Career Insights From A Toy…
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!!
A jingle I heard most of my young childhood. Weebles were from a game that you could play all day long. I never had the game, but I always thought they would be so much fun to play with. Can you imagine, playing with something that never fell over? Where do I sign up??
This thought came into my head as I was reading a few posts on LinkedIn today. Now, I read LinkedIn almost every day except for maybe Sundays, to see what is going on in the world of work. A few posts were about falling and getting back up. How to get back up, why you should get back up, etc. But we all know this, right?
When you fail, fall down, get kicked around, you are supposed to get back up. You’re supposed to face what defeated you, learn from it and move forward.
But what if we were all Weebles? What if we just rolled around and never had to learn to get back up? Where would we be in life now and how would our lives be different? What if we never really fell down?
Would we want to know or are we better off knowing that when we fall, fail, and get kicked down that we should get back up and do it all over again?
Now, think about this when you are facing a challenge about your career. Should you move forward or just roll around and see who picks you up? Granted, rolling around is a lot more fun, but you can only roll to the side or down. You can’t really roll up, even with a good push, you are going to eventually come back down.
Weebles wobble, and so do we, but its OK to fall. It is the only way to get back up! Your commitment to get back up is what matters in your career and in your career search.
Think about this: You interview with a company for a role that just screams out to you. You interview, you did great (so you think) and you walk knowing you nailed it! A few days later you find out you didn’t. You didn’t nail it. Your answers were not what they were looking for and they believed you would not be a strong culture fit (if you only could get all that feedback on an interview, right).
So, what do you do? You mope. You review the interview in your head, over and over and over. Most would feel defeated. But here comes the Weebles: This was just a wobble. You didn’t fall, you just got pushed around.
Think about what would have happened if you did the job. You go to work, you learn their systems, protocol, you take work home to get up to speed and you are doing your best. A few weeks or months pass, and bam—you are figuring out that this company and role are SO NOT FOR YOU. How do you get out of it? Should you get out of it? You blame yourself for making a poor decision in accepting this role. Ahhh-but did you? You Weebled. You learned that if you don’t take a chance you would never know what works and does not work for you.
Not getting the job you thought you wanted and/or accepting a job that you thought was ideal, but turns out it sucks, is just part of your learning. It’s part of wobbling; you never fall, you just learn more about yourself and what you want and don’t want.
Your career search, your accepting of a new job comes with all sorts of decision making, learning and changing. It doesn’t mean you fell. It means you just get to wobble till you find the role that allows you not to be a Weeble anymore, until your next career move.