Ron instructed us to devise a “Winter-Spring Plan of Attack,” and I find the military metaphor oddly reassuring. This is not just a matter of “attitude,” or hope, or the projection of winning force fields; no, everything hinges on the cool logic of strategy. I will need a three-part plan, I decide, because in Western culture important things come in groups of three. Every public speaker knows this: two points are unconvincing; four are long-winded and superfluous; it takes exactly three to suggest roundedness and completion. And the first part of the plan is, once again, as emphasized by Ron, networking—sustained and furious, skilled and highly targeted, relentless and dogged.
My major takeaway from Ron, now that I have a chance to reflect, is that getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique. There exists an elite consisting of people who hold jobs and have the power to confer that status on others, and my task is to penetrate this elite. Since my actual eighth-grade status never advanced beyond that of loathsome pariah and nerd, I have no practical experience of elite crashing, but it makes sense to include a ruthless scrutiny of the “product” I am trying to sell. My résumé was finally judged “great” by Joanne, perhaps only because we ran out of sessions. It’s the wrapping, so to speak—my physical appearance—that concerns me now. Sociologist Robert Jackall observes that in the world of corporate managers, “appearances—in the broadest sense—mean everything,”1 and, if it is to keep up with the standards set by the résumé, mine needs a careful reevalulation.
Fortunately, I discover on the web, there are companies that will do this for me, and I call one of them, Image Management in Atlanta. The man who answers the phone asks whether I am interested in “body language or colors.” Both, I say, the whole package, and am told it will cost $250 for a three-hour session. Call this part two of the Winter-Spring Plan of Attack: product enhancement.
But what about part three? An upgraded persona will not help without upgraded marketing methods, and to this end I read Nonstop Networking by Andrea R. Nierenberg, described in large print on the book jacket as “the Queen of Networking.” The book seems to be addressed to the same market as the antidepressant that is advertised as a cure for “social anxiety.” “Standing in the doorway,” Nierenberg acknowledges, oblivious to the dangling participle, “a networking event can seem scary.” The trick is to break the networking process down to “baby steps,” such as “establish[ing] eye contact” and “ask[ing] an open-ended question.” If you are still nervous, you can “use a script,” rehearsing it “until it comes across naturally.”2
Sample icebreaking questions are offered: “Why did you come to this session? Where do you work and what do you do? Where do you live? What other sessions have you attended?”3 I study the photo of Nierenberg on the book cover—the gray jacket and thick silver necklace, the dark lip gloss and the excessive eye shadow, which gives her a slightly loopy, half-asleep look—and imagine myself approaching her with the incisive question “What other sessions have you attended?”
I decide to go to Atlanta for a session at the image management firm and, it occurs to me as an afterthought, a follow-up visit to Patrick, who has indeed called, though I was not home at the time, to inquire as to what further coaching I might need. On the same trip, I will make use of any networking events I find advertised on the Atlanta Job Search Network. No more shyness or prideful reticence; I resolve to be a networking fool.
I make a reservation at the cheapest downtown hotel I can find, for an amazingly low $59 a night, secure a rental car, and pack every vaguely “professional” item of clothing I possess, which fortunately requires no more than a single small suitcase, even with the laptop thrown in. Just to be extra prepared, I spend one of my last nights at home watching Patrick’s video, which I purchased at the boot camp, on how to find one’s “career sweet spot.” It is shockingly bad, so bad it begins to fill me with a zany self-confidence. Patrick is shown addressing a classroom in which about twenty adults are seated at desk chairs with their backs to the camera. He wanders through his spiel, holding my attention only when he embarks on an anecdote I had not heard before, about how he once had $1 million, and then, well—his gaze wanders from the camera to the wall—apparently it got away from him. Occasionally the action is interrupted by a screen containing a text message, generally in the form of three bulleted points. I give up in boredom halfway through, only later in the evening realizing that I am a PR person, and what Patrick desperately needs is me.
