When Things Go Pear Shaped

Confession time, sometimes I get irrationally angry when a candidate or a client makes a choice that I would not have made. When this happens, I try to take a step back and I think about Facebook. More specifically, I think of my friends with children.

I’m of the age that many of my friends are having children, some of them, their second and third. With that, comes the inevitable deluge of Facebook posts highlighting the funny things kids do and the small achievements parents take so much pride in: crawling, walking, speaking, throwing expensive electronics (maybe not the last one). Because they’re not my kids, you’d think I might not be interested. But I am. I care like a gamer cares about leveling up and my favorite thing to do is to figure out where the child sits in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive development. Have they grasped objects, played with toys, grasped for objects, or developed object permanence (one of the funniest achievements when you really think about it)?

Later, during the ages of 7-11, a child should enter into the “Concrete Operational Stage.” One the two most important achievements in this stage is the elimination of egocentrism. This isn’t about having a “big ego” or being selfish or even being altruistic. It’s, most simply put, the ability to view things from the perspective of another individual. It’s the first step towards the complex social understanding that each individual lives a unique and dynamic life, full of diverse experiences, histories, and circumstances that contribute to make person distinctive.

When a candidate chooses something inexplicable or a client does something totally out of nowhere, I think we, as recruiters or sales people, all too often devolve to egocentrism and choosing to reject it is more difficult that we’d like to admit. But if we don’t admit it, it can too easily become our default setting and if it’s your default setting it can make it impossible to pick up the phone for the next cold-call or candidate screen. It paralyzes. It can make all our good efforts seem meaningless and futile. This could last a moment or it could hang around for a week but eventually we’ll need to make the choice to remember that the people we work with, colleagues, clients, candidates, are not widgets but people with individual agency.

There are many ways to do this but the first step is to acknowledge that it is a choice and the choice is yours alone to make. Once made, we can begin to not only move forward more quickly to the next challenge but also, when translated to our live outside the office, find deep meaning and fellowship when situations go pear shaped.

Author David Foster Wallace spoke about this his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College titled “This is Water.” As perhaps the greatest American writer of his generation, it would be ridiculous of me to try to do it better so I’ll simply conclude with an excerpt and a link to the entire address (it will be the arguable the best 20 mins of your day) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

“But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the lowwage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship”

John Rice is the Director of Business Development at NSS RPO, a consulting firm that provides on-site and virtual recruiting professionals. Contact NSS RPO to learn about how we can help your organization meet and exceed its hiring goals.