Campers in the Adirondacks used to suspend their food from a rope and pulley system high up between two trees to protect their supplies from bears while they were off enjoying nature. The bears learned when they saw a hanging bag, park rangers report, to look for a rope next to the trees. Then they chewed the rope to release the “pinata” of sausages and s’mores or other yummy camper food. If you’ve been out of a job for awhile, you can now insert your own dreamy and desirable stuff in that pinata image — stuff you see other employed folks enjoying which you cannot. It’s discouraging. Can you empathize with the bears?
A “bear canister” has been offered at campgrounds for sale or rent recently. It operates like a child-proof pill bottle — you have to squeeze and turn the lid simultaneously to open it. It’s also made of tough, very sturdy plastic that resists even bear claws. A dream denied, until some bears figured out the system, and this year an advanced bear canister was re-engineered requiring a 2-step press and turn which was thought to be impenetrable. It was successfully tested on zoo bears, and in fact, quite a few humans have had a problem opening it. But wait, for those of you still hanging in with my job search metaphor, there is a hopeful end to this story.
Campers are complaining again about food theft. A bear that park rangers refer to as yellow-yellow because of her double yellow ear tags has been tracked to the area of the complaints. Tooth marks appear on the lid of the supposedly impenetrable canister, but the lid was not ripped off by tooth or claw. Yellow-Yellow, a shy but persistent black bear has been observed from a distance pilfering a canister — apparently trumping the system by pressing with her teeth and twisting her head.
The job market right now seems impenetrable. I offer you this wisdom in a nutshell from a model of ingenuity and true American grit, Yellow-Yellow: whatever is thrown at you, just keep going after your dream in different ways, and don’t give up! Crunch, slurp…
Maggie Anderson Words That Work provides strategic communications planning, writing and implementation. We primarily work with executives, coaches and consultants to stand out, so they attract more opportunities and prospects.
Maggie Anderson
The bears (like us) get hungry when devoid of food (money) for extended periods of time. Ingenuity is the mother of necessity if you get my drift. So how do we come up with consistent as well as persistent efforts to be successful in this current economic downturn? We try the obvious methods of marketing and communication as well as the non-obvious. We learn by adapting to our environment until something starts to click. In this case, it’s all about sales. The sad truth right now is that most everyone is looking to sell their own products and services and are not particularly interested in buying or even bartering. The result is that many if not most of my networking events leads to few sales or prospects. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a networking event where most everyone in the room was a buyer? Well guess what… With the ability to build trusted relationships comes the ability to find buyers that are two and three levels away from your initial contact. In this day and age, it indeed is who knows who. So keep up plugging the obvious as well as the un-obvious to boost your services and products above the gloom and doom of the current mindset. And remember to always smile, because a happy face results in better sales than a hard sell with a stiff face. Keith Duncan. Inventor of ElectronicNapkin.com, The visual presentation system for your computer and laptop.