The plan takes form in my last day at home. Patrick will think I am coming for a coaching session, but I will in fact be coming to propose that he hire me himself. The best outcome would be that he does in fact hire me, and I exit the realm of the jobless just like that. In the second-best outcome, he will be sufficiently impressed to invite me to join his inner sanctum, the ExecuTable, in which he brings together the most promising of his job seekers with local business leaders. Or of course he could simply laugh me out of his office, but at least I would have gotten some valuable practice in “selling myself.” So the Winter-Spring Plan of Attack now has the necessary troika of elements, which I list as Network, Change Self (that’s the image enhancement part), and Sell Self. I cannot be sure, though, that the last two items are really separate and freestanding, since to “sell myself” I will need to transform myself into someone very different, psychologically speaking, from whatever I have been in my life up till now.
MY FIRST NETWORKING session in Atlanta is a major disappointment. I check into my hotel, noting that it is cheap for a reason—dingy and with the only available food being some Stouffers frozen dinners in a freezer next to the registration desk. But at least I have a fridge and microwave, a TV, and a desk, plus there is a computer attached to a printer that guests can use in the lobby. It’s still light when I drive out to the networking event venue, the Roasted Garlic restaurant in a northern suburb. This event, which came to me via the Atlanta Job Search Network, is sponsored by the congenially titled Layoff Lounge and aimed at the executive job seeker. Between the garlic and the lounging, I expect a convivial scene and possibly something decent to eat.
The Roasted Garlic occupies a site in a drab shopping center at which most of the stores are already closed for the night. It’s one of those dark, suburban Italianate places, where most of the action centers on the bar. I am directed upstairs to a room packed with about thirty people seated around long tables facing the inevitable PowerPoint screen—a motley crowd, ranging in age from thirties to late fifties, mostly in studied business casual, and featuring a few black faces.
No networking occurs, however, except furtively and on the margins. Instead we are subjected to two hours of lectures accompanied by PowerPoint slides, and in case these fail to get the message across, we also are each given notebooks titled “Mastering Executive Job Change” and containing the same PowerPoint slides in paper form. Look up and you see
I. Managing Career Transition and Change Strategy
A. Understanding Your Current Emotional Needs
B. Gain Control
Look down and you see the very same thing, unless, of course, you have been flipping ahead. But it’s probably just as well that our eyes are so fully engaged, since this is a sad, tacky place that we have come to, unenriched by even a whiff of the eponymous vegetable. Fake ivy on trellises lines the wall behind me, and I am facing a needlepoint rendition of a seaside town, possibly Italian, heavy on the burgundy and browns. Only a curtain keeps us from looking down on the bar scene on the main floor, but the curtain does nothing to dampen the familiar bar sounds of mumblings and the occasional squeal or hoot.
The content of the presentation attests to a major erosion of middle-class life: “Job change”—or, more accurately, job loss—has become inevitable, the speaker tells us, several times in a lifetime, and it is always accompanied by drastically straitened circumstances. How to manage? Much useful, but exhausting, information follows on preserving one’s 401(k) plan, health insurance, and credit rating when the income ceases to flow, as well as a host of small tips: Raise some cash by holding a yard sale, and use the occasion to network with your neighbors. Cut the kids’ allowances. Don’t eat out and, when networking, arrange to meet for breakfast, not lunch, or better yet for coffee at Starbucks. “Every twenty dollars you can save,” our speaker, a financial manager who resembles Alec Baldwin only without the sexual edge, tells us, “is a plank in the lifeboat you are building for yourself.”
There are moments of bitter humor. On the subject of pensions, he asks, “You’ve heard of those?” to some slight snuffling sounds from the audience.4 On health insurance, he says, “COBRA: It’s not a snake, but it’s going to seem like one when you see the quotes.” The bright side, though, is that some trace of class privilege survives into the jobless condition. As executives, he reassures us, “instead of being laid off or out of work, we’re ‘in transition.’” This residual superiority can be deployed while asking the mortgage company for a few months’ grace period. “You’re executives here,” the Baldwin lookalike declares, so you can go to the mortgage company without “your tail hanging between your legs.”
We are given a break in which we are encouraged to order some food, despite the prohibition on eating out. This Roasted Garlic, the speaker tells us, is “the best-kept secret in Dunwoody.” Having sampled a meal of tough chicken breast strips residing in a Campbell’s soup-flavored sauce, I can report that it is a secret I can be counted on to keep. I chat with Leah Gray, the blond, thirtysomething woman sitting at my right, who shares my disappointment that this has not turned out to be a networking opportunity at all. No discussion has been built into the agenda, nor any time for the informal sharing of stories and tips.
