Reflections

Wrong Forest!

• By fannieb
• April 12, 2015
• No Comments

Celeste realized that perhaps for the last 25 years she’d been trying to be successful in the wrong arena, corporate business. It was true that she found it interesting – running an efficient business to fill its customers’ needs while making money. That was pretty exciting, at least in theory. But more often than not she’d been at companies where management had lost sight of two things – efficiency and actually meeting the needs of all its customers.

The last company Celeste worked for, Chanteur, had lost sight of the true meaning of efficiency. They got it confused with saving money (being cheap due to scarcity thinking), being quick to backfill the continually vacated positions with warm, not so able, bodies, and fixing problems with patches. Chanteur’s operations were anything but efficient when looking at both the individual departments and the company as a whole. The results were disjointed dysfunction.

Chanteur also had lost sight of the fact that there was more than one set of customers. There were the external customers, both the end-users/clients of their services and those who actually paid for the services these clients were eligible for, and, there were the internal customers, Chanteur’s employees. This lack of awareness resulted in unhappy employees who came to work simply for the paycheck and who quit readily. And clients who wound up not getting all the services they needed or were entitled to. This was a recipe for low performance and customer dissatisfaction among at least two thirds of its customers.

Celeste was not independently wealthy and so she had to earn a living somehow. As a teenager she had romanticized her neighbor and role model’s success as a business executive and this had influenced her to set her sights on a business degree and a corporate career. In so doing she was also able to heed the advice her mother had given to her: “whatever you do don’t become a teacher.” And, so for 25 years she worked in business.

Fired from her first job out of college and her first and second jobs out of graduate business school she failed to thrive but also failed to get the message and she continued on, eventually finding a niche to settle into. With mountains of student loan debt there was no alternative or so she believed. She dabbled in self-employment during her career – first as president of Calligraphically Yours, a calligraphy business she started after being fired from her first real job in 1990 and then in direct sales for a multilevel marketing cosmetics company in 2004. Her 12 month career as an independent sales director for this company came after becoming disillusioned while working at Paramount Financial, a very successful credit card company. She had been happy for four of the seven years she spent there. In the beginning Celeste thought that Paramount was on the right track and actually cared for its employees, but then the company began to grow quickly acquiring smaller credit card companies in an effort to make even more money and it began to overlook its key resource, its employees. That was when Celeste’s opinion of Paramount changed. For her the company felt more like a jailor than an employer.

Celeste’s instinct that she was not where she needed to be was dead on, but she was trying to escape something that she was not able to clearly define. And she had not identified her passion either. So her efforts at self-employment, though very worthy, were not enough to make her attempts financially sustainable. She was trying to manage the situation from within the depths of the problem. She was not able to scrutinize the landscape or think from a different level of consciousness to come up with a better solution. She couldn’t see the forest for the trees. She got stuck and frustrated both times and had to turn back to her old standby, work at a corporation to earn a paycheck. During the last five years she oftentimes worked for people whose capacity for business was low, lower than hers and this created further dissatisfaction and dismay.

Celeste blamed the president of Chanteur, she blamed her boss, and she blamed others in leadership positions there for the morass that she and her coworkers found themselves in. The unhappiness was evident in the carriage of their bodies as they walked through the drably decorated office building and in the disheveled attire they wore (this was most alarming to see in the president). The despair was palpable in the apathetic energy that filled conference rooms during meetings and caused Celeste to want to curl up into a ball and shield herself from the unhealthy negative vibes.

But one day, after perusing job postings online, she realized that leaving Chanteur to go to another company would only be a temporary fix, at best. Each time Celeste jumped ship and moved to another company she was finding that her hope for working with smart people who actually cared about not only making money, but creating an uplifting atmosphere to work in dwindled more and more quickly. The honeymoon periods were getting shorter and shorter. And when she started working at Chanteur she had been disillusioned on her very first day; the only thing her job there had fixed was that it had increased her income substantially. The hope and excitement of finding good work at a company that was good to work for, beyond suitable pay, had all but evaporated for Celeste. The prospect of going to yet another company was actually depressing and did not inspire her to submit her resume to any of the many jobs for which she knew she was highly qualified.

By this time Celeste had begun a serious daily writing practice and had taken several creative writing classes, joined a writing group, and had become an avid reader to improve her writing skills. She was passionate about something again; passionate about something that she’d been zealous about as a teenager – writing. But Celeste had forgotten about this hobby after she stopped writing at age 15.

Her stepfather had discovered, by reading her diary, that Jack, her private flute teacher, was having sex with her. Celeste’s first sexual encounter had been found out and she felt violated, but not by her teacher, by her stepfather. Back then Celeste hadn’t thought that Jack had done anything wrong. At 14, she had thought she was a willing participant.

Her stepfather had snooped and she got caught, she had gotten Jack into trouble, and her detailed written account had caused her a lot of embarrassment. So she stopped writing. But she didn’t just stop writing in her diary, she also stopped writing the short stories she loved to concoct. She had even entered one of them into it children’s fiction competition before the incident with Jack had occurred. Celeste hadn’t won, her manuscript was returned in the self-addressed stamped envelope she had included with her submission, but that rejection hadn’t stopped her from writing. What had was Jack, the indecencies he took with her (she realized much later how wrong the actions of this 30-year-old man were), and the mortification she felt at having to verbally recount her “first time” to two sets of policemen in two different jurisdictions. The knowledge that her diary was salacious reading for them and the fact that her mother, stepfather, and probably her brother, and biological father had seen the highly personal details of her sexual exploration in the pages of her diary had been unbearable.

Celeste couldn’t remember if she consciously stopped writing her stories, but she certainly had made a conscious decision not to continue to keep a diary, even when her mother presented her with a brand-new one a month after the unpleasantness of the investigation had ended and Jack had been ordered to serve hundreds of hours of community service for his offense. That incident had the effect of shaming Celeste and was a turning point for her. She put down her writing and focused on a career in business, ruling out the possibility of developing her true calling for decades.

Photo Credit: colink.