By Mary Ann Faremouth,
The word “hunter” means different things to different people. As human beings, we are all hunting and searching for something. The fifth (5th) step of The Faremouth Method, “Be A Hunter” in my book and workbook, Revolutionary Recruiting and Revolutionary Reinvention, was born out of my many years as a career consultant servicing client hunts for the right candidates as well as candidates hunting for that right career path. Coming from a long line of hunters in my family, I suppose the word is naturally on my mind. I think that we all are hunting for that right mindset, a hunt that allows us to find meaning, purpose and fulfillment in our lives. We are looking for that magic that becomes the turning point in our lives. In the business world, what and how we hunt has everything to do with our success and reaching our career goals.
Being a hunter goes back to the earliest of times. We are inspired by curiosity to know what is in front of us. To know what lies ahead we need to look at what is behind us and become aware of our current surroundings and environment.
The hunt for alignment can be compared to Ancient Greek folklore where it talks about the phoenix which is a long-lived bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor. The predecessor, being the person we have been in the past and have outgrown. That new self has now earned the privilege of rebirth and learned valuable lessons of their personal journey.
We are all going through very challenging times at the moment and experiencing our own moment and process of the Phoenix. Our careers and life paths are passing through an intervention as we release who we have been and what we have done in the past and now embrace that discovery of who we can become. We are currently on the hunt for that discovery of how to reinvent ourselves by taking a close and honest inventory of how our previous skills and work experience can be re-birthed. We can move forward. We can change and transform. We can find what we are hunting for if we look into our own mirror and allow ourselves to see things that we have not clearly seen, or ignored, in the past. This is where we can associate other parts of us in order to re-create and re-birth a new perspective and articulate new desires and goals.
There is an eternal fire that burns within each of us that stimulates us into new directions. It is what drives us and gives us purpose. Fire is the catalyst that allows us to shape and change to reinvent ourselves to become the best we can be. The only constant in our lives is change. Throughout our life we go from birth to growth to death and rebirth, from the known to the unknown. This emphasizes that cyclical change in our lives that likens us to the Phoenix that rises from the ashes. In many cultures fire is viewed as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge. Fire has brought us not only warmth, protection, edible food, and tools, but also illumination in the philosophical sense of the word. In observing the flames and seeing our reflection, we are able to learn a valuable awareness as a result of a transformation that is created while something else is destroyed at the same time.
Challenges make us stronger. We become more confident and assured when we confront them. We are as strong as the difficulties we survive. It is about the survival of the fittest. This is when we need to put on our suit of armor and charge through the flame of destruction in order to purge the past for a much more positive future. While it is human to grieve what has been lost, it is brave and courageous to move forward towards a new beginning. Many of us have held onto the past because it is something we have known and are familiar with. We need to move forward with something we are unfamiliar with and look at it through new eyes and new possibilities.
In many ways, the world of COVID-19 has brought the world to a halt and has affected the economy, jobs, careers and our livelihoods. While this environment has created a destruction, it has also opened up opportunity to examine who we have been in a pre-Covid time and who we could become in a post-Covid era. It’s important to be extremely honest with ourselves so that we can prepare ourselves for that reinvention through the process of the phoenix. We are forced to let go of a lifeline that was always there for us and now create a new lifeline as we embark on our personal hunt of reinvention and purification. We want to come out on the other side of this experience with a career path which will bring us more enjoyment, satisfaction, and reward. Many of us are working from home, not gathering in large groups for conventions, workshops, and conferences. We are having to become much more acquainted with the digital world of online conferencing. There are many changes in the hiring process as employers are looking for people who are self-motivated, willing to learn new skills, and adaptable to the new environment. Employees are having to adjust by taking on more duties and roles, leaving behind a feeling of “that’s not in my job description.”
A positive and optimistic mindset can make a tremendous difference in how we plan to reach our goals. When we believe in ourselves and recognize what we are capable of achieving, we have a better ability to manifest exactly what we want with deliberate and focused strategic planning. This might mean employing things like affirmations, meditation, walking, or anything else which might keep us in a positive mindset looking forward.
Regenerating ourselves and our career path is healthy in so many ways. It allows us to re-create ourselves through more education, learning new facets of our career in order to move up in responsibility and reliability. When we are not growing and furthering ourselves, we become stagnant. When we are stagnant, we are not as productive and satisfied as we could be. We need to be re-infused with challenge, growth, and opportunity.
We have to ask the right questions in order to get the right answers to bridge this gap in our lives. The newly released workbook, Revolutionary Reinvention, provides a powerful tool of asking those pertinent questions to value our past by changing our present for a better tomorrow. It offers a way to reclaim our personal power by leaving our previous existence and supply our spirit with the energy that it needs to again rise like a flame. To be like that phoenix from the ashes that is born again now allows the Sun to act as our new alchemical force in our rebirth.
Mary Ann Faremouth
Mary Ann holds a CPC (Certified Personnel Consultant) credential, was certified by the Board of Regents of the National Association of Personnel Consultants in Washington, D.C., and was awarded an Advanced Communicator Bronze, Advanced Leader Bronze Awards by Toastmasters. She cofounded Jobs: Houston magazine in 1997. Mary Ann maintains affiliations with professional organizations, including oil and gas, financial, construction, IT, and structural, mechanical, and civil engineering. (www.faremouth.com)
Mary Ann’s award-winning first book Revolutionary Recruiting has been listed by Book Authority as Number #1 Best 100 Recruiting Books; #1 Best Seller, Non-Fiction, Amazon (2019); Top 20 Recruiting books, Recruitics; Readers’ Choice finalist (2019), Houston Literary Awards; Best Non-Fiction (2018), Best Cover (2019), and Best Self-Help (2018), Authors Marketing Guild. Her books support individuals and corporations, tap into each candidate’s unrealized potential to find the right person for each job, maximizing both employee satisfaction and the employer’s bottom line. Mary Ann showcases her expertise of the recruiting world on a monthly podcast for The Price of Business and weekly articles for USA Business. Her new workbook, Revolutionary Reinvention, was recently released on Amazon. Mary Ann lives in Houston, Texas.
