By Mary Ann Faremouth, CPC
The word “hunter” means different things to different people. As human beings, we are all hunting and searching for something. The fifth step of The Faremouth Method™, “Be A Hunter” in my book and workbook, Revolutionary Recruiting and Revolutionary Reinvention, respectively, was born out of my many years as a career consultant servicing clients’ hunts for the right candidates as well as candidates hunting for that right career path. My most recent book, Revolutionary Results, presents stories about situations and lessons I’ve experienced hunting for more meaning in my personal life. Coming from a long line of hunters in my family, I suppose the word is naturally on my mind.
We all are hunting for that right mindset, a search 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 and in our personal lives, what and how we hunt has everything to do with our success and reaching our 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 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 rising from the ashes of its predecessor — 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 from their personal journey.
We are all going through very challenging times at the moment and experiencing our own 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 the discovery of who we can become. We are currently on the hunt for that discovery of ways 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 ourselves in order to re-create and rebirth a new perspective and articulate new desires and goals.
There is an eternal fire that burns within each of us that propels us in new directions. It is what drives us and gives us purpose. The only constant in our lives is change. Throughout our lives we go from birth to growth to death and rebirth, from the known to the unknown. That cyclical change in our lives likens us to the phoenix that rises from the ashes. In other words, we are able to gain a valuable awareness as a result of a transformation that is created while something else is destroyed.
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 whatever destruction we have experienced 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 toward 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 past few years have affected the economy, jobs, careers and our livelihoods. While this environment has created destruction, it has also opened up opportunity to examine who we have been in a past time and who we could become. 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. 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, and contribute to an enhanced personal life.
Regenerating ourselves and our career path is healthy in so many ways. It allows us to re-create ourselves through more education 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 reinfused with challenge, growth and opportunity.
We have to hunt for answers to bridge this gap in our lives. My workbook, Revolutionary Reinvention, provides a powerful tool to ask pertinent questions to value our past by changing our present for a better tomorrow. My latest book, Revolutionary Results, offers a way to reclaim our personal power by leaving our previous existence and supplying our spirit with the energy that it needs to again rise like a phoenix.
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.