The Career Clinic Blog

If someone tells you how he’s feeling, say “I understand” at your own risk.

How can you possibly understand what someone else is going through? Even if you’ve had the same problem, you haven’t brought his life experience to it--so you’re still in the dark.

If that person is suffering, saying “I’m sorry” is almost never a bad move. Unless you’ve contributed to that suffering! In that case “I’m sorry”--if offered too soon--might feel like, “Can we get this over with? I messed up, I’m sorry, why can’t you move on?”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not on a mission to collect apologies. A lot of problems can’t be solved. What I want most is the feeling that I’m not alone in my grief.

And when I’m getting grief from someone? I try to tell myself criticism is a gift. It isn’t good news or bad news.

It’s just information.

Use it or don’t use it--but thank your lucky stars you’re surrounded by people who tell you the truth.

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Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but it’s more interesting--to me, anyway--because it’s, well, true.

I’ll take a documentary or an in-depth news report over a romantic comedy any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Happy Monday!

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It’s no secret what we’re trying to do at The Career Clinic. We want to help you get your hopes up, experiment with your life, and savor your story. I feel so strongly about that I made it part of my Twitter bio. Only to learn from a marketing expert we had on the show recently--whose specialty includes, among other things, nonsucky bios--it bordered on cliché. Sucky.

That’s the bad news. The good news? It wasn’t what she’s come to expect from me.

This woman is a very good friend. She has the courage to tell me the truth. Have I mentioned how lucky I am to be surrounded by people like that?

I looked her up on Twitter after the show. She may have a nonsucky bio, but I was too busy blushing to decide how I felt about it--which is why she might not be able to help me with mine after all. But she’s smart and funny and filled with great advice that’ll make you think more critically about the work you’re doing in the world.

Speaking of which! There’s a possibility we’ve been doing a few other things wrong at The Career Clinic.

Maybe all this sunny thinking is hurting your cause, not helping it.

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When I was a cocktail waitress the bartenders spent a lot of time straining mangled corks from the wine in bottles I tried to open.

No one had shown me how to do that, and I never thought to ask. It looked so simple. Thread the corkscrew down the cork, position that little bottle-opener thingy, slowly pull back. At which point the cork crumbled, every time.

It took us a while to figure out what I was doing wrong. Instead of just placing the corkscrew in the center of the cork and slowly turning, I muscled it down. As if it needed help! I took something simple, something easy--and made it difficult. I hate to admit this, but it’s a bit of a pattern with me.

The Career Clinic vignette is a bite-sized version of the talk show and we got some advice recently for how to make it better. I was sounding a bit forced. That’s probably the best--and the kindest--way to put it. What I thought was enthusiastic came off as a little much. How embarrassing! And how wonderful to have people around me who care enough about me--and our work--to tell me the truth.

I’m excited to see what else I can improve on, now. Like a true journalist, I’ll keep experimenting--and reporting back on the results.

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Did Mr. Crankypants just light into you or send you a nasty text?

Before you discount everything he says, don’t you wonder why he’d waste his breath--or his keystrokes--if he didn’t think you were worth an honest conversation?

Maybe, just maybe, you have it coming. Even if you don’t, are you sure there isn’t a sliver of truth to what he’s saying?

I’d rather have all hell breaking loose once in a while than be told everything’s okay when it isn’t.

But that’s me.

You?

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A producer for CBS News was having coffee at his home in Manhattan when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Tom Flynn raced to the scene on his bike and found a Merrill Lynch employee who’d just gotten a new camera. “He came out of the building,” Tom said, “and was standing near the southwest corner of the south tower.”

“You’re now working for CBS News,” Tom told him. “Okay, man,” the guy answered.

As job interviews go, that was a quick one. “You know how to work that thing? You’re hired.”

Tom checked to see if anyone else in the area had a camera. “If there were others,” Tom explained, “I wanted to own them.” Oh, that’s right. Death and destruction--but also, competition. Tom’s job was to give people the truth--the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--and be the first to do it.

I couldn’t get over that.