Leah hands me a card that seems to be imprinted with a tiny résumé, in which most of the entries are undecipherable codes, like LINUX and SAP, and tells me she’s been looking for another IT-related marketing job for six months now, going to events like this almost every weekday night. When I ask her what seem to be the most helpful events, she says there are a lot of things to go to, but that many of them are “very religious” and not particularly useful for contacts. At one networking event, she was challenged by one of the organizers to reveal where she is “churched,” and walked out indignantly. She hastens to assure me there’s nothing wrong with networking events being “religious”; it’s just not what she goes to them for.
Not all of the scheduled networking events pan out. The night after the Roasted Garlic gathering, I head out for a networking meeting at a downtown Episcopal church, where a kindly female pastor informs me that the meeting time was changed and looks prepared to offer me a free meal and a place to sleep. I rush back to the hotel and do a Mapquest search for Congregation Beth Shalom, where the “Career Mavens” are said to be meeting, but I wouldn’t get there till eight and the event ends at eight thirty. The next morning I’m up before six for the forty-five-minute drive out to a Golden Corral on the far west side, but the place isn’t even open and a guy who’s mopping the floor inside has no clue as to where the meeting might have migrated to.
Even with these gaps in the schedule, my home life, such as it is, is busy enough. Clothes have to be maintained in presentable condition. Food has to be procured, which turns out to be more of a challenge than you might expect at a “downtown” location. Within a two-block radius of the hotel, I can get a burger at Checkers or a larger one, with salad, at a sports-oriented pub. A great deal of time goes into planning my next outings with the help of Mapquest and two maps I have purchased, one small and laminated, one vast and impossible to read in the dim light of my room. I know I should be networking with every human form that presents itself—the wan Eurotourists in the hotel, who may have confused Atlanta with Atlantis or some other more seductive destination, the happy-hour clientele at the pub. But when the day is over, I want nothing so much as to pour myself a beer and shut down, alone in my room. How I earned the E for extrovert in my Myers-Briggs personality type is a mystery that only deepens.
IMAGE MANAGEMENT TURNS out to be located in a loft in what looks like a gentrified warehouse. I am greeted by Prescott, suavely outfitted in suit and tie, and introduced to his partner—a young Argentinian, as it emerges, who is dressed, more reassuringly, in nondescript urban casual. I barely get a chance to scan the loft space before being ushered into the windowless consultation room, but I note that it’s done up in boas and third-world crafts and practically screams Pride! I’m hoping their image-managing sensibilities are as gay as their interior decorating tastes—because gays have been practicing at “passing” for decades, and that is pretty much my current assignment.
Robert Jackall’s book impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. “Proper management of one’s external appearances,” he writes, “simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.”5 By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways too—that you can follow orders, for example, and blend in with the prevailing “culture.” But first I have to know what I am conforming to.
Naturally, I have already read a couple of dress-for-success books and learned that the idea is to pass as a hereditary member of the upper-middle class. As the leading expert in the field, John T. Molloy, puts it in his New Women’s Dress for Success, “The executive suite is an upper-socioeconomic business club, and in order to get in you must wear the club uniform.”6 He advises a kind of preshopping ritual, in which you first scout out the expensive shops for clues as to appropriate textures and shapes, and only then repair to a more affordable setting for your actual purchases. I think I have the class thing pretty well in hand—muted colors, patternless fabrics, and natural fibers, for example—but my observations come largely from the academic and publishing worlds, which permit a dangerously wide latitude for personal expression in the form of flowing scarves, rumpled linen, and dangly earrings.
Then there is the vexing business of gender. All of the books warn that it’s a lot trickier for a woman to pass than it is for a man, in part because the female “uniform” is not yet as standardized as a man’s, so it’s easier for a woman to go wrong. But the problem seems to go deeper than that, to the very biological underpinnings of gender: the features that make a man sexually attractive—handsomeness, tallness, a deep voice, et cetera—also work in his favor at the office, while female sexual attractiveness can torpedo a woman’s career. Shoulder-length hair, an overly generous display of legs, or a “too busty” chest7 can all undermine a woman’s credibility. Beauty itself is a handicap.
