by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Aug 28, 2009 | Career Skills
“Anger is a gift.”–-Zach de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine
There will be times in your career when someone is irate about a situation and raging at you, the embodiment of the uncaring machine, so I think it appropriate to explore the possibility presented in the quote from the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine.
It seldom feels good, in the moment, to be the recipient of blunt words or scathing commentary about unfair systems, incompetent people who ought to be fired, etc. But I’ve found over the years that refining this skill leaves you a lot calmer at the end of the day.
Aristotle said: “Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy. “
I did my best to keep this in mind last weekend. It was Welcome Week, and students were arriving on campus in a steady stream all weekend long. For most, Arrival at Penn State is almost a non-event. We have a knack for planning arrival, and wide group of people from Residence Life to Parking and the ID Office meet several times a semester to debrief on the previous arrival, and move on to planning the next.
This attention to detail helps smooth out the arrival experience for most, but at a school this large (approximately 14,000 of our 42,000 students at main campus live in the halls) There are going to be problems. Most are easy to resolve, but this doesn’t always happen.
Some people just aren’t good at being appropriately angry. As such, any bad situation really isn’t about you, it’s about them. And while going over how a problem happened is interesting, it is not always relevant to solving the problems. So I take the abuse, and focus instead on finding a solution and ignoring the anger. This approach keeps me sane and helps move the situation toward resolution.
Some key take-aways I have learned from dealing with angry people are:
- When someone is brutally honest about how they feel, at least it’s honest. Concentrate on that. Acknowledge that. And say to yourself, as much as possible “This is not about me, it’s about the problem in front of me. It will only be about me if I don’t try to find a solution.”
- Once you are aware of a problem, you can brainstorm solutions, rather than dwelling on how the problem happened in the first place.
- Anger creates a sense of urgency to move forward and come up with at least a temporary solution. (Nobody likes it when people are mad at them.)
- Even when a permanent solution can’t be found, having an even keel throughout a situation is essential. Responding to anger in ways that are calm shows you your mettle and helps you save your energy for another day and time.
So, in the end, anger can bring honesty into a conversation, encourage creative thinking, build a sense of urgency around solving a problem, and show you “what you are made of.” So anger is not a problem. Don’t return it to sender. Open it up, take a good look, and see what you can learn from it. Anger is a gift.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Aug 19, 2009 | Career Skills
Andromeda Galaxy
I work in Residence Life. This means that there are several times of year when I spend more time on campus getting ready for students to arrive than I do with my family. Right now, for example, it’s almost 1 a.m., and I just finished getting some projects done in my residence hall commons to hopefully move us toward being ready this Friday for Fall Arrival and Welcome Week.
Every year, I say I am not going to do this to myself, and every year, that promise to myself and my family falls flat on its face, exhausted, sighing, and maybe even snoring. But despite being really, really tired, and somewhat overworked, I find a strange energy in being here and I know in my heart that it is something that I am both good at and meant to do.
In his book Wherever you Go, There You Are, Buddhist author and mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn tells the story of Buckminster Fuller, who contemplated suicide one night after business failures got him feeling that people would be better off without him.
As Kabat-Zinn recalls the situation, Fuller instead decided to live his life as if he had died, to divorce himself from investing his emotional energy, time and effort in particular outcomes, and instead to do the things he knew how to do because it made sense, and was in service to the universe.
Working in higher education requires a similar mindset. Not so much from shooting for certain outcomes (this is pretty much the point of education in general) but instead by accepting that in the process of learning, the teacher isn’t the product. It’s not really even the information. It’s the process.
In my department, I am often involved in the interview and hiring processes, and so I’m regularly asked by candidates the usual sorts of questions that candidates ask to see if they will be a good match for the position, or to gauge if they will fit in well with our organizational culture. In answering these questions I spend less time talking about skill sets. . . they are on the resume, or they aren’t. . . and by the time the interview happens, whether a candidate has at least the basic aptitude for the job has pretty much been settled.The resume gets you the interview, the interview gets you the job, and your approach to the job very much determines whether you will do the job, or the job will end up doing you.
