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| 'The Sun' card. Source: Rider-Waite Tarot pack |
Negative life-experiences, properly re-evaluated, can help us define what we really want out of life. I believe I gained that insight at least partially from reading Dorothy Leeds’ Secrets of Successful Interviews: How to Get the Job You Really Want in 1998, as well as from earlier, 1984-86 experience of psychotherapy. (Secrets of Successful Interviews has clearly been since reformulated and updated as Marketing Yourself: The Ultimate Job Seeker's Guide.)
That insight was made more alive for me by way of the interviewing skills of a recruitment agency's founder, Jacquie, in 1999. She asked me about the supports I would require in my ideal job. I recited a work placement experience in which my line-manager had been the CEO of my employer (whom I had previously known through shared volunteering in childminding), my workbase was my training provider’s facilities and line-manager never visited me on placement except for three interviews with training provider’s Placements Officer in an 8 week placement. “I would like good supervision,” I stated, while I recalled that the CEO too busy with other things never really gave me that and later emphasised my failure to meet deadlines.
“Don’t you really mean that you would require recognition?” Jacquie replied, and I resonated with that insight.
I recall that interview insight as I reflect on the resurgence I gained recently by the revival of my rapport with Hereford Times letters pages, and the impact on me from a research-oriented telephone interview I received yesterday by way of referral by Alison Mann as Kundalini Yoga teacher to both the researcher and me.
In the telephone interview, I was asked about my resilience under lockdown, and we clarified the definition of ‘resilience’. I said that I take the approach that I’m a survivor, whatever has happened to me in the past, and I have a lot more scope as a state pensioner on more-than-’working age benefits’ and free of the shackles of a Universal Credit ‘Claimant Commitment’ that is oriented to getting the claimant off the unemployment register more than it is to helping the claimant get the job they really want.
I referred to a sense of life purpose as an essential ingredient in my resilience — my capacity to bounce back from whatever happens to me: “I’m an expert witness, applying verbal literacy skills and ‘expert witness’ testimony, rather than a victim of life’s circumstances and waste of space.”
I felt revitalised by that interview, whereas I would no doubt feel drained by interactions with someone who probably had no experience of recruitment experience from the recruiter’s point of view and yet professed to providing “the help you need, when you need it.” (Namely, a Universal Credit 'workcoach'.)
Thus, last night I responded to a friend’s feedback on my latest Hereford Times published letter that provided the impetus for blog posts:
After a very stimulating research conversation with University of South Wales counselling course student re lockdown and access to wellbeing promoting therapies such as Yoga this afternoon, I had a fresh burst of blogging impetus, in which I gave loads of info related to what I told the student/researcher: that for far too many people, financial lockdown has long preceded Covid-19 lockdown.And before that blog post, I noted that the print issue of New Internationalist magazine referred to in the 'Agenda for a Caring Economy' posting, is not on the New Internationalist home page, but there is this reference to related online article about the skewed values of the Global Economy
Alan Wheatley