Very beautiful young women have difficulty being taken seriously, especially by men, most of whom refuse to even think of them as experts or authority figures. In addition, beautiful women are seen by both sexes as lacking in intelligence—or at least as lightweights.8
I know I have no problem in the area of “too sexy,” “too busty,” or distractingly beautiful, but it is clear that for any woman, of any age or condition, being female is something to compensate for.9
While Prescott fetches some coffee for us from the kitchen, I try to skim through the purple-covered notebook he handed me, titled “The Personal Image Enhancement Program for [and the last two words are handwritten] Barbara Alexander.” I’m distracted by the curious gizmo on the corner table separating our chairs, in which four small burning candles share space with an actual running water fountain, but I force myself to read, finding on page 1: “What motivates you to imagemanage!” Not a question but answered anyway, sort of:
Your exposure in the marketplace, your dependency upon others to be successful and how often you come in contact with those dependencies, are three reasons why you should be motivated to develop and maintain a professional presence.
Fair enough, since I have entered a world where people seem to be judged not only by performance but by “image,” and, the notebook states ominously, “You need to understand that you are in total control of the images others form of you.”
Just as I would prepare for a visit to the dental hygienist with extra brushing and flossing, I have put unusual effort into my appearance today: mascara as well as eyeliner, lipstick enhanced with gloss, jacket and slacks, tailored pink shirt, and a muted gray silk scarf. Only now, as I await Prescott’s return—I can hear him taking a phone call in the other room—are the multiple defects in my ensemble emerging. My pant socks, which I had taken to be black in the gloom of the hotel room, are actually navy blue, although my jacket is black. My watch cost $19 fifteen years ago, and the band no longer matches the face. Then there is the problem of the slacks: everything else is Ann Taylor, drastically reduced of course, but the slacks come from the sale rack at the Gap, and, as I see for the first time, the zipper does not go all the way up. If I were wearing a pullover, as I usually do, this wouldn’t matter, but this shirt has to be tucked in. And what about the shoes, which are drably flat, and the “pearl” earrings, which I got at three for $10 at the Miami airport?
When Prescott returns with the coffee, I lay out the situation. I have been “consulting” for several years now and need to reconfigure myself for the corporate world, but have only the vaguest idea of how to proceed. Plus, I throw in, though I didn’t plan to, I’m concerned that I make no visual impression at all. This impression—an impression of an impression, really—stems from a newspaper profile of me some years ago, in which I was described as the kind of person whom no one would notice when she enters a room. At the time that had seemed like good news; at least I had figured out how to blend in. But now I need to leave some sort of memory trace in the people I meet. Prescott nods approvingly and congratulates me for coming to him: “Some job seekers neglect the visuals.”
Furthermore, I confide, my exposure to corporate dress comes mostly from New York and San Francisco, where a black-based minimalism still prevails, whereas here in Atlanta, you see a lot of bright red accented with gold. He confirms this, adding that not only are there regional differences in corporate costuming, so are there differences from company to company. Some are extremely conservative; others he calls “corporate creative.” It is wise to know what the rules are before showing up for the interview, because you do, after all, want to look like a “team player,” right down to the team uniform. To find out what is expected, study any photographs of female executives you can find on the company web site or call and ask a receptionist to tell you what the power gals are wearing—unless, of course, it occurs to me, the receptionist hates the power gals and maliciously advises me to show up in harem pants and bustier.
Now we proceed to the material at hand, which is me. As in so many of my coaching experiences, we begin by categorizing me as a “type,” only here no test is involved, only a quick allover survey by Prescott. I am “angular” in shape, he announces, and my face is shaped “like a diamond,” which suggests to me a pointy head, but in fact refers to my cheek-bones. They are “wonderful”; I can keep them. My hair and even the $3 earrings pass muster; they can stay too. As for my overall type, there are four possibilities: “classic,” which applies to people who always wear skirts, “are not very flexible, and tend to be Republican”; “romantic,” who “love flowing material”; “dramatic,” who “love to break rules” and are often “eccentric”; and “natural,” who are “outdoorsy, want to save owls and trees, love texture, and don’t wear a lot of patterns.” I turn out to be a natural, which seems to please Prescott, because “there’s less to change.” Fashion-wise, I am a kind of tabula rasa.