Tom reported from the scene for more than an hour. Then he got trapped in a garage and was afraid he’d die there. Then he raced to the CBS headquarters and sat at the anchor desk with Dan Rather and tried to explain what was happening to the rest of us. He eventually turned his notes into a poem, which was published as the book Bikeman a few years ago. He’s haunted by the memory of a woman who came to a reading. “I lost my son in one of the towers,” she said. She bought the book, but didn’t plan to read it. “They never found a trace of my son,” she continued. “Not even a fingernail.”

Tom understands. He still suffers from survivor’s guilt. “There was a fellow running alongside me as we tried to get away from one of the towers as it collapsed,” he says. “It was this big, huge, enormous building--so small parts of it were still huge. I was on the sidewalk with my bike, running, and he was running right next to me on the street. A piece of the building fell on him, and he just disappeared.”

I’ve always wondered what the people who knew they were going to die were thinking about before they did. Could they make peace with their lives?

Could you?

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Say what you want about the Rush Limbaugh - Sandra Fluke controversy. I’ll not be repeating any of that, here. If you want political divisiveness, you’ve come to the wrong blog!

But if you’d find it comforting to have someone admit the older she gets the less sure she is about anything, consider yourself comforted.

In a post only two days ago I linked to something I thought everyone pretty much agreed on. Then Suzy Welch reminded me one man’s cause is another man’s distraction.

What can one person do? Heck if I know. But if you want me to guess, here goes. Tell the truth, wrap it in kindness, and hope for the best.

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A crowded restaurant. The friend who isn’t taking no for an answer is here. I cross my fingers she hasn’t seen me, and duck into a booth out of her line of sight.

I’d been honest. I was full up on volunteer work, full up on spec work, and buried under so many deadlines I was lucky if I remembered to floss. "If I was going to take on more work," I told her, “I’m leaning toward the paid gigs.”

There. I’d said it. She was in business for herself. She’d understand.

She called the night of the nonencounter. She wanted to know why I hadn’t sought her out to say hello. Probably for the same reason she hadn’t said hello to me! That’s what I thought. What I said was, “I’m sorry.” And then, “I should have.”

Darrell and Katie were my witnesses, at the restaurant and now. They glared at me for being nice to someone who was scolding me.

She didn’t let up. She thought if I was so put off by her requests for favors I should’ve just told her. I was so nice she hadn’t realized she’d crossed a line.

Fair enough.

I told her again I was sorry. “Please, oh please,” I thought, “let this be it.”

But she continued: “That was so unprofessional!” I agreed. She elaborated. I listened.

Darrell and Katie kept glaring at me.

Then she asked how to fix this so we could be friends again. I thanked her for the question, and told her I had a question of my own. “Go ahead,” she said. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Because this isn’t an easy thing to talk about.”

She was sure.

I asked if she was put out by my reference to getting paid when we first talked about this. “I was,” she said. “But you didn’t say anything,” I told her. I took a breath, and I continued: “You wanted me to be honest with you, but you hadn’t been with me.”

“I agree that good friends tell each other the truth,” I offered. “And as I’ve been saying, I suck at that sometimes. If you go first, I promise to do my best to learn from you.”

The conversation wound down quickly. Darrell and Katie grinned at me, and I never heard from her again.

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A Minnesota company sells baby T-shirts printed with things like, “it ain’t gonna change itself.” That’s truth in advertising, I’ll tell ya. And doesn’t it make you want to make a beeline for the place the next time you’re in the market for a baby gift?

“In business since 1958.” Yeah? So? What’s this an ad for? A funeral home? You’re boring me to death.

I’m not the shy, retiring type. But if I had to do college over again, I’d wear the same T-shirt I used to at the start of a semester. I’d sit in the front row of a big auditorium and let the hundred or so mostly guys in my engineering class squirm their way through that first lecture. They were eager to meet me--or at least, see the front of my shirt--after being stumped by the slogan on the back. “Makes getting clean almost as much fun as getting dirty.”

I’d tell you what it’s an ad for--but I don’t want to burst your Bubble, Mister!

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Do you want to work hard, or have fun? Milk the moment, or live into a vision? Tell someone the truth, or preserve her dignity?

Ding ding ding. You’re right! It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

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