Four weeks ago tomorrow I promised my wife and family that I would find full-time work. Though I have been working on Successus for the past three years as a full-time effort my family could not sustain the low levels of income any longer. Then, last Thursday, I was offered a role as a financial consultant with Sample & Partners, the first “real” job I’ll have had in over four years.
To look back over my journey of the past month and assess it using my skills as an ontological coach I am able to note some important ways in which my coach training helped me.
Firstly, I made a strong declaration that I would solve the problem which had been created. It was so strong that at one point I stood in my old office thinking, “I don’t belong here anymore”. I do still have a role to play in Successus yet the feeling of physical displacement on that day was an indication of how the declaration had set new paths in motion. It was that declaration that kept me going through several knockbacks.
My body was being taken care of via my re-beginning of Tai Chi classes in the very same week that I began the job hunt. The Tai Chi served to keep me focussed on looking after myself during a very emotionally tiring time.
There is a concept in The Ontology of the Human Observer which suggests that the self is merely a story that we have told ourselves in order to keep a consistent view of our past experiences. My job search required me to continually step out of one story and into another to create a self-consistent view of myself for each job that I applied for. You might imagine that was tiring and it certainly was (becoming the prime reason I cite for crashing my car on the day I received a job offer). Yet at the same time it was tiring it was incredibly enabling and powerful. My new role is not something I would have considered a few weeks ago, yet I can see now that I’ll do very well at it. As I changed “my story” I also became better at explaining what I could do for people. This resulted in a simple two-page resume which showed my skills and some of my achievements, but not all, as doing so proved too restrictive for some people (i.e. in my view it caused them to narrow their view of what I thought I could do).
If I were to recommend a way to learn about your own business it would be to step out and declare that you are seeking employment. I had immediate access to feedback on our business that had never been there before. The most important learning centred on distinguishing between the people that “got it” and the people that “didn’t get it”. Most of our marketing effort had been on converting the latter which I now believe would never have worked. Even when search for employment I hit the same phenomena and so I learnt quickly to approach people who could understand what I am capable of and translate that for others.
There are many more opportunities there in my future for me now. I hope to have more time to write here and elsewhere as some of the constraints I had on my thinking have now been removed. As I am now fond of saying, “I’ll back myself”.