t one of them.”

She laughed.

I continued.

“The people who give you money want you to be on fire with the vision you have for the world and your place in it.”

Not bad advice, eh?

Yours truly should take it more often.

Stay tuned!

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“All a man wants,” a colleague told me many years ago, “is someone sitting across the table from him, hanging on his every word.”

To which one of my editors, Darrell--God love him--has this to say: “He’s full of it.” Oh, right. A man also wants someone who’s careful with money, good with the child, ahem.

You have to admit, though. That was a great pickup line to use on someone like me. It didn’t work (long story). But it gave me something to shoot for, romantically--to find someone whose every word was worth hanging on.

The psychic Tiffany Johnson, who’s an ordained minister, often marries people she knows won’t make it. How does she reconcile that? Not by saying, as Darrell jokes, “Oh, well. It’s your funeral. I mean wedding!” No. Tiffany just remembers it’s their path, not hers. There’s something this relationship has come to teach.

It reminds me how much I’ve learned from people I would’ve been happy never to have known. I bet you’ve had the same experience. You look back on your life and all the supposed wrong turns, only to realize they got you here.

If you love it here, why so much wincing at the route you took?

Why not offer a figurative bouquet of roses to the people who rubbed you the wrong way--but left you more polished?

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“I was passing the test, approaching life as an adventure and surrendering to the unknown. Not that I had a choice. The unknown’s kind of in charge that way.”

Those are a few lines from my upcoming book. If I was reading them in someone else’s blog he’d probably follow them up with the suggestion you “click to tweet.”

Maybe it’s just me, but that’s disorienting. One minute I’m floating on a cloud of inspiration. The next minute I’m being yelled at, figuratively speaking: “Do you like this? Really? Do you? Prove it! Tell your friends!”

I get it. It’s a scramble for attention out there. And the person I’m thinking of has quite a following, so he's doing what works--for him.

I’m only keeping score to the extent my handlers insist, and for the most part it’s for them to worry about and me to ignore.

I want to express myself so precisely a chord is struck in your soul. What happens next is none of my business.

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Once upon a time I called the office of my elementary school to find out what my IQ was. I knew we’d been tested, and I’d always wondered. I figured enough time had gone by that whoever was working wouldn’t have the slightest idea who I was.

Wrong.

To my dismay, the woman who answered and looked up my score was…my former piano teacher! And yes, she remembered me. Oh did she remember me. “You’re the only person I can think of,” she said, “who would want to know.”

And no, I’m not going to tell you what my IQ is. You might be able to guess, though, when I say it’s high enough I feel really good about myself--but not so high I have to beat myself up for not having cured cancer.

This is a question worth asking yourself on a regular basis: "Am I delivering on my potential?" You don't want to get to the end of your life with unused minutes, so to speak. Do you?

The other day Darrell interviewed a guy who’s been working since he was six. That’s when he started renting out his toys to earn money to help end the famine in Ethiopia!

Maybe it's time to toss my outdated yardstick.

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Girls State is a wonderful experience that gives young women in high school a chance to see what it would be like to be in politics. Boys State does the same for young men.

I went, and I’m struck by how much I looked forward to it given how little interest I had in working for the government. But sure enough, one week in the life of a pretend politician took care of that itch for the next several lifetimes.

When Katie went to Girls State last summer I half expected her to return home wanting to run for office. She’s her own woman, after all--and I was sure this was another way we were different.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Consider a small sample of her recap…

“I was eager for it to be over so I could look back on it fondly.”

“If everything about it was different, it would’ve been great.”

She ran for state auditor, but she lost because she didn’t have a slogan. I guessed she set that goal because she’s so good at math. “No,” she said. “A counselor pulled me aside and said, ‘Nobody ever runs for this.’”

“Breakfast was usually something you could put syrup on.”

There was at least one presentation that moved her to tears--even in this recap--and at least one delegate elected she thought would be “some stuck-up (person)” but was “amazing.”

And finally, “Out of all the people who didn’t enjoy it, I probably enjoyed it the most.”

My dad is a veteran, and I have only respect for people who serve this country in whatever capacity. So just because Katie decided she has no interest in politics as a result of Girls State doesn’t mean it wasn’t a win--for everyone. If she isn’t into whatever it is, she’ll serve no one. That’s another reason career consultants think experiences like this are so important. It’s just as critical you learn what you don’t want to do with your life. Choosing a path is infinitely easier if you can narrow those choices down.

What I learned from Katie’s experience? How much she loves waking up to my kisses on her forehead as opposed to an alarm. How many seventeen-year-olds would admit that? It doesn’t hurt I’ve tucked her in the night before, come to think of it, after the usual giggle fit.

There are sweet dreams all around, of another fun day and a really fun life--not lived in the public sector!

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You will forget how hard you worked, how much you accomplished, and how desperately people clung to you for sunlight in their otherwise dreary days.

So jot it down, save the thank-you notes, and bask in the warmth of knowing you matter.

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To inspire people to find work they love, and live without regret.

I used to think that was the goal of my talk show. And it is, but there’s something more basic going on.

The goal of my talk show is to learn something. The more focused I am on that, the more interesting the discussion--and the more likely you are to learn something, too.

That’s one reason I’m eager to talk with people like Rich Gallagher. Rich is an expert on customer service but he’s also a marriage and family therapist, a popular public speaker, a bestselling author--and a good friend.

The last time we recorded an interview I admitted to torching two days of an otherwise dreamy two-week vacation because I was so hurt by something Katie had said.

Rich commended me on what, finally, had snapped me out of it. I stopped beating myself up for feeling bad long enough to wonder why it had hurt. “That’s so interesting!” I almost said out loud. “What’s going on?”

The minute--and I mean, the minute--I did that, I stopped hurting. I realized how important certain things are to me, and how much of my identity is wrapped up in them. I forgave myself immediately--these are things I’m proud of, after all--and I apologized to Darrell and Kate for trying to get them to understand something I obviously didn’t have a handle on myself.

Rich thought that was great. We both think by showing more compassion toward ourselves we’ll be better equipped to offer it to people we love. Hence the suggestion to don our own oxygen masks first.

The thing Rich said that stopped me cold, though, was this: “I don’t think it’s a character flaw that it stung for two days.”

You’re kidding.

No. He wasn’t.

And with that, he wiped away a lifetime of guilt I’ve felt for being “too” sensitive. “Too” sensitive? Yeah? According to whom?

People who aren’t as sensitive! And what makes them the arbiters of sensitive? May I make a joke? Being too judgmental.

I am really sensitive. That’s one reason I’m a good mom, I was able to write Left for Dead: A Second Life after Vietnam, and I internalize mean comments in an attempt to learn something instead of firing them back where they probably belong--on the source.

It isn’t an easy way to go through life, but nobody signed up for easy on the day he was born.

It’s grist, and I doubt if I’ll be running out of things to blog about any time soon.

Thanks for finding it interesting enough to visit us here. I hope you’re learning a fraction of what I am by showing up.

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