Do you remember the story about the fellow whose cat led him to the right job?  It went like this…

Apprehensive young man desperate for career and already late for interview has a runaway house cat. After frenzied search, skirmish and surrender, young man and reluctant cat arrive at company’s formidable front entrance. Young man opens resistant door by clamping resume between teeth and wedging cat between sandaled feet. In time it takes to yell, “stop biting my toe”, cat escapes, dashes after delivery truck and leaps aboard. Stowaway cat, unaware driver, and yet to be delivered packages head for highway. After lengthy pursuit young man flags driver to stop. While exchanging cat and pleasantries, young man describes aborted interview. Delivery driver, impressed with young man’s dogged desire to recoup recalcitrant cat suggests career with animal rescue.  Young man turns suggestion into opportunity and works happily ever after.

What’s the moral of the story? To get a great job all you need is a coincidental intersection of people and events?

If that were so there’s little you can do to influence your job search other than stand around intersections, waiting for the coincidence of good fortune to strike you instead of the person standing next to you. I don’t believe that. I do believe that life can be more challenging for some than for others.

Bad things can happen to good people and the best intentions can go ignored; hard working, honest, talented employees can be laid off and the misunderstood can be fired; that some people are born to wealth and privilege and others to misery and despair; that there are many things about which we have no choice but to choose again. It’s in that gap, that place between what was chosen for you and what you choose for yourself that I would hope you would focus.

I’ve worked with a wide variety of clients having to deal with a broad range of job challenges and career issues.  Despite their age or circumstance, education or economics, the majority struggle to answer the question, “what should I be when I grow up?”

Some are locked into the belief that careers should be hard and unforgiving. “That’s why it’s called work”, they say. Others, intellectually quick and hungry for mental stimulation are drawn to what is difficult or unusual, only to find that their learning curve is as short as their interest is brief. “When will I find something that sustains me?” they say. “I’m tired of this endless search.”

Some believe they should set aside the playthings of their youth, that whatever dreams they had as children, of fun, fame and fortune were just dreams, and not to be considered as career possibilities.

I’ve worked with grown children who espouse economic independence from their deep pocket parents even as they accept their co-dependent reality; with young adults who struggle to find an identity that’s not subordinated by a parent’s power or influence.

I’ve worked with not so young adults who’ve overcome poverty and jeopardy to make it on their own and in their own terms; with people who’ve left their jobs and people whose jobs left them; with people for whom English is a second language and want a chance to prove themselves as they are, not as others would wish them to be.

They all have this in common: A desire to enjoy what they do, to be respected, treated fairly, and paid equitably for their effort. It takes courage, not coincidence. It requires stepping into the space between what has happened to them and what they choose to happen next. That’s the place where they improve their self-awareness; increase their self-confidence, and where they take action.

What’s the moral to your story?