How To Sell Yourself
A
couple of hundred secretaries attended a seminar in Syracuse a few
months ago. Because I happened to be in the hotel that day, I did a
little eavesdropping.
The speaker was a snappily dressed, fast-talking Yuppie who dished
out a lot of expensive advice about how to sell yourself in the business
world. By the way you dress, she explained, you can put across a
message of power (suits, ladies, not soft sweaters; skirts, not slacks;
pumps, not sandals).
The way you wear your hair tells the boss more than your resume did.
Hair over the forehead tells him (yes, the lecturer did actually refer
to the boss as "him" most of the time) you're shy, coy, or afraid of
something; long, loose stuff says you haven't grown up. And you
know what fluffed-out hair proclaims the minute you walk into the office: fluffbrain!
What you eat for lunch and how you arrange your desk lets people know
who's in charge. No creamed dishes, no desserts; no teddy bears or
cutesy mottoes on the desk. Feel good about yourself--slim, trim, lots
of vim. Be assertive. Be confident. Walk into the head office in your
elegant Joseph A. Bank suit--dark (of course) impeccably (of course)
tailored (of course). Stand tall. Head up. Smile. Give him the kind of
handshake that lets him know it could have been a
knuckle-cruncher--he'll get the message:
power. You're in charge.
Beneath the Surface
In
Tree of Life magazine Peter Reinhart writes:
The spirit of this age is one of personal power; the
spirit of Christ is one of humility. The spirit of this age is one of
ambitious accomplishment; the spirit of Christ is one of poverty. The
spirit of this age is one of self-determination; the spirit of Christ is
one of abandonment to Divine Providence.
He goes on to suggest a new kind of seminar: training in the assertion of
virtues--humility,
for example, spiritual poverty, purity of heart, chastity of mind.
Instead of self-reliance he sees reliance on Christ as the source of
empowerment and liberation.
So do I. To be Christ's slave is perfect freedom.
Will this idea sell? Will it work? Can we really get what we want
this way? The third question is the crucial one for Christians. Answer
it, and you already have the answer to the first two.
If what you want is what the world wants, nobody will be able to sell Reinhart's seminar to you. It isn't going to work.
But if you've made up your mind to have what the world despises--the
things that last forever--and if Jesus Christ is Lord of your life, the
whole picture, even in the dog-eat-dog world of competition and big
money and big success, will be different.
What distinguishes the Christian from others in that world? I admit
the validity of some of the Yuppie's advice, silly as it sounds. The
medium, alas,
is to a certain extent the message. A Christian
must he at least as careful, sensible, and serious about doing the job
properly as anybody else. He must also dress and act carefully,
sensibly, seriously. Man looks on the outward appearance because it's
the only thing man can look on. God alone can look on the heart.
What's in the heart reveals itself sooner or later. You may get the
job on the basis of first appearance.
You'll keep it on the basis of how
you perform day by day. Many perform well because they're after money
and power--but there's nearly always room for a little fudging here and
there, a lot of elbowing and shoving and downright trampling of
whoever's in your way, not to mention high-level crimes that people get
away with.
The Christian in the office or factory or construction job operates
from a wholly different motive: "service rendered to Christ himself, not
with the idea of currying favor with men, but as the servants of Christ
conscientiously doing what you believe to be the will of God for you" (
Ephesians 6:5,
6 PHILLIPS).
How High, How Mighty?
I would hope that the Christian businessman or woman, whether lowest
on the corporate totem pole or the chief executive officer, would be
distinguished from the rest not only by conscientious work but also by
graciousness, by simple kindness, by an unassuming manliness or a modest
womanliness, and above all by a readiness to serve. There's nothing
intrinsically wrong with ambition--Jesus often appealed to it--but the
nature of those ambitions makes a huge difference: "He that would be
chief among you must be servant of all,'' even if that means serving
coffee instead of serving on the committee you were itching to join.
A Christian is the sort of person who can be asked to do whatever needs to be done without retorting, "That's not
my
job." Somebody is bound to remind me that you can get in trouble with
the unions this way. Well, you know what I mean. Christians are
available.
Christians aren't too high and mighty to do the nasty little task
nobody else will do. Christians can be counted on, imposed on, sometimes
walked all over. Why not? Their Master was.
I think of my friend Betty Greene, a pilot (called an aviator in her
early days) who ferried bombers during World War II and helped found
Mission Aviation Fellowship. "I made up my mind," she told me, "that if I
was to make it in a man's world, I would have to be a lady." A more
ladylike lady I have never known. She knows when to keep her mouth shut.
She's modest. She's the very soul of graciousness. She isn't trying to
prove anything. Nate Saint, an early colleague of hers, once told me he
had had no use for women pilots until he met Betty. She shook up his
categories.
Christians ought to be always shaking up people's categories. I guess
one of the things the world finds most infuriating about much-maligned
Jerry Falwell is his unflappable graciousness, his refusal to retreat
behind spurious logic. They'd like to call him a rechecked bigot, but he
doesn't fit the category. His worst offense is that he's so often
right. He speaks the truth--that's bad enough--and he speaks it in love.
That's unforgivable.
"The very spring of our actions," said the apostle Paul, "is the love of Christ.'' That goes for all of us who claim the name
Christian.
It is the energizing principle of whatever we do--from praying and
serving the church to laundry and lawn mowing and the jobs we get paid
for. Charity is the word.
Charity? In the late twentieth century? Yes. If in home, school, and
workplace the rule of each Christian's life were MY LIFE FOR YOURS ("in
honor preferring one another") it would make a very great difference.
The Christian's distinctive mark is love. It was what set the Lord
Jesus apart from all others. It was, in the end, what got him crucified.
If we follow him in the marketplace, many of the self-promotion methods
others use will be out of the question to us.
Won't we run the risks of being ignored, stepped on at times, passed
over for a promotion? Yes, those and a good many others. But what price
are we willing to pay for obedience? The faithful, unconcerned about
self-actualization, will find along the pathway of self-denial the
blossoms of fulfillment. We have our Lord's paradoxical promise in
Luke 17:33: "Whoever tries to preserve his life will lose it, and the man who is prepared to lose his life will preserve it.
Copyright 1989, by Elisabeth Elliot
all rights reserved.
