It Ain’t Over ‘til I SAY It’s Over!

At the sensitive age of seven I was a poet.  I considered myself to be good at writing poetry.  I shared my poems with my friend Ellen.  She was also sensitive and a very good listener.  I loved writing the poems and having her read them knowing she would always say something nice about them.

Then, when I was14 I took a poetry class.  My teacher said my iambic pentameters were awful and I would never be a good poetry writer. I didn’t know then that iambic pentameters were not the only thing to consider when writing poetry. I took his word for it that my poetry was awful. He took all of the wind out of my sails, and I stopped writing poems.  It was a tragedy.  The tragedy was not the discouraging comments from the teacher but rather that I took them inside myself and gave up on writing poems for a very long time.  I allowed that teacher to define my limitations.

We all have had experiences where we were gave up something we loved because someone, or ones, discouraged us.   Many of us, if not all of us, have dreamed dreams that were not only squashed by others, but many times we crushed them ourselves, because we had bought into what we were told.  We became the first one to tell ourselves “no”, instead of someone else. We didn’t even try and see if we could make that dream come true.

On the other hand, I imagine there have been times when someone tried to discourage our ideas or dreams and we didn’t let them.  We stuck to our vision  and made it come true or brought the idea into fruition. 

We might wonder, what was the difference.  What helped us succeed and not give in to the “nay-sayers”?  Perhaps it was the strength of passion.  Perhaps we believed in ourselves so strongly that nothing could stop us.  We may have wanted that dream so much that we put everything we had into making it so.  Perhaps we were fearless, unafraid of failure, never looked behind to see if someone was gaining us.  Perhaps it was all of these. 

Getting the juice from success

Knowing what helps us be successful is an underrated approach to problem solving.  Imagine having a list of ways to make a success of things? Imagine that list being made up of your own personal strengths and abilities? Imagine if every time you ran into a hard spot in your life you could simply reach for that list, pick out what might be most helpful to you now and apply these traits or actions that helped you be successful before to your current situation.  In fact, this could even be fun and creative.  You could select what made sense for resolving what you are dealing with now and you could use something totally different that might help you be successful now.

Asking the right questions

An example of the first approach, choosing something that worked before and applying it to your new situation could be: I have a friend, Victoria, who was very good at getting to know candidates for jobs because she asked questions that got beneath the usual superficial answers many job candidates give.  Her management noticed how well she did on the job and gave her some of the most difficult managers in the organization to work with.  At first this didn’t feel like a good thing because the difficult managers were, indeed, uncooperative and getting the right candidates for their job openings was tough!  So, my friend took a look at what had made her successful before and applied it to this new situation.  She asked the “difficult” managers lots of questions about the job openings and what was important to them to have in their candidates. They became engaged with helping her help them. They recognized that she really was trying to get the best fit for their job opening. Her questions helped the managers get clear about what the criteria for the job and she was able to send the best matches to them.  The managers became easier to work with and more trusting that the recruiter would send good candidates for their openings.

Another skill Victoria had was helping groups work together. She had managed a number of events in her organization that required her to gather and work with people from different departments and levels in the company. After 10 years with the company, she moved to a new city where she knew no one and needed to find a job. Having been a recruiter and having led many workshops on finding jobs she thought getting a job would be a slam dunk.  It was not. Most of the steps she taught in the workshops was dependent on the jobseeker having a network or people they could develop into a job information network and this network could refer the job seeker to job openings or people to talk to about potential openings.  That meant the job seeker had to know people already.  Victoria knew no one in the city!

Victoria decided to take her own coaching advice and reviewed her own list of skills and abilities that made her successful in the past, forming groups caught her attention. She immediately saw how forming groups might help her find work. She went to various conferences and events where she could meet new people, just like she taught in the career development workshops. But she went beyond what she taught by inviting various folks to be in groups that connected to something they were interested in.

One of the groups she formed was for women who were new to the city she now lived in. They were having the same problem she was meeting people in a new city. They got together for monthly potlucks and chats and supported each others goals.  Since Victoria was also an artist, she got to know other artists in the new city and used her group management skills to start a group for women artists who want to get better at doing and marketing their paintings.  Both of these areas were of interest to Victoria and her enthusiasm and passion for them was contagious. She got many job ideas and leads through these groups that in short order, led to her finding a delightful jobs at a higher levels than the one she had left.

We are led by dreams.  We can be enchanted by possibilities.  When we are fueled with passion and the desire to make our dreams come true, we can do so by thinking creatively…out of the box!  And as we do, the most important thing is to not let anyone stop us from going for that dream and to use all we have within us to achieve it.

There is a power in dreaming.  Without dreams we live small, mediocre lives.  Goethe once said: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.  Boldness has genius power and magic in it.  BEGIN IT NOW.”