Friday 8 June 2012

Know Yourself

My experience has been that employment agencies look only to find the best fit box to stuff you in that they can then promote to likely employers. Despite all the profiling and other gimmicky that they might surround themselves with, their primary objective is to find that best fit box with the highest turnover and the best commission and then move on as fast as possible. They are certainly not in the business of looking at you as a blank piece of paper to assess the skills and experience you have to offer. All too complicated and time consuming. The best fit box is a fast but dirty way of summing you up into readily recognisable sectors, be it sales, education, health or whatever.

Likewise with your employer, their primary goal is to get you productive and income generating as fast and cleanly as possible. They too are looking for nice neat boxes to put you in, best fitting your past with their operational needs. No niceties, a people person, a problem solver, a task finisher, find and stuff you into the best fit box and get you working fast. Fair enough they need to profit out of your labour. The box you are put into of course only reflects the opportunities and experience's you have been allowed in the past. They are in no way reflective of your actual skill or mind set or where your aptitude really lies, if only you were given the chance. No one has the time or even perhaps the judgement set to gauge how good you might be, but only what you have previously demonstrated. Those boxes you find yourself in you get to carry forward throughout your working life. The chance to breakfree and start with a clean slate, or that white piece of paper, just never comes. You carry your past baggage forward with you, not your choice, not your wish, not your aspiration, it just accumulates and becomes the measure yardstick for all your futures.

You of course know yourself extremely well. Right? Wrong! Imagine yourself in a totally white room, floor, walls, ceiling, no windows no doors, just white sound, white scent and white surrounds.  Now who are you? Not your name, not your history, not your description. But who are you, that inner person? What we are, this inner person, is in response. In response to your surroundings, to the people you last had contact with, with the after tremors of the last physical experience. Your sub-concious and concious responses to these other stimuli are what drives your awareness of who you are. But it is more than this because we too bring baggage. We are not white pieces of paper with each fresh encounter. We bring the past along with us which shapes our reactions this time and moulds the future possibles. Worse still prior experiences limit our range of possible responses and the people we meet recognise and or have preconceptions of your reactions which limit the range of what you can or cannot do in response. We are limited by our past. Not immutable, subtly shifting and adapting, we evolve but within the constraints of what we were and did last time. Not fixed, you could wake up and start out with a clean white piece of paper, inventing a new personality for yourself. Except your physical baggage and all those people you associate with drag you back to what you were. Not you, the who you would like to be, within the constraints of your innate personality. The me that I can be and am, are but reflections of my past and peoples expectations of me.

It is a leap, a small leap, more of just a progression really. How the government views or has expectations of its citizens, directly influences how the citizen sees themselves, how they respond and react. Treated with disdain, suspicion, regarded as flawed, with limit capacity to think rationally or behave with a modicum of decency, they get citizens just like that but pushed to extremes. Regard your citizens with respect, expect the highest standards and they will rise to that confidence in them and often exceed expectations. The we, whether employer, individual or citizen just want recognition and encouragement to do better. Not much to ask is it.

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