The White Belt Recruiting Series, Part 5 of 6 – Click here to read the previous issues.
Our focus today is on our last guideline, Rule 4:
1. Put On Your White Belt
2. Build Your Plan
3. Dedicate Yourself TO Your Plan
4. Pick Up The Phone And Call
“Here is where you start: Play one note on one string and pour in every ounce of your heart and soul. Then repeat.”
Philip Toshio Sudo, Zen Guitar
Our master, Sensei Sudo, teaches that Zen Guitar begins with just one note. Consider the power of his command. Pour every ounce of your heart and soul into that single note, played on only one string of your guitar.
I challenge you to try. You don’t play guitar? No matter. All guitar stores want nothing more than for you to come in and pick up one of their guitars and try it out. You are under no obligation to purchase, let alone express dedication to the instrument. Go ahead, lighten up, free yourself, don’t allow anyone to require anything of you! Just go into the store and try out a single note on a single string.
Now, the challenge comes. How do we pour every ounce of our heart and soul into a single note on a single string?
The Zen masters have a wonderful combination of two commands that truly help.
1. Destroy the Future
2. Erase the Past
In teaching swordsmanship, the Samurai Masters make constant reference to death as the answer to every question. What happens in the very moment of death? Death destroys the future.
Enter your imagination! You have the power to give yourself this additional command, in this strangest of mind-bending ways:
“I die in the next moment, but this moment I live.”
How many songs are popular right now based on the theme of living as if we were dying? Why is this?
It is a message we require, today. If you destroy the future as if you were certain you would die in a moment, then this current moment becomes real, somehow. In fact, we can go farther. If you don’t destroy the future, then you’re virtually certain to lose this moment to its incredible power.
The future is so mighty, so vast, so infinite, and so expansive that you can plop yourself down in any part of it and stay there forever, never having to return to the present at all. You can live your entire life in the future such that you never enter any current moment with every ounce of your heart and soul, not even once.
Imagine being on a lifeboat in the ocean, water everywhere, dying of thirst. That is exactly what living your entire life in the future is like. You have nothing but time, everywhere, yet never a single moment to spare.
On the other hand, some people never find their way to the future, since the prison of the past never lets them loose for a moment. Lost in the past, devoid of a future, the present is nothing more than the continuous result, already made certain by forces long since dead and gone yet still reaching forward and forward, forever.
If you’re trapped in the past, you’re not living.You’re just haunting your current space. Living in the past alone is nothing more than being a zombie. You’re the walking dead; you just may not know it.
If you have to pick which ocean to die on, pick the future. The past is a horrible place to live, worse than the future by far. At least in the future we don’t know what will happen. In the past, everything is certain and unmovable. While it is frightening to face the unknown future, it is the hell of slavery to be constrained by history’s chains and walls and immovable certain outcomes.
I have to flip flop, right now. I adore the future and I worship the past. The future is where my dreams will come true. The past is where my lessons come from. By studying the past, I empower myself for the future. Don’t bet against me.
But, for all that power and passion, like any White Belt, I too must destroy the future and erase the past. If I don’t, I won’t actually be there in the guitar shop attempting to pour every ounce of my heart and soul into that one note on that one string.
Pick up the phone and call. Pour every ounce of your heart and soul into this one call, to this one person.
How far should we take this counsel? I’d rather you make one and only one call like this, during the course of an entire day, than hundreds of calls made with anything less than all of your heart and soul in them. If you can only do this one time during the course of a day, then do it, and afterward put down the phone and do whatever you wish.
Know this: One call with your entire heart and soul in it can change the world.
Yet, you don’t need to change the world. All you need to do is change one person. No, not yourself. When you pick up the phone and call, you don’t matter anymore. The only person that matters is the person you’re calling.
And you don’t have to change that person forever, either. What you really have to do is change that one person’s day, today. How? It’s so easy! You just have to make their day better.
If you can do it once, though, it won’t be long and you’ll be able to do it twice in one day. You will simply learn that after you pour every ounce of your heart and soul into one call you must now, again, destroy the future and erase the past. It is only in this way that you can complete Master Sudo’s command: Then repeat.
You cannot fail as a recruiter if you master the simple art of making just one person’s day a little bit better by making a single phone call, and then repeating.
There is a specific kind of improvement you can offer your candidates and hiring managers. Even as a White Belt Recruiter, you can help them understand their work life. Your candidates have to make decisions about staying right where they are, or leaving. They need to know what their value is where they are as well as on the open market. They have to decide whether or not this is the right day to make a change. We can crunch all of that down to: Understanding Value and Timing.
You can help prospective hiring managers Understand Performance and Timing. Who are the best people to have on their team, building their firm’s performance right now? Who should they keep? Who should they fire? Who should they hire and when?
However, what if you feel that as a White Belt you don’t know much about these things? All the better. That means you have to ask.
So let us close our consideration of these guidelines with this final application. Pick up the phone, call, pour every ounce of your heart and soul into a single question to a single person, and then pour every ounce of your heart and soul into shutting up and listening.
If you’ve followed this rule, you can now return to Rule #3 and understand it better. You must dedicate yourself to this service. You can understand Rule #2 better now, too. Your plan must answer the two questions:
1. Can I pour my heart and soul into a single call today?
2. How many such calls can I actually complete?
And you can understand Rule 1 better too. You don’t know what the outcome of your one call will be, let alone the best methods or outcomes of the many calls you will make each day. That will always be true, no matter how great a Black Belt you ever become.
We’ll go back over our four rules next time and look to see what further depths this initial exploration can uncover. And, we will close our White Belt considerations by imagining this: your own one call with your Consigliori, heart and soul poured in, destroying the future, erasing the past and listening for the one note that begins your true song.
Reprinted with permission from Pasquale Scopelliti.
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