It shouldn’t surprise candidates, then, that hiring committees are more interested in determining “fit,” than looking at a portfolio of your previous work, or hearing that you are a superstar of some sort when it comes to one aspect or another of the job.
When interviewees ask “what are you looking for in a candidate?” some seem surprised when I reply that I am not looking for a particular skill set, or something obvious, like being a team player, but instead for someone who understands that working in higher education is a lifestyle, not just a job, and that the people who are most successful are those that can see beyond what they want from a situation and instead can clearly see where they fit into the big picture. In short, those who understand that it’s about the process, it’s not about them.
So, returning to the idea of “fit,” it’s perhaps not as nebulous as one might assume. If you spend your time asking questions like “What should I be doing right now?,” “How will my actions affect others?,” and “What makes the most sense in this situation?,” you are beginning to understand your “fit” at the university, in the career field, and maybe, as well, in the universe.
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Aug 8, 2009 | Career Skills, Job Search, life purpose
I’d put safe money down on the possibility that most of us working in higher education didn’t have that dream as kids. As for me, I wanted to be Evil Kneivel , then I wanted to be Elvis.
Growing up in the ’80s, my attention soon turned to the yuppie lifestyles of the day, and I started college with dollar signs in my eyes, and dreams of a BMW. My first two years, I was a management major, but I really studied partying more than anything else. Calculus wasn’t my friend, and first semester my sophomore year, I earned the first “F” I made in anything. (But it was a high “F,” almost a “D,” and one of the hardest grades I ever earned. I was in hall council, because I liked pizza at meetings and cookouts with the women’s halls. By the end of sophomore year, I made two big decisions…changing my major from Management to Political Science, and applying to be a resident assistant.
The change of major was first a nod to the reality that calculus was a pre-req for several other classes later in the curriculum, and I just wasn’t that good at it. I chose Political Science because a.) politics always interested me, and b.) I thought is was a good background for law, and if I couldn’t be part of the big yuppie revolution through the glories of corporate management, I had heard that Political Science was a good background for law, and everyone knows that lawyers make SCADS of money. The RA thing grew out of two interests…doing cool programs and having fun, and the hope that being an RA would keep me out of trouble.
My junior year, I defined myself as an excellent programmer and jumped deeper into the whole student life realm, by becoming a peer health educator. It wasn’t where I saw myself coming in, but it was pretty good. Senior year, I kept enjoying life and the RA job, but somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the fact that I was going to need a job after college. I drank way too much, and one particularly bad evening, I overdid it and ended up getting arrested. Aimless is as aimless does, I guess.
The aftermath of this one event would stay with me, not because it destroyed my future, or caused me to be dismissed from my RA job; neither of those things happened. Instead, I learned that people were there for me, even when I made mistakes, and that some saw potential in me that I didn’t see myself. It wasn’t until this time that I started to understand that these people in Residence Life and other parts of Student Affairs weren’t just holding down jobs, they were answering a call, living out a higher purpose. In giving their time and energy to students like me, even when we faltered and arguably didn’t deserve the compassion, they were perhaps even performing a sacred duty.
Somewhere along the way, this message started to stick with me, and I started to think about going into Student Affairs. I was lucky enough to get an assistantship with Health Education, and I packed those 2 years of my M.Ed. program with activities in Housing, Health Ed, and Student Development; I came to know some great professionals and some great students, many of which I have kept track of in one way or another, as my generation passed into adulthood and another came to college.
There are days I ask myself why I wanted this, when an endless stream of issues waits at my door, or comes barging in, unannounced. It’s then I remember an aimless wanderer, and the people that pushed him back onto a path; I see myself in both, and it’s then I know I was meant to do this work.
So much for being Elvis.
