The Career Clinic Blog

Someone I used to work with was so cantankerous I tensed up every time I was around him. This feels like several lifetimes ago, before I made a habit of considering the possibility someone else’s bad mood wasn’t necessarily my fault.

I’ll never forget one staff meeting when this man was lighting into the rest of us. The office would run so much more smoothly, he thought, if everyone around the table wasn’t such a colossal schmuckup--though I overshot that last word by one wrong letter and three extra ones.

The reason I remember this particular meeting? One of the women listened to him for quite a while before she put her hand gently on his arm and--flashing him the brightest smile--said, “Are we having a bad day?” It wasn’t snotty at all. It was almost impossibly sweet, the way a little kid might ask the question.

The room got very quiet for a moment.

Then everybody cracked up. Every single person around the table, including Mr. Grouchypants, laughed and laughed.

We finished our business, and the man’s bark never had quite the same bite again.

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Did you leave it all on the floor?

That's what your basketball coach wants to know at the buzzer. Did you throw yourself, your whole self and nothing but your best self, into the game?

So why, in the process of leaving it all on the floor on one project, was I sweating the stall mode I'm in with projects two through infinity? It's just math. You can't give more than a hundred percent--and if it's all going toward one goal, the others will have to wait.

Or as my friend Jamie remarked, "One newborn in the house at a time." I think of that often. I smile, and cut myself some of the proverbial slack.

That's what friends are for. Smiles...and slack.

Thanks, Jamie!

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A woman walks into the lounge of a classy Italian restaurant for a glass of wine, but doesn't find anything she likes.

No problem, right?

She'll realize she's in the wrong place for her tastes--and go somewhere else.

Except she didn't.

I was her waitress that afternoon. She struck me as someone who was having a bad day--but I wasn't, so no big. There weren't any other customers in the lounge, and I had plenty of time to try and make it--as they say in the trades--a happy dining experience for her.

I smiled and listened patiently as she told me what was wrong with each of our selections. I couldn't add a lot to the discussion because I only distinguished wines by color. One by one she ruled each out, growing more annoyed as she worked her way down the list.

"I'm really sorry you're not seeing anything that looks good to you," I offered at one point. Mostly I just listened and hoped my smile didn't betray the feeling this exchange wasn’t going to end well.

Finally she gave it to me. The look. The "what are you going to do about this" look. Which in my classic new-to-the-job mode inspired only panic.

I kind of nodded, smiled weakly, and told her my idea. Not to be a smarty-pants--that would’ve been unkind, and stupid--but because I was convinced that what was obvious to me wasn't obvious to her. The suggestion was a very tentative, "You wouldn't have to order wine..."

Cut to the next thing I remember, being at the server's station later that evening, still smarting from my supervisor's take on the incident. Maybe it wasn't a butt-chewing, as I mentioned in the last post, but one painful little nibble. Communications consultant Richard Gallagher thinks there was a better way through this--for the customer, and for me--and I’ll fill you in tomorrow.

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Nothing like a book called Living Well at One Hundred to make you think, "Better do some financial planning." Many of Dr. Darlene McCord's suggestions will ring familiar, and on a recent edition of The Career Clinic she said stress is contagious. "If you're a manager you set the mood for the whole office," she points out. "People look for cues about how to feel from you."

It reminded me how often that plays out. For better or worse, default settings or no, we catch moods from each other as easily as we do colds.

I first became aware of this in college. I was at a concert with my boyfriend, and couldn't believe Billy Joel was going to sing "Summer, Highland Falls." I almost burst into tears at the sudden delight, not realizing Steve was taking this in. I could feel his eyes on me, then. He smiled, so I smiled. Later he told me he wished he had a picture of my expression at that moment. "Priceless," he said. And then, "So innocent." Now I realize what the expression was. I wasn't about to decide it was a smile-worthy moment until he gave me the okay.

I aspire to what Dr. Alex Lickerman described as indestructible happiness, but I cop to what I've heard put this way: "You're only as happy as the least happy person you're living with." So you do the best you can by yourself--and your sweethearts--and keep a can of Lysol handy.

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"Smile!"

If someone reminds me to do that when I'm getting my picture taken, no problem. If someone breaks my concentration to suggest it, I just want to say, "You smile."

Curt Rosengren isn't surprised. The man who calls himself the Passion Catalyst says some of the happiest people he knows don't look that way on the outside. To the contrary: "You almost have to poke them to make sure they're still breathing. That's how absorbed they are in their work."

It reminds me of the guy who took issue with me as I perused the handouts on this table or that after a workshop session several years ago. "You have to relax, Maureen," he scolded. "Nine hours of day of this stuff is enough." How can he be so confident he knows better than I do, I wondered, what's fun for me? "I am relaxing!" I said brightly, not exactly rushing out of the room to snag a seat at his table for dinner.

I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I've felt badly for people, doing work I’d hate, only to find out they love it at least as much as I love mine. Happy people don’t necessarily whistle while they work, Curt points out. Sometimes they’re very, very quiet.

Unless you ask them to talk about it! I've yet to meet a person, in love with a job, who doesn't also love telling you the story. How that relates to your career, in the next post.

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I used to host a talk show on a cable-access station, and the manager of a local department store let me borrow outfits to wear on television. One of the gals who worked for him was nice, but she never smiled at me. I saw her two or three times a week, and I started wondering what the deal was. Did she hate her job? Or did she just not like some of her customers? Maybe she didn't like me. Maybe she thought my show was lame.

It wasn't that I needed her approval. But not getting that…registered.

Then one day I saw her smile at someone. She flashed a mouthful of teeth so crooked it was disorienting, because everything else about her appearance was flawless. It reminded me how little we know about each other’s stories. I vowed to be gentler, from that point forward, when sizing anyone up--myself included.

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The Dippy Donut pastry shop I worked at one summer had one of those little bells on the door so if you were in the kitchen filling donuts or whatever, you'd hear a customer come in. One afternoon I was in the back doing dishes, in a good mood after talking to my college boyfriend--who was off on his own summer job laying railroad ties for Union Pacific. I sang as I scrubbed. At the top of my lungs. Maybe you remember that Michael Nesmith song, "Her name was Joanne..." That's my boyfriend's mom's name, I thought, as I belted out the next line: "And she lived near a meadow by a pond..."

I finished the dishes. Then I went out front to sweep the floor. That's when I saw a customer standing there, looking at me.

"How long have you been here?" I asked. "Long enough," he said. I started to apologize for what he'd just witnessed, but he cut me off. "I think it's great you're so happy," he said. Pause. "At work..."

Thinking of him, and me at that age, still makes me smile.

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