Moral authority

Some have asked me if my new book will be a compendium of moral platitudes that people will have to digest and use to analyze their behaviors. Good grief, NO!

Moral platitudes have been the direct and irrevocable downfall of televangelists, senators and all kinds of preachers and teachers. I just can't go there.

The Last Best Resume on Earth is, if nothing else, a moral reckoning of one's own. Since G*d already has seen everything, there's no hiding, no subterfuge, no clandestine cover-ups with which to fool your Maker. It's the NAKED truth. Like in the film Defending Your Life, it would be interesting to review the days and hours of your time on earth (up to now) and see how you would use this time if it were over as a defense to move on. The metaphor is useful, if not fantastical. What (or how) would you and I plead to continue here on earth if everything up till now were under scrutiny? How might the priorities change?

Something to think about.

Character Referencing

You see it all the time: "references available upon request". This is a combination of both professional and personal names, emails and phone numbers of the trusted "others" who will back up our credentials, assuring the potential employer we are who we say we are.

The personal names have different expectations from the work-related names. These are the people who know us after hours; these are those who know our troubles and our joys, the friends who've been through thick and thin with us.

Believe it or not, employers do contact these friends. What we don't actually know is what they say about us, but we assume it's good.

The character resume is, for some purposes, a short, second page accompanying the "work" resume that covers the subtler issues an employer might wish to learn about us: our genuineness, our respect for authority, our innate ability to behave with humility,our uncompromising willingness to admit mistakes and clean them up, our courage to take risks.

A time-saver? What if your references let themselves be quoted as going on record vouching for your character? It's a way to open a conversation about your character that could be helpful to both you and the employer.

Defending Your Life

Remember the 1995 film starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep? It was a fun parody of what might happen in that intersticial space between death and the NEXT LIFE.

Brooks dies on his birthday when he inadvertantly hits a bus head-on; Streep hits her head on the patio of a swimming pool, falls in and drowns, a strange way to meet her Maker since she considers herself a good swimmer. They meet up and fall in love in Judgment City, the pit stop for reckoning with one's life by petitioning before two judges, with a prosecutor and a defense lawyer.

Brooks' "trial" ends in his having to go back to earth (another reincarnation) because the prosecutor proves he lived a life full of fear and missed opportunities. Streep ascends to something better (we never know what this is) because her life was filled with courageous, selfless acts. But in the end (happy of course because boy gets girl) Brooks risks everything for Streep when she's assigned to another "realm" without him and he almost gets hit by several buses pursuing her, determied to never let her go.

So is conquering fear at the heart of developing character and the subsequent ticket to redemption? Is Albert Brooks right?

A Character Resume?

Why on earth would anyone want to write such a document? Isn't it easier to just wait till judgment day and make( plead) the case? After all, many of the best jobs happen over a cocktail somewhere and there's interest sparked and VOILA! Richard Bolles has never believed in resumes (What Color Is Your Parachute?).

I don't know. I think you're going to be interested. My brain is a little lazy today, so this is the lonely, skinny post. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

How I Got Interested

I've been interested since I was three in "saving my soul". As a cradle Catholic, I was taught very early about sin and its consequences. I learned to take confession at age six, and mastered the typical lies that got me through for a few years without embarrrassing myself to a priest: I disobeyed my parents and gossiped about my classmates, standard issue misdemeanors.

As an adult, leaving formal religion behind and studying world religions and ritual, I began to see we all worried about the same things and we all knew the bottom line: if you don't love your neighbor as yourself, you might not be as happy as the neighbor who does.

And try as I might, I could never escape from conscience--an innate pressure that sent the cues to knowing the right thing to do, if not the courage for acting on that knowledge.

I had a long career (and still practice it but with less intensity) as a career coach/resume writer, and over the years I formed strong views of what people were really writing about in the job campaign: sometimes exaggerations of their accomplishments, and often unnecesaary modesty about the best their skills could produce. It finally occurred to me that writing about our character traits, about those aspects of ourselves, could be an interesting and healing way to take a long look at our inner value to ourselves, as projected to our inner picture of God.

So came about the birth of The Last Best Resume. It is meant to be ongoing and upggraded, just like an ordinary employment resume. I'll keep you posted as it develops. Maybe, dear reader, you may want to write one for my book.

Compartmentalizing

Most of us think of ourselves as decent people, governed by conscience in our daily affairs.

In fact we have a little wall of self-protection, which allows us do the "right thing" most of the time, UNTIL we feel wronged or until we see we can get by with something no one will notice or care about.

My close friend won't allow herself to surf the web looking for a new job while still at her current one. She says it's unethical. But she will claim to be the age of a "senior" at the local movie theatre--she's actually 6 years shy of 65--to save $3 on admission. She even fought with the ticket seller, dramatizing resentment at being told she looked younger, feigning insult to injury.

This is compartmentalizing. It's what is known as situational ethics. Perhaps there's room here to draw a larger vision, a bigger picture of what makes for true character. If we are inconsistent about where we draw the line on character, do we need to rethink those lines to get to heaven? And most importantly, if we define heaven as something peaceful to be attained here on earth, is there any way to get these little perpetrations clearly front and center and corrected to achieve a certain life force that's truly empowering?

I conclude the universe is fair. The simple white lie has a cost to each of us. My friend is not poor, but she is obsessed about money, about saving where she can, like many of us. But what will this crazy lie cost her? At least we know this much. I was there and I noticed. Her character status was reduced in my eyes. Is this a cost to her? Of course. Compartmentalizing is our individual way of prevaricating with the truth, of selling out a precious part of ourselves for nothing worthwhile.

Compartmentalizing got Bill Clinton in big trouble. Where is our version of self-righteous self-interest tripping us up?

Getting Into Heaven

Remember the film Defending Your Life, the funny and sometimes touching Albert Brooks/Meryl Streep film of about ten years or so ago? Well, what if you couldn't enter heaven without a resume (prior to your arrival in Judgment City, or for those of you who haven't seen the film, prior to negotiating your way past St. Peter)?

I'm authoring a book on examining your character, putting your basic personal self (the real you) under the microscope to see how well you would hold up if you (God forbid!) suddenly died today. Or tomorrow, or sometime soon. It doesn't matter. What are you doing about developing your characer? Aside from your well-flossed teeth, your loyal spouse or your trophy date(s) and your Harvard degree, how do you show up in the privacy of your own conscience? How would those closest to you describe the REAL you---in the privacy of their own conscience?

I can help you identify what you need to repair, refine, remake, redo and otherwise, recycle your worst habits, your most egregious sins, so that when you meet your MAKER, or the emissaries your MAKER uses to protect Himself, you will have a document---a truthful, no BS one--- unlike your actual job resume, that will get you past the endless reincarantions you'd just as soon avoid.

Read my book: The Last, Best Resume: the heavenly resume to get you into heaven. Due out June 2008.