Richard Bolles - What Color Is Your Parachute?

washing

weighing

winning

working

writing

When you are done with these two lists, pick out your favorite five things that you can do, and love to do; and write out some examples of how you actually demonstrated that, sometime in your recent past.

Incidentally, if you want a longer list, for any reason, Canadian career expert Martin Buckland has a free list of 2,010 action verbs at Elite Resumes ( http://aneliteresume.com).

What about a real disability: something you can’t do, but really want to be able to do? Maybe someone has invented a technology or simple strategy that helps you get around that disability. You never know. There are some very clever people out there. So, if your particular disability has a name, look it up on the Internet. Put its name into a search engine like Google, and see what turns up. Look particularly on the list it gives you for any professional association that deals with your disability. Contact them, and ask them what information they have.

An alternative way of dealing with this is to search for related jobs. Example: one career counselor in Europe was working with a young teenager who wanted to be a pilot. Problem: his eyesight was too poor. So the counselor sent him out to the large airport nearby, with a pad of yellow paper and a pen, and told him to spend the day listing every different kind of occupation that he saw or heard about, there at the airport—besides pilot. The next day he showed his list to his counselor. It was very long. When asked if he’d come across any occupation that interested him, he said, “Yes. I love the idea of making the seats that they put inside new airplanes.” So, that’s the job he pursued. He ended up in the airline industry, even though he couldn’t be a pilot.

As for employer prejudices , you may have to cast a wider net in your search, than just the Internet. The kind of things you won’t find there: the detailed help for ex-offenders that Dick Gaither offers. So let me tell you about him. He is head of Job Search Training Systems in Indiana, and has worked with ex-offenders a lot over the years. Ex-offenders, regardless of their past history, and their counselors will find lots of help if you e-mail Dick at workwizard@aol.com . He will send you 126 pages of helpful information and guidance. It’s free. A great public service, from a tremendous human being.

As most of us know, the proper attitude toward ourselves is called “good self-esteem.” But self-esteem is an art. An art of balance. A balance between thinking too little of ourselves, and thinking too much of ourselves.

The name for thinking too much of ourselves is “egotism.” We have all run into that, at some point in our lives, so we know what it looks like. Some of us have even caught a passing glimpse of it in the mirror.

In our culture and others, we are taught to recoil from this in horror. We even have mythologies warning us against it; the story of Narcissus comes to mind. Poor guy! (See http://tinyurl.com/a3a33if you are unfamiliar with the myth .)

In order to avoid egotism, a lot of us go way overboard in the other direction. We shrink from ever declaring that we have any virtue, any excellency, any special gifts, lest we be accused of boasting. And so we fall into that opposite pit from egotism, namely, ingratitude. We appear ungrateful for the gifts that life, the universe, God—you name it—has already given us.

So, how do we adopt the proper attitude toward our gifts—speaking of them honestly, humbly, gratefully—without sounding egotistical? Just this: the more you see your own gifts clearly, the more you must pay attention to the gifts that others have. The more sensitive you become to how unusual you are, the more you must become sensitive to how unusual those around you are. The more you pay attention to yourself, the more you must pay attention to others. The more you ponder the mystery of You, the more you must ponder the mystery of all those you encounter, every loved one, every friend, every acquaintance, every stranger.

Self-esteem is an art. It is the art of balance. A balance between thinking too little of ourselves, and thinking too much of ourselves. But we can only think too much of ourselves if we lose sight of others. Look at yourself, but equally look at them—with wonder.

That is the proper attitude we all should set as our goal.

Job-hunter: I never thought of egotism this way. I always thought that if you talked about yourself being good at something, that was boasting. I’d heard about “the tall poppy” theory of life, with its implication that you shouldn’t stand taller than others in your field .

Career-counselor: Well, I think that’s true. But you make yourself equal to others not by lowering yourself but by raising them up. I ask you, what are the favorite skills of your best friend or mate? Do you know? Are you sure? Have you asked them what they think? Have you complimented them on these skills, during the past week?

Job-hunter: I’ve got to go now; I think I have work to do .

Career-counselor: No longer worried about being egotistical, eh?

Job-hunter: No, I’m just worried about them. I want them to know how excellent they are .

Career-counselor: Just remember, it’s no sin to praise yourself as long as that heightens your awareness of what there is to praise in them.

Number of people in the U.S. who found jobs the month I am writing: 3,907,000.

Number of vacancies still unfilled at the end of this month: 3,093,000.

Imagine we find ourselves in some U.S. city that we haven’t been to, in ten years.

We had a friend there, and we wonder if he’s still there; or has he moved, or maybe died. We decide to look him up in the phone book. We come up empty. No phone number for anyone by that name. We decide, therefore, that he doesn’t live there anymore.

Well, we’re wrong. He does still live there. It’s just that, like 26.6 percent of all American homes, he’s switched completely from a landline to a cell phone, and cell phones aren’t listed in the local phone book.

So, what was our error? ( Hint: there are two errors here .)

The first is, we chose the wrong method to try and find him.

The second, and more grievous error, is we falsely concluded that because we couldn’t find him with our method, this meant that he didn’t exist. Didn’t exist there , at any rate. Wrong! It’s stretching logic beyond the breaking point to think that “Can’t find” = “doesn’t exist.” Think about the lifelong battle between ourselves and our car keys.

Okay, now fast-forward to a time when we’re out of work. We are looking for a job. We turn to the Internet, and search all the job boards: Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkUp, Craigslist, Indeed, SimplyHired, and so forth. We can’t find any work. What is it we all typically say at this point? Well, you know what we say: “There are no jobs out there. I’ve looked until I’m blue in the face.” We’ve just made the same error, again, as we did with our friend and the phone book. We’ve assumed that “Can’t find” = “doesn’t exist.” Wrong!