Day 28

Occurred March 6, 2009

Today's favor was about perspective. I received a request asking me to assist a man facing a career change. I believe the request was intentionally vague so as to allow me the freedom to not pre-judge the desired outcome of the favor. Once again I was reminded that true kindness is the ability to meet another individual wherever he or she is at presently. This man was at a place of transition and seeming chaos; my goal was to allow him to have his chaos and yet see him as peaceful and settled when I spoke to him.

We agreed to meet at a coffee shop in Hollywood and to spend the afternoon looking at his options. The only thing I asked of him was to bring something to write in and an open mind. We chose a comfortable sofa alongside a small coffee table. Pausing in between sips of his steaming drink, he asked me where we should start. I replied, "at the beginning...tell me about your past jobs and experiences at each one." He recounted a long list of various positions he held in his industry since graduating college. I noticed that at the end of each job he closed with the following words, "I could not stand my boss and so I left after ___ years." Without exception this was true, he had never had a job where his reason for leaving was anything other than the state of the relationship with his superior. I asked him why he thought every boss had turned out to be the "same" as all the rest. Confused, he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. I asked him how the relationships with his bosses started at each job. Again, without exception he said, "They all started great, but then something happened and they ended up not appreciating me."

Next, I asked him if he had wanted each of the jobs. Not skipping a beat, he shook his head answering, "No, hardly any of them, but I needed a job and they offered me one." It was then it occurred to me that the real issue was not the bosses but rather this man's underlying resentment at having to accept a job he really did not want. The bosses had no way of being privy to this information and therefore probably deemed his eventual lack of enthusiasm as a personal attack. I remembered an exercise a friend told me about from her experience at a psychology seminar: tell your "story" and then tell it with accountability. I proposed this idea to the man sitting beside me and he agreed to try to relate the whole series of events without being the victim. At the end of his revised story, he looked over at me and laughed saying, "Wow! That was amazing; I never knew the real problem was how I saw each situation, not the situation themselves." I encouraged him to take whatever time he could to choose his next job carefully and to remember it all comes down to the power of perspective upon our perceptions.