The first problem is that I come across as “too authoritative” as a result of the combination of an “angular” body with a tailored shirt and the straight lines of my jacket lapel. “You want to look approachable, not authoritative, so people will feel comfortable working with you,” and this means curved lines, not straight ones.
Decoding this diagnosis, I see that I am not looking feminine enough.10 This is, to say the least, confusing. The dress-for-success books all urge what I take to be a somewhat mannish appearance, achieved through pragmatic hairstyles and curve-concealing suits. But if you go too far in the masculine direction, Prescott is saying, you somehow err again. What could be threatening about a tailored shirt? I recall, from my other life as an amateur historian, that subordinated people often used imitation as a form of mockery; some nineteenth-century colonized Africans and enslaved black Caribbeans, for example, liked to strut around on festive occasions in the full regalia of British officers. Maybe an overly masculine office outfit on a woman sends the same kind of signal—as a sly mockery of the male-dominated corporate hierarchy.
“As for body language,” Prescott continues, “the way you’re holding your hands on your waist, you seem to be holding something in.”
This is true. I release one hand and send it over to pick up the coffee cup. But the other one must remain at its post, covering the gap in my zipper.
“There needs to be a necklace to pull it all together,” he goes on.
I protest that, with glasses, earrings, scarf, and brooch all vying for attention in the head and chest region, a necklace could be overkill. But no, a necklace will apparently be a peacemaker, not an additional contender.
The recitation of flaws continues, almost faster than I can write them down. There’s the issue of suits: you cannot wear slacks with nonmatching jackets. The top and bottom must form a single unit, perhaps the better to resemble a military uniform. Charitably, he says nothing about the watch, just gently suggests that I go for a larger watch face, preferably with a gold band.
He moves along to color in general, where I receive a major blow: I can never wear gray or black again, because they drain the color from my face. This pretty much condemns me to nudity, since my entire wardrobe is black and gray, and not because I’m striving for New York City-style coolness, circa 1995. The truth is I spill on everything, so no peach or yellow item has ever survived more than two or three wearings. Even my conservative silver brooch, a gift from my Norwegian publisher, is deemed “not corporate” by Prescott. All this time I had thought I was a perfectly presentable-looking middle-class professional, when in fact I must come across as a misfit, a mess.
If Prescott wasn’t so perfect—so perfectly groomed, so perfectly discreet—this might be unbearable. I have plenty of excuses to offer, but of course I do not inflict them on him. Mainly, as a writer, I have no need to dress for work in anything other than gym clothes, or no clothes at all for that matter, and when writers do try to “dress up,” they are generally granted a lot of leeway. I remember attending a banquet with the poet and short-story writer Grace Paley, who appeared in a loose pink floral dress. When I complimented her, she confessed it was a nightgown, which was obvious on closer inspection.
Finished with the assessment, Prescott leads me off to a second small, windowless room, where we sit at a counter facing a mirror to address the matter of cosmetics. He asks to see my current collection, so I am forced to display the contents of my makeup kit, as if this were an airline security check: two lipsticks, a tinted moisturizer, pressed powder, blush, mascara, and eyeliner. “Liquid eyeliner?” Yes, incredibly enough. Most of this must be tossed: The lipsticks contain hidden grays that are dragging me down; the blush is another carrier of lethal gray. The pressed powder, I am mortified to report, presents a slightly ridged surface that he identifies as a bacterial colony fed by oils from my skin. So all this time I have been patting my face with microbial scum. I can see that I am in for an additional splurge on his special line of makeup in addition to the $250 for our session.
After I am deftly—and rather well, I must say—made up with his own concoctions, he places a kind of bolero consisting of layers of different color swatches around my neck, turning one over at a time, so that I appear to be dressed sequentially in brown, yellow, green, red, orange, peach, et cetera. “See that,” he says, turning to a forbidden hue—“how it’s making you pasty?” I agree that I resemble a cave dweller or corpse. Then he shows me a “good” color and insists that I acknowledge the rich, honey tones it imparts to my face. I again agree, although as far as I can see, I still look faintly tubercular.
