UNWANTED PHONE CALLS
(May/June 2003 Issue)

A telemarketer rings my phone at 9:30 PM on a weeknight and interrupts my peaceful home. I am writing, and I do not welcome this call. When will they be calling next, at midnight?

I resent it. I want to foil him. I want to hit him with a phone menu. I want to stick a robot voice in his ear. Hey. It’s time for my empathy lesson of the month. The guy is just trying to earn a living. He’s had a harder day than I have, by far. He has to deal with resentful people like me. And he has to keep talking in the face of verbal fusillades from other angry people. Maybe this is the place for me to elevate my discourse. Be kind to a telemarketer. Take a telemarketer to lunch. They have hearts too.

And so we all have little incidents in our lives that test our empathy skills. We listen carefully to clients. We’re paid to do that. How about being empathic with everyone else? If I can’t treat a telemarketer decently, what will I do if the neighbors play loud, offensive music? Do I have it within me to resolve conflicts peacefully?

Everything relates to everything. If we can conduct our lives empathically with respect to the people around us, then this positive energy will radiate to everyone in our environment and beyond. It’s easy enough to relate to people we like or people who may do something for us. We know where our bread is peanut-buttered. But telemarketers are something else again. They offer us little and they are often rude. And they’re inviting themselves into our lives. Well, so what? Dogs and cats do it all the time, approaching each other without invitations. They even find a way to be enthusiastic about it.

I deliberately choose telemarketers to talk about, because they are so widely disliked. We don’t want to listen to them. They’re money-hungry. They bore in for the "close," which we’re not going to give them. But we can offer a respectful response. Why? Because they are presumably kind to their children and, after all, we’re just humans trying to get along here.

We are a Win-Lose culture. For every winner, there is supposed to be a loser. What an awful concept. What about a Win-Win concept? Everyone’s career is good and worthwhile. Everyone’s work is potentially of value. Conflict is not a necessary ingredient for career success.

We can choose to envision the world we live in as essentially cooperative or one that is hard bitten and competitive. Surely there is healthy competition, but cooperation is more widely the norm. Look at job hunting. It works best when people connect ("network") in great numbers with other people, exchange information, and help each other. Those who set up and maintain (through lasting relationships) cooperative webs of people succeed better in the job market. Those who are lone-wolves and maintain that everyone is a competitor are much less likely to be successful.

Empathy is a way of affirming that all human beings are equally important.(and plants and animals too) A job is a means for stating and restating this every day to every co-worker, every customer, every supplier, and every job applicant. Empathy is so fundamental to living it’s a wonder we have to reaffirm it. Telemarketers are us. Give them a cheery hello.

Howard Figler, Ph.D., is the author of The Complete Job Search Handbook and The Career Counsleor's Handbook [1999, with Richard N. Bolles]. He can be reached at: hefigler@pacbell.net