CHAPTER 1 - BEGIN GAME HERE

Read The Rules

If life is a game, how do you play it? The rules seem to change on a daily basis. You´re not even sure who the players are. You work and live in an economy where job turnover now averages less than 3.5 years and frequent news headlines announce layoffs of 7,000 people at a time. Your car salesman this past weekend was last month´s airline pilot. Your financial planner is now in chef school. Your organization is being led by its third CEO in two years. Your competition is working harder to grab your best customers. Your organization is asking you to do more with less. Your family life is out of balance. As you struggle to get a grip on the rules, you wonder what your next move should be.

Want To Win

You´re at a turning point. You know you want to make a change. You´ve thought about the direction you want to go, but for some reason you haven´t taken action. Do you want to move up, in, sideways, or even out? Or do you want to make a subtler move - one to simply enhance the position you´re in now? Whether you´re a seasoned manager, entrepreneur, recent retiree, salesperson, stay-at-home parent, out-placed executive, recent graduate, immigrant or part time professional, you want to make the right moves for you. You want to be an impact player in the game.

Use Your Strengths

It might be hard to think of yourself as an impact player. When you look at the playing field, it seems large, cold, and lonely. The players look different, too. If you´re a Baby Boomer or a retiree, you may be feeling too old to play well. If you´re a recent graduate or immigrant, you may be feeling inadequate on new turf. If you´ve been out of work for a long time, you may be feeling lost. If you´re a full-time parent, you could be feeling isolated. All of these feelings could possibly deter you, but everyone has unique ways of getting to their goals. As an adult, you´ve collected unique life experiences to take out on that field with you. Use those strengths and you´ll soon see that any game played successfully is played for real-with wisdom, courage, strategy, and timing.

Play With Wisdom

The first time through a game, you´re often testing your skill, but by the second and third, you´ve learned from earlier mistakes. As you plan your future in a fast-paced environment, trust your personal wisdom and be energized by the wisdom of each day.

Melissa, an RN graduate student in nutrition, keeps a journal of things she learns from her patients as she makes her internship rounds. Different from the official, required medical reports, her journal entries remind her of the humanness of her patients. Penny, a vibrant marketing director for a medical specialty clinic, brings eight years of marketing experience in pharmaceutical sales to her job. Her daily learning, though, comes from listening to the patient services staff members at each clinic who teach her what it´s like to be on the inside.

Betty, a retired homemaker, combines the experience of both years and days in her life philosophy. When she rises each morning, she says out loud, "Well, new day, what am I going to do with you? What will I learn from you today?" At day´s end, she takes her answer to heart as she looks forward to the next one. Ken, a widowed part time worker in his early 70´s, reads a daily prayer or spiritual poem every morning at the kitchen table while his toast browns and his coffee perks. People who know Ken say that he lives the words of his poems. Betty and Ken have ageless wisdom.

Your wisdom grows in unexpected moments: Your child turns to you and offers an insight on your mood in a way no adult ever has before. Your most difficult client offers a critical comment that illuminates a flaw you´ve been avoiding too long. Your spouse tells you something that you cherish at the end of a long day. Your newest employee solves a problem on the shipping dock because you finally took a moment to really listen. When you add the moments together, you realize that wisdom doesn´t involve much talking at all. Wisdom involves a lot of listening.

Play With Courage

The right move is not always the easiest move. Today´s winners are making choices in challenging surroundings.

If you look, you will find people playing courageously everywhere. For example, Robin, a 62 year-old career strategist, realized that she needed a rest after working at a high pace for 22 years helping others find direction. She had helped clients take time off and now thought about taking a year for herself. Afterwards, she felt renewed and enthusiastic about returning to work.

Gary, 45, a small town stockbroker, needing a new client base, bravely accepted a position miles away from his Midwestern home to work in the financial field with a commission-only base. The new location in the Southern United States was both a cultural and distance shock for his close-knit family, but once there, working in a cloud of anonymity was an advantage. Gary says, "In the new location, I didn´t do anything differently than back home, but the strange environment helped me position myself as an expert."

J.J., 24, a motivational speaker, played hockey with a passion until an accident during a game caused him to be quadriplegic at age16. His will to walk again was strong and buoyed him for some time. His defining moment, though, came when a specialized hospital in Colorado deemed that there was no more they could do for him. They told him to go home. Outside the hospital that day, he saw a dog running with his master; for a long moment he felt that the dog was better off than he was. The dog could run and play. But on a final goodbye trip to Pike´s Peak, he adjusted his thinking. The majesty of the mountain renewed his perspective on life and he courageously accepted life in a wheelchair.

Play With Strategy

Perhaps you´re contemplating a major move, like Gary. Maybe you need a long break like Robin. Or perhaps you´re restructuring your life after adversity, like J.J. You may also be like Melissa, Penny, Betty or Ken - someone who wants to stay where they are but not stagnate where they are. Making a move doesn´t always mean a change of career or locale. Many moves are internal strategies that propel you forward. For Robin, it was acknowledging that she needed a full year away, for Gary, it was a need for client trust, and for J.J. it was acceptance of his condition while atop a mountain. In every case, the inspiration to change began internally.

If you´re like most people, you value the rewards of personal growth and living a fulfilling life. To reap those rewards, your best plan is to blend creative inspiration with solid guidance and strategy. When nine miners were stranded in a collapsed and flooded Pennsylvania coal mine in July 2002, they survived through strategy - not panic. It was a strategy to work as one that kept them alive. When two of the men experienced chest pains, the others grouped together and calmed everyone so nobody would have a heart attack. It was strategy above ground that saved them as well; someone thought to bang on a nearby pipe to get an accurate count of trapped miners and to send oxygen down first before drilling a rescue shaft. Strategy is guided inspiration: it is an all-important part of a successful move.

Play With Timing

With today´s fast-paced technology permeating every aspect of your life, you struggle to make the right moves quickly enough to make a difference. Great moves happen with a great sense of timing. You can plan clearly and intelligently even when your routine is jarred by outside events. For example, Billie had been a line worker in a factory for thirteen years when the plant was forced into a major layoff and she found herself one of 85 employees without a job. She had been happy there; a little bored, perhaps, but had never felt a sense of urgency to change. However, after losing her job, she knew she didn´t want to do factory work any longer; she was thirty years old and wanted to move on. Looking back on that period, Billie recalls that having no options made her brave. Even so, she remembers driving around in the parking lot of the local junior college, gathering up the courage to enter. Now an admissions advisor at that very junior college, she helps many who have been jarred out of their pattern as she once was.

Begin Game Here

Take a deep breath. The air is clear and the day is calm. The field is empty. The board is open. The deck is crisp and new. The other players will enter soon. Are you ready? It´s your move.

Used with permission.

©2004 by Cyndi Maxey and Jill Bremer Published by Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Financial Times Prentice Hall Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

About the Authors
Cyndi Maxey and Jill Bremer share 20-year careers in communication and image consulting and training, respectively. Both currently own and operate their own businesses in the Chicago area. Cyndi has worked with employer-employee relationships in her role as a training consultant, coach, and speaker. She is a Certified Speaking Professional, the highest earned designation of the National Speakers Association. Jill has coached and trained hundreds to look and speak their best for sales presentations, job promotions, and personal growth and success and holds the Certified Image Professional designation with the Association of Image Consultants International. Cyndi´s two previous books are The Communication Coach and Training from the Heart. Jill´s chapter on image appears in the book, Rude Awakenings: Overcoming the Civility Crisis in the Workplace.