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When I was in first grade, an older woman with glasses came down to our classroom and gathered a few students including myself. She proceeded to sit all of us on a bench and ask us questions covering a variety of topics. She told us that we were the three smartest kids in first grade and “gifted” and would be meeting with her weekly until we finished elementary school. I remember thinking the entire thing was funny and proceeded to give her smart ass answers to various questions. For example, she asked us what kind of food birds ate and I told her “baked potatoes” and other statements along those lines.
She didn’t seem amused. Around 20 minutes later, she sent me back to the classroom but kept the other two students she was chatting with there. For the next year, she would come down every week or so and grab these two students out of my class of thirty or so and chat with them independently for around an hour. One of those kids was a friend of mine. I ended up feeling really left out by not being able to leave class and go with these gifted students anymore. I felt as if I’d failed.
Every year in each class that I was in until I finished elementary school, that same woman would come down and grab these two students and take them upstairs to her office where she would talk to them about whatever topics gifted students were supposed to be talking about. They had apparently been judged “gifted” in a short conversation that we had when we were six years old and I’d been kicked out of the “gifted club” by my smart ass answers. I remember quite well that these students seemed to feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment in having been judged gifted by this woman when they were younger. For what it was worth, I felt like somewhat of a failure for having been kicked out of the gifted club at this age.
When I got into junior high school, this sort of separation continued. People began to be sorted into different math classes based on their ability. The sorting continued and as school progressed, it became more and more pronounced. This is something I saw started to separate people. The smart kids typically wouldn’t spend time with the average kids. The athletes wouldn’t spend time with the non athletes. The popular girls separated into different groups than the unpopular girls. All around, there was a tremendous amount of separation going on.
An interesting thing about school is that our current education system is focused on success and becoming someone different from who we currently are. The emphasis of education is on what we lack and how we are different from others. We are tested in a variety of subjects and classified and separated based on our ability to do different subjects. There is a continual separation of us going on from other people almost from the moment we enter school. This separation is imposed on us from the outside and is something that we are quite unaware of. At some point, however, in addition to the educational system separating us into various groups, we also start separating ourselves from others.
As time goes on, there becomes the rich and the poor. We separate ourselves based on religion. We separate ourselves based on where we live. Kids start separating themselves based on social class. We separate ourselves based on race. This separation that’s first imposed on us by the outside continues to become more and more pronounced as we separate ourselves based on factors we start to learn from others. Schools separate us, our parents and others also teach us how to be separate from others. Pretty soon, we are in a place where we are perfectly isolated and quite alone.
I’m sure that you can remember when you first entered school how easy it was to make friends with various people. I remember this well. In fact, back when I was in kindergarten I think everyone was friends and learned to be friends with each other. Everything was new. Kids play together and are able to celebrate and learn from each other.
I’m not sure what the point was. It may have been in first grade, or second grade, but there comes a point when our separateness from others just takes over and is like a landslide and appears to never end. It just starts going. As we move up the ladder and get older it becomes harder and harder for us to make friends with other people. We walk up and try and happily speak to strangers and are viewed with suspicion. By the time most of our education is over, we need to make massive efforts to relate to others.
Connection and contribution are not valued by only our educational system but by much of society. We are trained from an early age by the social and educational system to be alone and independent. We are taught to break up in small groups based on our strengths more so than we are taught to get along as groups of people. Our ability to live as a group in society is dying in so many ways and this is making us quite lonely. Most of us are taught that to be happy and fulfilled we need to be better than others.
When we are small children, we don’t have self consciousness. At some point, however, we learn to become very self conscious. We become self conscious about how we are different from others and how others view us. When we become self conscious, this starts draining energy. Energy we could be putting into connecting with others, for example, starts going into comparing what’s different about us from others. We become more and more concerned about what others think and this becomes more of a priority in many respects than what we even think. For young children, it’s quite normal not to be self-conscious and care about what others think. Young children can connect with everyone. They smile and say hello to the beggar on the street and look at everyone as their friend. Children are so totally themselves.
It’s incredibly unique to know and see people who are able to totally be themselves. They are so rare and people who are totally themselves know no other way to be. They are taught the beauty of being themselves. When you think about the rare people you know in your life who are themselves, I’m sure you are also thinking about some of the happier people that you know. The happiest people out there are able to simply be themselves. They are totally able to be themselves and unconcerned about the differences that may exist between themselves and others. They are themselves.
We all have a need to be happy. The only way to truly be happy is to simply be yourself. This means not fighting with who you are and who others think you should be. This means not resisting who you are. It means just being who you are. It’s absolutely magical to just be yourself. Be yourself and love every aspect of yourself and who you are. When you’re comfortable with who you are, you can be comfortable with others.
Your relationship with yourself is something that determines your relationship with others. For progress in your life, the most important thing is awareness of who you are and not an obsession with where you believe you should be. Your mind, like most minds, is likely conditioned with an “ideal” of the sort of person you should be. This ideal is the result of numerous judgments and separations between you and others that have likely been occurring throughout your own life. Every time you see someone out there who’s better at something, who is promoted over you, who is richer or more attractive than you, who is more well known than you, the concept of this ideal is activated within you.
There is a constant effort within most of us to become this ideal person we believe we should be. There’s a conflict between what we are and what we believe we should be. Every thought and emotion that we have is being interpreted and we have a constant discomfort with ourselves. In order to be happy, you need to embrace the person you are. If you aren’t yourself, you’re constantly trying to be someone and are never going to be happy. When you learn to accept who you are, you begin to find freedom. To accept who you are is to be free.
One of the best ways I believe to be happy and fulfilled is to help others grow. The reason this leads to so much happiness and fulfillment is due to the fact that by helping others, we learn to connect and be less self conscious and see fewer differences between ourselves and others. This connection is a huge missing component in the way most us are taught to think in society. The more you help others, the more you connect and can grow. Unlike many things in the world, we all have an equal opportunity to grow and to serve. It doesn’t matter what our social or physical condition is: We all have an equal opportunity to help others. To truly experience growth and happiness you need the desire for growth and contribution.
THE LESSON
Be yourself and strive to recapture the free self-confidence of your childhood. Embrace the person you are and avoid being overly concerned with what others think. If you cannot embrace yourself, you will never find true happiness as you will always be trying to be someone else.
About Harrison Barnes
Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.
About BCG Attorney Search
BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive that gets results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities that its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.
Filed Under : Featured, Staying Positive
Tagged: equal opportunity, fulfillment desire, physical condition, self conscious
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Do not be distracted by your insecurities and doubts, or you will never achieve success because you will not allow it to happen. Focus only on the message about your skills and capabilities. Identify your goals and create a gameplan, and fill your mind with positive and hopeful messages that will drive you towards said goal.
In this article Harrison explains how you can ensure success in your career by externalizing your opponents. Your job is like a game; if you work hard, play by the rules of the company and are seen as part of the team you will be viewed as a valuable player for the company. The most significant part of any game is the presence of an opponent. Don’t look for an opponent among your co-workers. Never speak negatively of your team members. Instead, concentrate on the external opponents. External opponents bring you and the team closer as you work towards a common goal. In order for you and your company to succeed it is important to have an external opponent. Harrison advises people to consistently work hard and not participate in the politics. This is a sure way to score big in your career.
In this article Harrison discusses how people who stand for something always do better than those who do not. Companies who stand for something always do better than companies who do not. The most successful companies not only stand for something, but they are completely consistent with their core principles. This is what keeps them going and this is what makes them successful. One of the largest problems that people have in their careers is when they diverge from what they are good at. When you do not stand for something, you divert from your true strength. Everything begins to crumble and slowly fall apart when you are not doing something that you are really good at. The biggest success comes when you stand for something and are good at it.
Companies necessarily seek to employ positive, forward-minded people. A firm’s success depends on their employees, and they seek people who will enhance them rather than merely contribute to the bottom line. People with positive natures, who contribute to a healthy social environment, prove essential to the growth and success of their employers.
In this article Harrison discusses that the meaning you give to things will control the quality of your life. How we feel about ourselves is all due to what we tell ourselves certain things will mean. The meaning you give things is crucial for your career success. You need to choose meanings that make you stronger. You need to ensure you interpret things in a way that serves you and does not hurt you. You need to reach your full potential. Don’t classify yourself as someone who is not fit to succeed at the level at which you’re capable. You need to take charge of your mind to have the career and the life that you deserve.
In this article Harrison discusses the importance of ‘energy’ over technical skills. When people are hiring you they are purchasing your “energy” more than they are purchasing your technical skills. They are interested in your ability to influence the world around you through your energy. When you are marketing yourself and seeking a job, or working in a job, there are essentially two things you are marketing. You are marketing your technical skills, but more importantly you are marketing an intangible sort of energy. The most successful people have mastered the art of projecting positive energy. The better your energy, the more employable you will be and the farther you will go.
You can never become too comfortable if you wish to be successful. Your success will largely depend on your ability to become dissatisfied with your current position. Successful people are never satisfied with the status quo, and constantly push beyond their comfort zone. When do you this and succeed, you set a new standard for normality in your life. Be continually dissatisfied, and always pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Resourcefulness can make you better at everything you do, and separates the truly extraordinary people from the general herd. Do everything within your power to be resourceful in your job search, life, and career to give yourself the best possible chance of achieving your goals, and learn how to employ the resources currently at your disposal for maximum impact.
The most successful people in the world share the common characteristic of sharing, or concentrating on the value that they give back to others rather than on their own growth and profit. Focusing on yourself never leads to long-term success, but leads instead to unhappiness as well as emotional and financial challenges. Your greatest consideration, therefore, should be how you can contribute to others, and how your actions can impact their lives.
The best way to attain your goal is through small, incremental steps on which you can build. Establish a routine, and make sure you are consistently working towards some kind of goal. Start small, and always build upon what you have done before. Most people fail to achieve their goals because they believe everything should happen quickly and at the same time, instead of progressively building upon their past achievements.
Make sure that you are involved in groups that focus on positive things. Your success in life depends on your ability to focus on the outcomes you want, and the focus of the groups with which you associate will in turn shape your own focus. You must endeavor to always choose groups with a positive focus.
Everything you do is a form of preparation for your job interviews, as you are always under some form of scrutiny. The best employees can always spot other good employees, and you cannot “fake it”; merely doing a good job in your work is a form of interview preparation. Always put your all into your work, therefore, even if you do not have long-term plans to remain at your current employment. Switch jobs as infrequently as possible. The time to prepare for a job search is before you even realize that you need to do so.
Your greatest successes will come from some of the smallest actions in terms of meeting people. You will cause a “stacking effect” the more you meet and connect with people; conversely, people cannot connect with you when you are withdrawn and nothing will happen. You must do everything in your power to connect with as many people as possible.
When myriad candidates are applying to limited positions, practicing unusual tactics in your job hunt will prove far more helpful than following the established routine and waiting for positions to come to you. Much like in military strategy, well-planned and unconventional moves can help you conquer your goals without suffering significant losses. You can land an excellent position by focusing on companies’ needs, rather than depending on job and recruiting advertisements.
You can change your life forever by harnessing the power of persistence. Think about the people in your life, and whether they empower you or hinder you in achieving your goals. You must win at all costs, and persist until you succeed.
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Your ability to help people will determine the extent of your success; the more powerful and effective your help, the greater rewards you will receive. One of the rarest and most profound achievements is to follow through on your goals and create a paradigm-shifting idea. The more revolutionary your work, the more people you will affect and the more memorable of a career you will have.
You will greatly benefit your career by helping and promoting your company’s expansion. A common belief is that expansion is fundamentally positive, and a lack of expansion is fundamentally negative. You must be on the side of expansion rather than contraction in every area of your life. All employers seek people who will help them expand, and the more your ability to contribute to this expansion will provide you increased job security and a greater likelihood of being hired.
The ability to fit into your work environment is among the most important parts of obtaining and retaining a job, even more so than your skill level. Fitting in means nothing more than being comfortable in one’s work environment, and making others similarly comfortable. Employers want to hire people who will embrace their approach to business and the world on physical and moral levels, so you must strive to fit in with their worldview.
Focus on what you are doing, not what others around you are doing. There are people to take action towards their goals, and then there people who sit on the sidelines and comment on the first group of people. People who are mostly interested in gossip and watching others usually lack the confidence and determination to take action themselves. The most successful people go account and accomplish things rather than sit back and watch others make things happen.
In this article, Harrison advises you to live the lives you wish to have, do the jobs you want to do, and basically live your dreams to your best possible ability. Life is fleeting and no one knows what tomorrow holds. So Harrison puts forward certain questions – when are you going to start living the life you want and when are you going to take charge of your life. The time to have the career you want is right now, not tomorrow, and not later. You need to take charge of your career and life and no one else is going to do it for you. Your entire life and the quality of it is a product of your decisions. You can have, do, or be anything you want. Do not create alibis for making comprises in life. What separates the best and the happiest people is the ability to stop to making excuses and Harrison wants you to be this person.
Anyone can be up when things are going well, but the real challenge comes when things are not. Do not look at problems, which are inevitable for any person or business, in a negative light; think of them instead as challenges, lessons, or opportunities. There is a silver lining to be found in every problem, and finding that silver lining will enable you to grow.
Understanding what you do for a living is very important for your career. You should understand the generality of your specific profession. You and your career are a product. You need to know where and how to market yourself in the best way possible. You need to be relevant and understand the skills you are offering. Being a relevant product is essential for your success. It’s easy to be relevant when you understand what you are doing and what purpose you serve. Being relevant is more than just getting a job. Being relevant also relates to serving the employers with the skills they need. You need to understand your market and what your customers want. This is the way to stay employed, and it is also the means to continual improvement.
Things will not always go the way that you want them to go, so you must not be discouraged by adversity in your job hunt. When you persist and consistently put forth your best effort, things are much more likely to go in your favor. Also, you must resist others’ efforts to undermine your efforts and potential; focus instead on doing everything in your power to fight on and complete the task at hand.
Having a goal or vision will propel you towards greater career success and happiness. Without a purpose, you will find yourself depressed and ultimately fail to achieve your goals. Do not subscribe to the unrealistic problem that you should never have problems, but instead regard problems as part of your overall growth strategy.
Don’t ever give up, and make the most of the tools at your disposal. Take chances and invest in your best skills, and persist in the face of unfortunate events. Have faith in your considerable work and capabilities, and use them to create value for others.
In this article Harrison discusses what a good hiring manager should look for. Many people who make hiring decisions really do not know what they are doing. In fact, they often make mistakes when hiring. They put too much emphasis on skills and experience. But the single most important aspect of hiring is evaluating the person’s unique outlook on the world. If the person does not have a positive outlook on the world, he/she will bring down the morale of the other workers. The person will harm the company through the negative outlook. The key to success is having the power to stick it out in jobs and finding happiness wherever you are. Hiring people who do good work and are always able to find happiness should be the number one objective of hiring managers.
To reach the goals to which you aspire, you must compare yourself with people superior to you for motivation. Most people prefer to look at life the way they wish it to be, rather than as it truly is. Move out of your comfort zones and face reality. Don’t seek out or compare yourself with the average people around you, as doing so will only mire you in mediocrity rather than push you forward.
You can better market yourself by taking a stand against something. Peoples’ personal beliefs, including the things with which they do not agree, define who they are as people. Standing against something differentiates you from the crowd; when done in the correct manner, without disrespecting others’ opinions, such a stance can help you land your dream job.
Maintaining a routine in both life and work is important to success. Not only do you need to establish a routine, you must make that routine demanding and push yourself to the limit. Budget a certain amount of time each week for networking, applying to jobs, brushing up your interview skills, and following up with employers. Such consistent effort on a daily basis will make a huge difference to your career success.
A recommendation from a powerful person can make a huge difference in your job search; a reference from an influential person makes a tremendous difference to a prospective employer, and thus can be a major advantage for you. When an important person whom the company trusts recommends you, you instantly qualify for positions that may previously have been unattainable. Make the absolute most of your connections with the powerful people in your life, because doing so can instantaneously change your career and life.
You must plant seeds in the minds of others, so that they will be more likely than otherwise to think of you when a future need arises. In planting seeds, you are making people aware of what you have to offer; you must make sure that you are ever present in the minds of your potential employers. Planting seeds is the most effective way to generate top-of-mind awareness, and ensure that the right people remember you at the appropriate time.
Recent immigrants exemplify the benefits of willpower, passion, and excitement in the way that they work so much harder for their goals than the people who have been here for most or all of their lives. Like most Americans, you need to rekindle the spirit of your immigrant ancestors and become hungry for what you want. The entrepreneurial spirit that brought people to America has often faded over time; adopt the fire and work ethic of new immigrants in order to achieve your goals.
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Harrison, Martin Luther King Jr. said something similar.
“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” Martin Luther King Jr.
In our quest to grab the brass ring we too often look and ask, “What’s in it for me,” and “What can you do for me.” Far better to say, “How can I help you?” or “What can I do for you?”. If you really want to blow their minds ask, “How may I serve you?”
Connection is key in these trying times.
Keep ’em coming!
Bernie
Isn’t it that the best networkers theme should be “Givers gain.” It is totally true the more you put yourself out there the more opportunities open up. I believe this is true and has worked for me in my life. You never know where opportunity is going to knock and who it is going to come from.
You have to believe in yourself and believe you can do it. That way others believe in you too. Your dreams can change but somehow you may not be doing exactly the same thing you believed you would be doing when you were a kid. You might be doing a modified version of it.
This I think is the difference. You can marry up and with your ever growing network you can get inspired to make the change you never thought in a million years you would be doing. I think this is what makes people great.
Alone doesn’t define happy. Communioty does.
I need a job is what I am thinking right now.
Great insight
I HAVE NEVER RECIEVED SUCH A GREAT IDEA ,I HOPE ITS GOING TO IMPROVE MY LIFE
This is really touchy!
Thanks so much,i\’ll start to develop a high self esteem of myself. And aspect myself as i really am. Once again,i say,thank you.