THE MOVING FINGER
(January/February 2006 Issue)

The Moving Finger writes;
and, having writ, moves on:
nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

So writes Omar Khayyam in the Rubaiyat. His wisdom is about living in the present, the most important concept that is almost never discussed in career counseling. Why concentrate on the present? Because, counselors and clients are almost exclusively obsessing about the future. Will everything turn out the way I want it to? Will I achieve my goals? Well, maybe, except that goals change, you change, the world changes, every day. As John Lennon said: life is what happens while we're making other plans.

Chasing the future is chasing a fiction. Ruminating about the past tends to make us ornery, regretful, and we tell sad, rueful, sarcastic jokes about ourselves. Most of all, it is wasted energy. We become skillful at beating ourselves up.

There are three good reasons to urge clients to focus on the present. First of all, being alive is the most fun when you're participating in it. If you're concentrating only on where the train is going, where is the experience of living? Lost. If you sit there counting your frequent flyer miles, you're overlooking the miracle known as flight. When you obsess about the future and the past, you're not missing much - just your life.

Secondly, and perhaps paradoxically, we get better results when we're not paying attention to results. Living in the present taps you into your most powerful intuitive self. Concentrating on outcomes can dissolve your energy in a puddle of worry. When you produce a work of art, do not think one second about what people are going to think of it. Send your Ego far, far away. Every piece of work (carpentry, a filing system, organizing a party, running a sewage system) is a work of art.

We get better results by not aiming at the target, because our minds and bodies are most fully involved. All cells are integrated. The organism is its complete self. Sound like philosophical mush? Top athletes call it being in the zone.

Thirdly, the present is all we have. We just think there is a future, but try to grab hold of it. Gone. Work with the present. It is our friend. It never deserts us, unless we desert it.

We can get so worried about the past (why did I do that?) or the future (Will I succeed?) that our present completely disappears. Have you ever sat with someone who was so distracted within himself, he was there but not there? Is that sometimes you?

Clients often want the counselor to do crystal ball gazing. On the contrary, the best indications of a client's career possibilities lie in what she is doing right now. A satisfying career results from recognizing that your work is a piece of clay constantly being re-shaped - by you and the things that happen to you. As Krumboltz and Levin explain so well in their book, Luck Is No Accident, careers progress because people live fully in the present, taking advantage of the constant stream of events that happen to them. The Moving Finger writ a lot of so-called failures for Churchill, Lincoln, and millions of others. If they had become depressed about their futures not turning out as desired, they could have retired to drink tea. Instead they chose to live with present events unfolding around them and kept molding their clay to be with what was happening. People who are the happiest in their careers pay no attention to what happened yesterday. They do not waste time contemplating outcomes. They follow one of the best phrases to come out of the Sixties, by Ram Dass - Be Here Now.

Howard Figler, Ph.D., is the author of seven books, including The Complete Job-Search Handbook [third edition, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1999], a best seller for many years. He is co-author [with Richard Bolles] of the Career Counselor's Handbook [Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999]. His most recent book is Keys to Liberal Arts Success [Prentice-Hall, 2002]. He can be reached at: Howard Figler, Ph.D., and Associates, 9542 Shumway Drive, Orangeville, CA 95662 USA. Tel: 916-988-6464; e-mail: hefigler@pacbell.net.