This should be the fun part—playing with paints and little swatches of fabric—but I am suddenly gripped by queasiness. I understand that to make myself into a “product” that I can market, I must first become a commodity, a thing. I further understand that the queasiness may simply be a follow-up to the Checkers’ bacon double cheeseburger I had for lunch. But there is an unmistakable pallor shining through the professional makeup job. What I had not understood is that to become an object, a thing, you must first go through a kind of death.
I make some excuse about a four o’clock appointment and buy $55.50 worth of cosmetics with the assurance I can always order more of Prescott’s personal selections by e-mail. I get to keep my own mascara. Then I head back to the hotel, park, and start walking aimlessly past office towers and happy-hour joints, through nondescript neighborhoods and downtown parks, until the paint comes off my face in the rain.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I drive an hour or so outside of Atlanta to see Patrick. His office turns out to be in a shopping center anchored by a Kinko’s and a Chick-Fil-A, where I prime myself with an iced tea. I am dressed in the same clothes I wore for my image makeover, having refreshed the shirt by washing out the armpit areas in the sink and drying them with the blow-dryer, and I’ve memorized my major talking points: why he needs me, what I can offer, the bright future ahead. This strategy is based on the advice books, which urge you to research the prospective employer thoroughly in advance, then to use the interview—not to prattle on about yourself but to talk about what you can do for the company. Jeffrey J. Fox’s canny book Don’t Send a Resume, for example, explains encouragingly that “the company may not know it needs you”—until, that is, you outline “five or six ways the company could be improved.”11 Hydraulic fluid leaks? Overly long shipment times? You point out these defects and explain how you’ll fix them.
But something has gone badly wrong with the plan, I see as soon as I enter his office, which is located right above a Chinese take-out place. I envisioned an office suite, staffed at least by a receptionist, and containing a sort of boardroom where the ExecuTable insiders would gather periodically for coffee and croissants. But Patrick opens the door himself, revealing a room the size of a walk-in closet. He seems to have deteriorated significantly from the voluble guru of boot camp. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, as if in conscious defiance of corporate propriety, and has the puffy, pained look of a man who’s been recently boiled.
When I am seated on the couch, he inquires as to the status of my search. For a moment, I am almost too overwhelmed by the death-of-a-salesman vibe to respond. I should make some excuse and flee. I should admit to even greater “obstacles” than I had revealed at the boot camp and submit to a normal coaching session. It doesn’t look to me as if he could afford to hire even a cleaning lady, not that such a person would find any clear surfaces to clean here anyway, what with the clutter of pop-psych and self-improvement books stashed on the desk and rising from the floor. But I am programmed to proceed and cannot deviate from the Plan. In the spirit of a person who has walked to the end of the plank and is taking her first steps out onto air, I announce, “Patrick, I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve studied your video and my notes from the boot camp, and I think you should hire me. You need a PR person. You need an image makeover. And I’m the person to do it.”
Getting no response except for a sudden neck twitch that seems to be addressed to a muscle pain, I plunge into my prepared pitch: The career coaching industry can only expand. Whether or not the economy improves. And this is because the corporate world has changed. Today, in the wake of the last recession, companies are intent on being permanently lean; they churn people in and out as needed, so that the average executive or professional can expect to hold—what?—about ten or eleven jobs in a lifetime whether he or she wants to or not.12 And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that our society is so unprepared for this change. College, for example, prepares people for jobs, but not for the trauma of job change. Hence the huge long-term market for career coaching, which Patrick is poised to conquer. There’s big money to be made. Very big.
“I was the first career coach,” he interjects tonelessly. “I started in the seventies, before all the rest of them came along.”
“Fine.” Now I think I have him where I want him. He’s accepting my framework for this event, or at least he’s not imposing his own, and this gives me the courage to rattle on: You have a gift. Anyone can see that. Many things can be learned, but the way he works with people, which I saw at the boot camp, that’s not something that can be learned. The ability to look at a person and really see what’s going on with them. When I watched him at the boot camp, I couldn’t believe he wasn’t a trained psychotherapist.
The flattery is working, and—who knows?—there is an out-side possibility that he might be able to raise the money to hire me from some of his executive contacts. But you’re more than a psychotherapist, I continue, “because you can galvanize a whole group at the same time. That’s called charisma. That’s something you have or you don’t. You’re born with that. It comes from inside.”
“I know,” he says, addressing the bookshelf. “I have a gift.”
“The thing is, Patrick,” I say as gently as possible, “you’re stuck.” That’s his word and his central theme in the “sweet spot” video—dealing with people who are stuck.
“Like look at that boot camp,” I continue. “Now I don’t know what your plan is, your mission, and if you want to tell me it’s to reach the laid-off sixty-five-K-a-year middle manager, fine, I have complete respect for that. It’s an important demographic, and I can respect you if your mission is to work with them. I admire you for that.” I am trying to suggest that his operation might as well be the Salvation Army, and he is twisting his neck again, so all I can see is the corner of his eyes.
“But,” I go on, “that’s not where the money is. If you’re looking to make money, you have to aim for the one- to two-hundred-K person. And that’s where I can help you.”
“But we’re here to talk about Barbara Alexander,” he says, tapping the legal pad on his lap.
“We are. We’re talking about what she can do for you.” I have never before in my life spoken of myself in the third person, but then this emerging Barbara Alexander person is not exactly myself, or anyone I would want to know. Maybe the makeover is kicking in, or maybe it’s Patrick’s own philosophy, which I acquired at boot camp: EP varies exponentially with PSWB, meaning that my inner self-confidence can bend the world to my will. Clearly thrown off, he gets up and moves to the desk chair, as if to reabsorb his lost authority through the seat of his pants.
“Let’s talk about your video, the one about the sweet spot. It doesn’t work. Terrible production values. And look at the semiotics of it—that’s a word we use in PR,” I tell him, amazed at my own creativity. “You’ve got a bunch of people that you’re supposedly interacting with, inspiring, and all we see is the backs of their heads.”
“I only had one camera.”
I shrug. “Why didn’t you invest more in something so important?”
“But there was great energy in the room.”
“Maybe, but the viewer doesn’t see it. They don’t get a hint of your charisma.”
Since he seems to accept this, I plunge deeper. What else is there to do, now that I’ve started, except to see the plan through? “The other thing is that I do coaching on public speaking. You’re very, very good, but you could be better. Trouble is, you tend to flub your anecdotes; you let them dribble away; you don’t draw the point. I can help with that. You need a crisper approach.”
“So . . . you . . . want,” he says, letting each syllable struggle to find its way out, “to . . . market . . . me.”
If it weren’t for the sepulchral tone of this utterance, I might be annoyed. Where has he been for the past twenty minutes? But it’s clear I’m not just dealing with a severe case of narcissism here. Right before my eyes, a man is being sucked down into some dark sticky substrate of the mind. I want to save him. I also—where is this coming from?—want to push him down deeper into the enveloping muck. “Listen to yourself,” I say, leaning forward, “how your voice falls when you say that. What I’m picking up on here is depression.”
If he can be a psychotherapist, so can I. If he could reduce Cynthia to tears with a diagnosis, I can offer one of my own. At any moment, of course, he’s free to say, “Look, I’ll do the coaching here, thank you very much,” and crush my chutzpah under his heel.
“It’s the sleeping pills I’m taking; they make me like this.”
Aha, further vulnerability! I have the sense now of being engaged in a life-or-death struggle; whose grift will prevail? I return to my qualifications as a PR person, the brilliant nation-wide successes, the careers I have helped launch. He could still win if he could find the strength to patronize me, as in: “That’s great, now I want you to go out and try this on a real potential employer”—perhaps accompanied by an indulgent chuckle. But no, he has to get defensive: “You haven’t seen anything of my true gifts,” he says, “just this much”—indicating the tip of his pinky.
I acknowledge my ignorance as to the true extent of his gifts.
“You’re saying a lot of things, but you don’t know what I’ve been going through recently,” he says, and moves on to a list of explanations that would be laughed out of his own boot camp as “excuses.” There was a “business divorce” involving a sudden loss of assets. He had to find another apartment and move to this smaller office. Three long-term clients unexpectedly bailed. As for the boot camp, with its population of $65K guys, that was not typical for him. He just “cherry-picks” the boot camps to get people for his ExecuTable. That’s where he makes his real money.
Inspired by his own defense, he makes another attempt to seize power: “But you’re here for some coaching, right?”
I could be really mean. I could demand to know, “What’s Patrick’s problem?” and shout “Patrick!” as the boot campers did with the hapless Kevin. But I just barrel along with my plan for him. In the boot camp he had mentioned that he is writing a book, I remind him. That could be the platform we launch him from. When will it be done? Because with the book in hand . . . And I outline the book tour, the Oprah appearance, the lecture bookings, and how about a Wall Street event—a lunch maybe, for some of the movers and shakers, with him as the speaker?
“You could do that?”
I assure him that I do that and more every day of my life as a PR person-slash-event planner. Could he give me a brief summary of the book?
This, it seems to me, is his last chance to rise from the mat and reclaim his position as coach. But he seems to have lost interest in the match, or maybe I never quite engaged his attention. “If a person has a gift. . .,” he begins, and goes off into a couple of sentences that are too garbled for me to record in my notes.
Hmmm, we’re not quite there yet, I tell him, but not to worry; it’s almost as much effort to perfect a media-ready summary as it is to write the book itself. Plus, I can help him write the book. I can edit, pull things together. Does he have a publisher? No. An agent? No. I can help him with all that. I’m connected.
The hour is coming to an end, thank God, and I want to be the first to acknowledge this fact. I tell him that I don’t want to take up any more of his time, although it is hard to imagine that he has anything else to do with it, the phone having rung only once during our time together—a low rate of interpersonal contact, I cannot help but observe, for the self-proclaimed inventor of career coaching. One of the things I learned from Kimberly is to tell people exactly what you want them to do for you, so I tell him two things: First, I want him to think my proposition over. I know it must be strange, coming out of the blue like this, but I’m perfectly serious. Second, I want him to let me into the ExecuTable group.
He has one last bit of fight in him. As I pack away my notebook and pen, he announces that he could coach me on “presentation.” My manner is too “gruff.”
Gruff? It seems to me an odd word to apply to a person who has spent the last hour cajoling, persuading, selling.
“You told me all kinds of things without knowing what I’m going through. You seem angry.”
I am taken aback. I don’t feel any anger toward Patrick—pity, of course, and a certain contempt for his entire profession. If I’m guilty of anything here, it is an excess of that vaunted corporate quality—focus. I came to sell myself and did not let myself get deflected from this mission by Patrick’s obvious distress; wicked from a humane point of view, perhaps, but perfectly acceptable, I had thought, for a go-getting, proactive, highly focused, “seasoned professional.” Yes, I’ve been using a beaten man to hone my self-selling skills, but Kimberly, I suspect, would approve.
Then too—how could I have forgotten?—I’m a woman. The typically masculine word gruff is the clue that I have broken some perhaps Atlanta-based gender rule here. Maybe it’s the “inaccessible” tailored shirt. But I do not give an inch. It’s not anger, I say, it’s aggressiveness, and I apologize if I was too direct but I’d do the same in any potential employment situation: tell the interviewers exactly why they need me and what I can do for them.
“Well, you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know.”
“Good, people only really hear what they already know.” With that brilliant riposte, I offer to pay him for his time, since I’ve taken up an hour that could have been used as a coaching session. He says the fee will be $175, quite a bit more than the $75 he mentioned in his e-mail confirmation of our session, but I write the check without comment, shake his hand, remind him I’ll be calling in a week, and leave.
So who won? If a job was the goal, I lost, but I knew from the moment I entered his office that there was no job to be had. The important thing, I tell myself, is that I managed to make my pitch for almost an hour, and this man supposedly gifted with such superior insight, such rare “people skills,” never saw through it. Unless you count that outburst of sexist cattiness at the very end, he was taken in, even tempted, by visions of Oprah dancing before his eyes. On the other hand, he’s the one who has the $175, so from a brutal bottom-line perspective, he’s the one who came out ahead.
I make my way back down the freeway toward the hotel, aware of all the feelings appropriate to a pacifist on the occasion of his first kill. Yes, I am filled with self-loathing and disgust. Slime oozes from my hands onto the steering wheel; the white noise of the road is filled with muffled denunciations and curses brought down on my soul. But I did it, didn’t I? I tried selling myself, and for an hourlong stretch I wasn’t half bad. I have blooded my sword.