Tuesday, November 24, 2009

If patience is a virtue, I am rarely a virtuous woman

During a recent chat over lunch with my career coach, we got on the topic of what I am learning from my experience searching for my next position. Having a slightly sarcastic side to my personality, I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to keep my response appropriate to the context and company. Later that evening, having been unable to get the conversation out of my head, I realized that there are quite a few “take-aways” from this experience and not all of them negative. Perhaps the biggest for me is learning to have patience.

When it comes to me, personally, I have never been a particularly patient individual. I tend to expect a higher level of performance from myself than I would ever expect of anyone else. This characteristic once prompted a therapist to say to me, “Maggie, perfection is about heaven, and in case you haven’t noticed – you aren’t living there.”

Generally, I do tend to achieve whatever I set out to do. Unfortunately, what this means is that if for some reason my expectations are out of sync with reality, patience is in short supply. There tends to be a lot of introspective analysis of where I got off track and what it will take to refocus my efforts to reaching whatever end-state was so blasted important in the first place. Ironically, this rarely, if ever, spills over onto others and I am incredibly patient with children, even my own. Go figure.

This job quest is teaching me (the hard way) how to be patient with myself in general, but more specifically, when things are beyond my control. It has also taught me that there are a lot of things in this world that are beyond my control. A very sobering realization, I must admit. At the same time, I have discovered that one thing is universally in my control and that is how I respond to the situation.

This isn’t to say that I am serenely going about my day, calm and secure in a place of Zen. I’m not. Not even close. There are days that I am barely keeping it together and there are days that I can actually forget that my situation is so tenuous. And in between those two extremes are a lot more days where my expectations align with reality.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The importance of an open mind.

I recall overhearing my older relatives once talking about how it was possible to be too open in one’s thinking. I think the exact words were something to the effect of not being so open-minded that your brains fall out. Being all of about 12 at the time, the conversation really didn’t make that much sense. Wasn’t being open to possibilities what life was all about?

As I’ve grown up a bit, I understand what my relatives were talking about, but I still have to disagree with them. Even at, er, let’s say…um, thirty-nine and holding, I am still very open to possibilities. This trait of mine is probably the number one reason why I did not sink into abject despair during my bout of unemployment. It may even be why I am not completely freaking out over worry that my contract for hire situation might not become a permanent gig.

Being open to possibilities gives you the freedom to exist in the “now” and perform something of a SWOT analysis on your life. For those without a business degree or familiarity with the jargon, the acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a process for evaluating what is going on from more than one perspective to arrive at a total snapshot of the situation.

I believe being open to possibilities also works in terms of the creative process.

I have really struggled with one of the stories I am working on because I had this great outline for how the book was going to play out. It was a fairly detailed outline of each chapter and, I thought, it was going to lead to a really good book. At some point during my writing, the main characters took off in a different direction from what I had envisioned. Stymied, I set the story down and focused on other projects. When my “muse” reappeared, I pulled the story out to work on it again and found my characters still uncooperative. This time, I am ignoring the outline I so carefully prepared and am just rolling with what comes out of my head. Reading back over the 150 pages I have written of this new path, I know I have some major editing ahead of me. Some of it is pretty rough and likely to be cut from the final manuscript. I also have some cross referencing to do against my first novel in this series to be sure I haven’t messed up the time-lines between the two books. But, some of what I have written is so much better than the original concept.

A lot of people mistake me for a pessimist because I am pretty quick with the sardonic wit or the sarcastic quip. The truth is, I honestly believe that things will work out the way they are supposed to – one just has to keep from taking a narrow perspective. The problem is that it rarely happens on my preferred time-table. So, be it a new contract position, being picked up as a permanent employee under the current contract, landing a permanent job with some other company, or finishing this book – I am open to the possibilities before me.