In high school, a friend of mine
drove a Porsche. His dad was a wealthy doctor and gave him a
beautiful sports car as a birthday gift when he was old enough to
drive. My friend and I would drive all over town cruising in his
gorgeous, shiny chick-magnet, listening to A Flock of Seagulls and
Duran Duran on the cassette tape player. We would spend hours and
hours driving around the Sonic after high school football games
trying to get noticed. And the best way to get noticed was to
catapult the vehicle from a state of inaction to that of incredible
speed, and to do it rapidly; to change it from a state of potential
energy to a state of movement and kinetic energy. And we didn't
slowly accelerate. A very strong punch on the gas pedal increased
its velocity along the highway. The energy of the vehicle was all
within our control.
Your attitude is just like a
Porsche. You have control over it. Is it inactive and negative? Or
is your attitude positive and energized, adding speed and energy to
your life? Regardless of your circumstances, you can catapult your
attitude to a positive state in an instant.
When I was a youth and was involved
in Boy Scouts, I would recruit friends of mine to join because it
was so much fun. I recruited a friend of mine from my parish,
Patrick, and I remember how he loved to go on the monthly camping
trips.
On one camping trip, Patrick dove
head first into a body of water without knowing how deep the pond
was. He broke his neck and became paralyzed from the neck down. He
was only fourteen years old.
My mom would take me to visit him in
the hospital, and I couldn't stand seeing him there. I couldn't
stand it at all. He was in a bed that would rotate his body from
side to side so that the pressure of his body would be distributed
evenly over his back, since he couldn't move anything except for the
muscles on his face. He spent the entire day looking up at the
ceiling. When he was awake, he would be staring at the same ceiling,
day after day, month after month, and year after year. I cannot
begin to comprehend how agonizing this was for his family, and I
cannot even begin to understand how he could have made it as long as
he did.
Patrick died just a few years later
when we were both in our mid-teens. The whole experience of knowing
him formed deep within me a desire to live a purposeful life.
Because I knew Patrick and saw his situation, I made a commitment to
live my life to the fullest, not letting a day escape me without
experiencing a sense of loving others, passionately experiencing the
bountiful gifts that God has given me, and being grateful for every
single precious breath.
It is indeed possible to catapult
your attitude from negative to positive instantly. I call it the
Attitude Turbo Charge™. Your attitude certainly determines your
outcome. Your sense of positive serendipity plays a large factor in
the energy that you attract into your life. The challenge that we
face as subjective, irrational, emotion-charged mammals, though, is
to cope with disappointments and not let them influence our
attitude.
The recruiter's career is filled
with disappointments … almost every week, if not everyday.
Candidates can do stupid things. And clients sometimes don't return
phone calls and don't interview candidates in a timely manner, so
your hot candidate moves on to another opportunity. Clients could
pay late, putting a damper on your cash flow. And sometimes you have
a favorite client who leaves his employer and is replaced by someone
who hates recruiters. Yes indeed, negative things are a big part of
this business.
When I first got into sales, I was
selling long distance for a major long distance carrier. At the
time, I lived in Asheville, North Carolina, where I currently live.
Our territory consisted of seventeen counties that included all of
those far-away places in the boonies of Western North Carolina. I
can honestly say that I was the top-producing sales rep for a
seventeen-county region. There were two of us, and the other one
wasn't very good.
It was brutal. I was kicked out of
buildings, yelled at, screamed at and threatened. I had a product
which was truly a commodity and wasn't very sexy. But I made it
work. I learned how to sell. I actually was able to make a living
above the poverty line. Each day I would say, "Today is going
to be the greatest day of my life!" and it turned out to be. I
still say that mantra each and every day. On my way to work, I
expect that today will bring wonderful surprises. I expect that
people will just call me up out of the blue to give me their
business; that people willingly return phone calls, that I always
get through to the decision-maker because the secretaries are on my
side.
I learned this attitudinal
turbo-charging mechanism in the brutal world of long-distance sales.
If you can make it in recruiting or in selling long distance, you
can make it in anything. One way to definitely change your attitude
immediately is to expect another outcome, a positive and
serendipitous experience so fantastic that you get excited about the
possibility. Expect your outcome to be a certain way, and it will.
If I am ever in the middle of a dire
circumstance, one that seems to be hopeless, I instantly sit back,
take a deep breath, and think of my friend Patrick. I think of
Patrick's life, the fate that became his, and I feel encouraged
knowing that he would probably want me to be grateful for my life.
And at that point, my seemingly large problems don't seem very large
anymore.
Copyright © 2003 Scott Love
Scott Love can be contacted on-line at
scott@recruitingmastery.com
or by visiting his web site at
www.recruitingmastery.com.
I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I
fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood.