Making Ripples

One of the most important decisions you have to make is in selecting employers who will make effective use of your talents and will recognize and reward you for what you can contribute. If you can effectively predict your future with this employer, you can possibly enjoy years of a productive relationship which will leave you richer in experience and in a better position financially.

All this will occur when you intend to perform work of a particular type in sufficient quantity to receive a handsome salary with adequate benefits AND you connect up with an employer who is looking for a person with your particular skills and work ethic and is willing to pay for your experience.

Unless both of you are looking for you to produce a professional level of effort with an adequate exchange, it will not happen. Your intentions and the future employer’s intentions need to match in order for a satisfying relationship to develop. This will not occur if either of you is untrustworthy.

Let’s make this painfully simple. If you actually have to jump through hoops to sell yourself to this new employer, you are in for a difficult future. Either your qualifications do not meet the person’s needs, or you have not presented them clearly enough for them to be recognized. Or, you have not asked enough questions to understand what the job really entails.

If you are the right person for this job, you will have already asked why this job opening has occurred, especially in a management position. Is it a new position or was someone let go? If it is a new position, do these people really know what it involves? There is no challenge like being the first engineer working for a company that has never employed an engineer before or being the first sales manager of a company that is still selling through door-to-door salesmen. Or being the first purchasing agent for a company in which the president bought everything himself.

If you do not know why the previous occupant of this job left, you will be flying blind until you get this information and understand it fully.

When you discover a job requirement being presented by a person who understands your value to him and presents his needs in an unambiguous way, you have the potential for a job experience of a lifetime! All you have to do is to determine fully what is needed and wanted and continue to deliver this in abundance. This will keep your intentions and your employer’s intentions in alignment and satisfaction will occur on all sides.

It is not enough for you to want the job and sincerely intend to do the best you can. You need to be able to understand the job requirements, both written and unwritten if you are to succeed in the long run. You may find out that what the employer says the job is like bears little relationship to the working relationships within the company. If you do not have enough experience to determine what the exact situation is before signing up, you are not the right person for that job.

If you are not able to ask awkward questions about working conditions and compensatory time before you start, you are hosed when they expect you to work through weekends without any compensation. Getting to work on cutting-edge technology and breaking all sorts of barriers is no compensation when you find you have spent years and lost your family chasing technological dreams with 70 hour work weeks and months spent away from home.

When your intentions and your employer’s intentions match, you will gladly work under the most aggravating conditions because you have certainty in what is expected and the rewards you get match the risks. When the trust is broken, your sanity and your health suffer and you may take years to recover.

This situation can occur in a startup venture where you are given a piece of the financial pie and you and a few others engage in the creation of a viable enterprise based on a new technology or business arrangement. You all trust each other in the beginning and you work impossible hours and somewhere along the way the intentions of some of the executives change and the company is no longer the same, even though nothing has been stated formally or publicly. The original trust is gone and with it, the confidence in attaining a bright future disappears. It is now just a matter of time until the organization collapses under its own lies and either goes out of business or is bought out by a competitor.

The reason I bring up this unfortunate situation is that you can perceive the shift in intentions when they occur and if you are wise, you will make your preparations to seek another situation before the final bell rings. Any time you see that you can no longer trust those you work with or live with, it is time to seek a new relationship. If you cannot trust someone, you have no way of creating a future with them. If you cannot create a future, you have no way to bring it about.

In Part Three I will discuss how your perception of a person’s spiritual companions will aid you in deciding whether you can trust the person and create a future with them.

You may have read that the future is a result of our intention. That is almost a true statement. The fully correct statement is that the future is the result of all intentions held by those who are affected by that future. This is why the projections of seers and fortune tellers are so often wrong.

They are able to read the intentions of the major players in some future situation, but sometimes they do not reach far enough to see all of the intentions directed at that future state.

Let this be fully understood:

THE FUTURE IS CREATED BY THE INTENTIONS OF ALL WHO INTEND 

TO PARTICIPATE IN IT OR INTEND TO PREVENT IT.

Let’s take the too common situation of a woman and man deciding to marry. If they manage to reach agreement on when, where, and who to invite, there are still the intentions of all of the parents and even grandparents to consider. If there are significant differences in what these people intend to happen, what do you think will result? Social media is full of stories about weddings that turned into horror shows because the people involved could not reach a peaceful agreement. 

Even when a group agrees that something should happen, the final result will be skewed by those whose intention differs in some regard from the rest of the group. 

When I was running the South Bay Mission in southern California, we decided to move the mission to a new area. We ran a few group sessions to determine the new location and how we would accomplish the move. We were able to spot where we were going to move by looking for the route our truck would take when doing the move. After that session, we drove down the road until we reached the spot where our trail ended. We were in front of a strip mall with a vacancy over a coffee shop. The next day I called the rental agency and we were able to secure the perfect location for an affordable rental.

This is what can happen when everyone is on the same page. When it came time to move, we had secured the use of a truck to help us move and we all were able to visualize how the truck would sit in front of our building because there was only one way to park. When the truck arrived, the owner had parked it so he had to drive down a flight of stairs to reach the street. We were a bit shocked at his choice of positioning, but since it was his truck and he was providing it at no cost, we were willing to let him do what he wanted. We loaded the truck and he drove it down a flight of stairs and off to our new location. This drove home the reality that the future is created by the intentions of all who are involved.

If the group creating the future is small and in close agreement, it is a lot easier to predict a future occasion. My wife and I needed a new car and we wanted a used car with specific characteristics. Instead of looking at cars on all of the used car lots, we decided to see if we could spot which route we would use driving the car home when we purchased it. We looked ahead in time and could see us bringing a black sedan home along a particular route that led from a pair of used car lots. We drove out the next morning and went by the first lot and nothing on that lot indicated to us. On the second lot, a wonderful old Ford Crown Victoria attracted our attention and we bought it and drove it home as we had predicted. This car served us well for years until we could afford to buy newer cars.

You can see from the examples I have used so far that agreement is necessary to create a future reality. You have the ability to see what someone intends, even though you may not realize it. So how can you use this to make something important, like your future employment, a reality?

The optimum situation will exist when you intend to perform work of a particular type in sufficient quantity to receive a handsome salary with adequate benefits AND an employer is looking for a person with those particular skills and work ethic.

In Part Two am going to discuss how creating a future employment situation can go right or can end badly.