A Memorial Day Tribute – From Victoree

The American wailing wall

A few conflicting stories exist about the origins of what we in the USA now celebrate as “Memorial Day”, the 30th of May. In my meandering search I have noticed that the overlapping part of the “Venn diagram” among the stories is that the 30th of May was once called,  “Decoration Day” a commemoration of the (un)Civil War. It was a time to lay flowers on the graves of the fallen of both the Union and the Confederacy.

Perhaps the idea of a commemoration of the most destructive war this nation has ever seen arose concurrently in both the former combatants territories and slowly pushed up into the national ego as part of the national mourning process. As more tomorrows became history it seemed so “right” to mourn all the losses from all the wars America has ever fought at this time, so the day was renamed, “Memorial Day”. Now, we can freely mourn all our losses: my great grandmother’s war, the Civil War; my grandmother’s war, WWI; my mother’s war, WWII; my war, Vietnam; my daughter’s war, Afghanistan. Somehow, the morrigan sorrow manages to scrape her bony finger across the face of every generation.

A gift from the crow

I consign it to legend; something lost in our country’s misty, schizophrenic memory. Every election year the “Land of The Free and the Home of the Brave” rolls over in her sleep and the nightmares about the Civil War come back. She has generally forgotten what the commemoration was originally about, but hangs on to the “celebration” part. So, over the years, Memorial Day has become simply the party that kicks off the summer.

So, while cleaning the grill, skewering the kabobs and marinating the steaks,please consider that Memorial Day is about remembering. It might be a good day to mourn any/all kinds of loss including personal ones. I do not suggest anyone lay flowers at a former job’s doorstep even though that would be crazy-cool and maybe some much needed closure would happen. Maybe buying a personal bouquet would help speed the healing of an emotional wound.

Tribute In Light

Personally, I bought a very small, but significant gift for myself with the last paycheck of each job I lost. On Memorial Day, I look at the gifts and remember. Remarkably, one by one, year by year, I find the original outrage and pain suffered in those jobs has given way to peace and forgiveness.

May Memorial Day fill you with peace.

-Victoree

Notes From A Bad Teacher About Education Careers

Education Calculator on Notebook (Photo credit: nniknak)

Some people seriously consider going into education as their “encore career“.

Let me whisper something in your ear: fuggedabowdit.

Ask me what prompts that venomous phrase. I want to do my part in strengthening education by preventing one more idealistic, romantic  person with the wrong personality configuration from becoming one of the 50% of educators who leave the profession in the first five years of practice (and head off some chocolate OD’s and soggy-pillow-at-3am moments).

Yes, truly monstrous people continue to slip through the cracks and end up in education  judging from some of the  lurid stories in the news these days about abusive teachers. However, this is not that kind of discussion. This is intended  to influence people who ought not teach lower school grades to put the cap back on the pen before the application gets filed to any system anywhere. This is about the “rightness of fit” issue in the job search. I am lifting the example of early education because it is what I know, but the lessons can be widely applied to jobs anywhere:

when you don’t belong somewhere, you don’t belong. Move on.

In earlier posts this year there is a discussion about discovering the most appropriate place of employment. I collected the discussion in the section of the blog, “Victoree’s Shape-Shifting Job Gypsy Card Game”. Click on the tab  to review.

While re-doing my MBTI assessment with a professional counselor it finally dawned on me why I had so little success as an early educator. Education systems, like many other companies, slide up and down the scale of being candid about  fully disclosing why an employee “didn’t work out”. It seems companies rather go to great lengths to couch  bad comments on the “final report card” in vague terms, probably to deflect a possible wrongful termination/discrimination lawsuit.

The truth surfaced for me in cross referencing the results and finding several of the same traits  surfacing across several assessments, including the MBTI, skills, and strengthfinder2.0.  I came to the conclusion that I am basically unsuited for the lower school classroom. No shame.

The release of that shame felt like finally being able to wear a pair of jeans one size smaller. Releasing the shame might even make my dream of shopping in that lower-sized section come true! (You know stress makes you fat, don’t you?) I made a cowardly decision to look for “job security” and “normalcy” early in the job search and ended up in a place where I did not belong.

Wherever the ”ah ha” breaks through,early or late in the job search, give yourself a gift and let the revelation “work you”.

Related articles

• Relationship Between MBTI Type and Religious Preference (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Indeed increases job search traffic lead (indeed.com)
• How to Become a Teacher (answers.com)
• CAPT Training Programs Approved for Continuing Education in Professional Licensing, Qualification, and Certification (prweb.com)

The “Wrecking Ball” Card: 5 Career Deal Breakers

The "Wrecking Ball" Card

This is the fourth and final card in the spread, the “wrecking ball” card. On this card are five things that will make working at any specific place like living in Hell. Above, I am showing you my own completed card. To get a sense of what should be on yours, Look at your other cards.  Look at your temperament and your strengths.  Look at your gifts and your Holland Code.  Look at your value system. Take all that in consideration and  think deeply about what kind of work environment you simply could not tolerate.  For the “glass half full” crowd: think deeply about and envision the kind of work environment that would bring out the best in you.  You actually could write your card from either angle. You choose. As an aside, “glass half empty” people are not evil. Just different.

