CuppaGemma

Success and security are wholly subjective terms.

“The economy” has become a threadbare phrase which tinges with the smell of sour baloney and an obese wet cat too to near your face. Everyone is aware, and no one really has much to say about it any more.

Some folks, such as my brother and his wife in Michigan keep their heads down, hopes up, and mouths shut as the week wears on. As engineers who work in concept and design they “should” be okay. There is the pawn game of ranking orders and years served which defines who gets what notice when.

Other friends here get half a week’s notice with the Recession named instead of Lord Voldemort for the termination of their role. It’s a shock and somehow you must keep your composure.

Then there are those who choose to walk away. They want to leave with heads held high instead of shutting out the lights a few weeks or months later out. Some have new roles to settle into, and others savings and scrappiness to pull them through. We Bartleby’s bond with our polite mantra, “We prefer not to.”

Depending on our ages and our experience we handle this differently. The weight assigned to the severity of it all, the amount of Tylenol or Haagen Daz or chocolate consumed, whether we become terse, or laugh out loud comes down to what we think of ourselves. There is always another option.

If this doesn’t work out, what next?  What’s the contingency plan? How can you hustle into something else? What has been percolating that you can leverage? If what you expected to be there was suddenly gone, how else could you keep things going?

Perhaps it’s the art of paying attention. A certain kind of attention.

After the plane landed safely in the Hudson, a myriad of stories were written about “survivor mode” and what is the it that happens that makes the difference between a situation imploding and the results disastrous, and a different outcome entirely.

Part of it is being calm and maintaining control. Another part is the ability to make decisions on the fly (without committee). But the most significant aspect, in my opinion, is how you perceive the situation in the first place.

What are paying attention to? Just what you are supposed to- or do you have a peripheral eye always on?

For example, there is a test where people are asked to identify how many photos there are in a newspaper as fast as they can.  The results follow two trends- a couple of minutes, or under 30 seconds. The people that complete the test so quickly notice the copy on the inside of page two that says, “STOP COUNTING THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS PAPER.”

You wouldn’t notice that if you did as you were told. You’d scan for images, not the copy around them. So you would miss out. You listened with a narrow view.

The folks that are adaptable, who pay attention, the who ones build relationships and focus on people first, money later seem to be best insulated against this hairy beast of a bad economy. They have more than one maneuver to walk through life. They assume you will need to know more than one thing to get by. They keep learning and looking.

They decide against failure.