Subliminal Power
Sometimes amazing things happen to us, for reasons we don’t understand. We put them down to luck, or chance. Whilst things can, and do, happen by luck or chance, more frequently outstanding things happen to us because we make them happen, even though we don’t realise it.
A year or so ago a client came to see me. She was one of these people who have tremendous energy, an outstanding intellect and are great fun to be with. She was a partner in a tough, macho, City law firm- against all the odds because she had young kids, and was black. Not many black mothers get to be partner in waspish law firms.
But she was having a terrible time at work. She was under tremendous pressure, being bullied, working long hours, not seeing her kids and altogether in a terrible way.
She managed to negotiate an exit from her firm and spent the next eight months spending quality time with her kids and her husband. It was a convalescence for her. She had the freedom to think and to dream, with no constraints on her time, other than those she chose for herself.
When she left her City job she had planned to give up the law altogether. But gradually, as she recovered, she began to realise that she still wanted to be a lawyer, but not the sort of lawyer she had been. She wanted to be a lawyer who could take her kids to school. A lawyer who was doing good, not a lawyer who was just making profits for multinational companies. She was in no hurry, she had negotiated a good settlement from her firm and planned to look for a new job sometime over the next year or two.
And then, completely out of the blue, the perfect job came along. It was a few minutes drive from her home, working as an in-house lawyer for a manufacturing company. It was a nine to five job, a varied role, working with people who she liked, in a business that did something she cared about. She heard about it from a friend who introduced her to the chief executive- a woman. They clicked immediately and she offered her the job on the spot.
That is when she wrote to us, telling her consultant that she had landed this tremendous job by chance. But I don’t think it was chance at all. She would never have got that job if she had gone for it as a burnt out, stressed City lawyer. She would never have even realised she wanted a job like that. She got that job because she got herself mentally into a place where she could begin to see what she wanted, where her friend realised that she could make a suitable introduction, where she was able to conduct a successful positive job interview, and where she clicked with the chief executive. She made it happen for herself; subconsciously.
Sometimes the things that we think happen by chance are actually the result of our own actions. Even if we don’t always realise what we are doing at the time.
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Tags: Career, Career Advice, Career Consultant, Career Energy, career management, Career Planning, job, Legal Job, new job
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