Think about it like this: would you marry someone you did not know well? After all, a huge investment of life-time will be spent preparing for, commuting back and forth from, and living at a place of employment for at least two or three years.  Interviewing is much like the courtship period of a relationship–the time you find out that the face she presents comes out of a bottle and that he hates to go anywhere that does not have a TV in it.

With both dating and working it is much better to find out as much as possible on the front end. It pays to be able to make an educated decision about how your most precious commodity, your time, will be spent. This set of five intolerable conditions would be your “career deal breakers”; things you would say, “no thanks” to an employer about in the interview. Though you may think you are desperate enough to “take anything”, that is not quite the truth nor would it be wise. And another thing: you cannot do anything you want to do actually. You came to the earth with an assignment; a “Divine Mandate”. You came equipped to do your job on earth, not every job.

For example: I will always be better with words than numbers. I admire people who can reason in numbers. They’re cool. However, I know myself so well that I am quite comfy being an expert in  language and not worried about my dearest friend, the engineer, who is an expert in her field.

Unfortunately, education is not into strengths development. School has led us into this myth of “you can do everything well”; that “deficiency teaching–bettering your weaknesses” at the expense of building natural strengths is a good thing. Let me tell you this: You can teach a fish to climb all you want. A squirrel will always be better at it. You can reward a tortoise all you want. The hare will always be the faster runner.

Spun out all the way to the end, some form of the “wrecking ball conditions”  may be at the heart of the issues you could be fired for three to six months down the road.

As said earlier, there are things you would rather know on the front end about an employer. The interview is the appropriate time to find out what you might not be able to discern from other research. In the interview, rephrase the statements on your card into positively posed questions to the potential employer. The answers will tip you off to a company’s culture and clue you in about whether or not you might fit.

Many people think they do not have choices in this job search game. The fact is you do. It pays in the long run to make the best decisions possible by researching, asking, talking, networking, listening to employees (past and present), and “reading between the lines”–reading the cards.

Shapeshifter: Sense of Identity and Job Loss

 

Shapeshifter artwork: "the Selkie"-Yaamas

Let me tell you an ancient tale I learned from the people of the Orkneys:

There are certain shape-shifting fae folk who live in the ocean. They are seals at home, but they have the ability to shed their seal skins and become human on the land. They would stash their skins behind a rock or a dune and go about. Men were ga-ga about these beautiful, magical ”selkie” (seal) women. Women were just as crazy about selkie men. Once a clever fisherman found a selkie woman’s skin and hid it in his house. After the selkie woman was done with her fun day trip in town, she returned to the beach to recover her skin. The fisherman was ready for her. When he saw her, he wooed her and proposed marriage. So the selkie woman became his wife and had him children. All the time she longed for the sea. The fisherman forbade the children to go swimming, but his wife sneaked out to the sea-shore every night to look for her lost skin. One of the barin (children) discovered the skin one day and asked their mother what it was. On a chosen day when her husband was far offshore, she told the barin the tale of the skin as she walked with them down to the beach. Quick as lightning she waded into the surf with the skin wrapped around her and became a seal again. The children ran crying after her into the sea and changed into seals the moment sea water touched them. The fisherman found out what happened when he arrived at home. He lived the rest of his life in regret, mourning the loss of his family until the day he died.

People lose many things when they lose their jobs. One of them is sense of identity. There is an interesting article on Jibber Jobber where the author comments about ”loss of identity”– a phenomenon that happens with job loss.

 Read it here: http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/2008/06/16/i-lost-more-than-my-job-2-years-ago/

Loss of identity does not happen to everyone, but more often to those who are emotionally invested in the places where they work.  Badly wounded after the loss of my first professional position, I developed “chronic failure to attatch”; an aversion for “getting too close” to any company. It was step one on the path of becoming a “job gypsy” and a “shape shifter”.

Unlike people who successfully “gain allegience” to their employment, a  job gypsy by default has to derive self-definition from something else other than a job. She therefore is free to ”shape shift”,  performing whatever task the company needs like water takes the shape of its container.   Generally, the “regular” staff seldom cares who a shape shifting job gypsy really is. They are only concerned that the project gets done.

As much as I lost, whenever I lost a job (you always lose something),  the one thing I did not lose was a sense of who I was.  I lost sense of direction; I lost sense of purpose, I lost goo-gobs of money, but never sense of identity.  I simply stashed my “skin”/self and became what I needed to become at the site.  A common question I used to get when I did substitute teaching was, “who are you today?” Faculty even spoke to each other as if  I were invisible. Water. Between assignments, I lived life in my own skin; in my native element.  This is how career temps and teacher substitutes stay sane. The self and the company remain exclusive. I heard about one sub who broke the rule. Depression overtook him and he committed suicide. Nobody understood why. You and I know why.

 He never found his skin.