Skip to main content

Life Parallels

 As someone who has changed jobs more times that I like to call attention to in my resume, I have developed adaptations to cope with new job jitters - over the years even learned who to thrive in it. My cousin P asked me a valid question recently - what makes you think that the thing you are going into will be any better or different from what you are leaving? We all know that the interview process (unless you have close personal connections with the hiring manager or people in that organization) is like a courtship - they sell you on the job, the prospects, alignment to your stated goals and so forth. 

The interviewee gets a chance to ask questions to assess if they should believe the sales pitch. But the interviewee must also dance around things they want to gloss over and dive into what they feel will show them off in the best light. It's like the first few dates - everyone is on their best behavior, making the best impression they can in hopes of taking things forward - a committed relationship or a job. I think much is transferrable between lessons a person can learn from a serious of bad relationships and jobs that turn out to be duds for any number of reasons. 

I have found a very strong parallel to exist between by string of ill-advised relationships back in the day and the jobs I was skipping in and out of. There was the same level of disenchantment with both and I was showing the same lack of discernment, unwillingness to probe where I noticed something concerning. If a person is unable or unwilling to expend the energy on diligence and are lazy enough to expect things will magically work out, then only one outcome is likely - in the fullness of time, they will reach peak disappointment and will need to exit the scene. 

Once I got a handle on the relationship area of my life and understood what it took to keep me centered and at peace, I was able to bring some of the wisdom into how I went about looking for the next thing in my career. I told P I felt pretty good and was prepared for surprises good and bad with the confidence that the bad would be containable. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more