I grew up with Ladybird books. These were books for children on anything from history to science. I gravitated to history, it was where I first read about William the Conqueror, Warwick the King Maker, and Robert the Bruce.
I have Celtic heritage and love anything that speaks to the qualities of the Celts. For those who don’t know about Robert the Bruce he eventually led Scotland to independence from the English, a process which began when he defeated Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. He also experienced failure, pain, loss, and doubt before then.
There is a myth associated with Robert the Bruce. He was on the run and taking refuge in a cave, plagued with fear and seriously considering giving in to the English; he had already lost so much. He saw a spider struggling once, twice, to pin a thread so it could spin its web. He watched the spider fail over and over, but the spider never gave up, eventually making the connection it needed. That was the inspiration for Robert the Bruce to continue his struggle.
I don’t know if it was the memory of that Ladybird book, or the attitude of my family, including my Scottish grandmother, that instilled this sense of persistence. Probably it’s both. I call it the bloody-minded gene, and I seem to have inherited it from both sides of my family, but life is about nurture as well as nature.
Growing up I would often hear phrases like, “there is no such word as can’t.” I hadn’t realized the importance of being instilled with such an attitude. I also hadn’t appreciated how I could have acquired this attitude at any point; it didn’t even need to have been part of my upbringing. I gained this insight just after college.
I was applying for accounting jobs after graduating with a science degree. There were hundred of accountancy firms and thousands of jobs (or so I thought), and I expected my qualities to speak for themselves. I was complacent. After 10 to 20 applications met with no response I began to customize my cover letter. After a few more I began to customize my CV. Eventually I got an interview. I thought I had made it. But I got complacent again.
Questions came up during the interview that I wasn’t ready for, and I made the mistake of answering them honestly, but not helpfully, and without showing myself in my best light.
The interviewer: “If you’re sent to a client on an audit, how would you cross-sell a client our tax services?”
Me: “Oh! I’m not very good at sales.”
For some reason I wasn’t called back for a second interview after that one.
It had occurred to me to make a note of the questions I was asked during my interviews. I would replay them, chewing over my different options, and settling on something that might have been a better response. I would rehearse the answer over and over in my head until it felt like this was the way the interview had actually gone, and not just the way I had hoped.
The interviewer: “If you’re sent to a client on an audit, how would you cross-sell a client our tax services?”
Me: “I think it’s important to listen to the client’s needs. The question presumes they need our tax services, but the audit, or even a lunchtime conversation, may uncover a need for consulting services instead. If that were the case I’d approach the lead of the audit with the suggestion. I still have things to learn about approaching a sale, but insight can come from anywhere, and this is something I could offer from day one.”
My plan wasn’t to avoid the question, quite the opposite, because I didn’t want to be evasive, but I did want to find a way to convey my strengths, and to express how these might address a problem. If I could also do this in a way that admitted to my inexperience without conveying it as a weakness then all the better.
I would slowly get more and more interviews, and I would slowly progress further and further in each. As I did so, something interesting began to happen. When I began the process I was inexperienced and inadequate. The deeper I got into the the exercise the more I believed myself to be supremely capable, but merely needing the opportunity to demonstrate it.
My Tai Chi teacher used to say that he could not teach anybody anything, instead, all he could do was set up the right conditions for a person to learn. In a similar vein we set up our own conditions to thrive or wither. Those conditions can be physical – through a tidy home, they could be emotional – through cultivating relationships with people who nurture us and divesting ourselves of those that do not, or the conditions could be mental – through our belief systems. The cauldron of these interviews was shifting my belief systems; I was not only convincing myself I had the skills to do the job, I eventually convinced myself I could do it and do it well.
It didn’t need to take 100+ résumés and 30+ interviews to convince myself of this We always have the chance to sit with ourselves and play these events through in our minds, even before they happen. If we are informed by our experiences of the past, then why can’t we also be informed by the experiences we imagine? Perception is, after all, reality.
