What do you do for a living? What advice would you give to someone who is going to do that work? What is your greatest satisfaction in your work? What is your greatest challenge in it, and how do you respond when you are living at your best? What qualities are needed to do it well? What are the five main things people need to know who do that work? If you are retired, the question may change: what did you do? Or what are you mainly doing now?
I just love getting to know people. And these are some of the questions that I use in what I call vocational interviews. I have begun to find these interviews tremendously beneficial in getting to know others. A vocational counselor reminded me that some people hate their work. A high school guidance counselor told me that he likes to ask about the student’s dream job. It is good to remember that there may be reasons to vary the questions.
Sometimes I have arranged with people to set aside an hour, taking turns, letting the other person ask questions for thirty minutes, and then asking my own questions of the other for thirty minutes. Two or three of the vocational interview questions are plenty in order to lead the conversation into fascinating realms.
Can I learning to love someone, to support them in some way in their life struggles, without understanding them at some depth? I believe that learning to love someone involves understanding their motivation. That is especially important if I am to love someone whose behavior causes feelings of irritation in me. What are they defending in their behavior? Against what threats? Some people are happy to answer direct questions about their motivation; some are not. Some people feel uncomfortable about personal questions. The vocational interview is one way to avoid such embarrassment.
Of course, it usually takes some socializing first, some relaxed building up to that level of resonance where the vocational interview or other significant discovery can begin. With some people, the only access to deeper conversation is through the chance opportunities that arise in simpler daily socializing or practical conversation when a little humor can release a greater openness.
People spend a lot of time working. To learn what their lives are like at work is to find out about a large portion of their waking hours. They acquire skills. They endure difficulties that may be oppressive. What a priceless opportunity it is to become, to some degree, through conversation, a sympathetic colleague!
Each person becomes interesting as we get to know them and as we mobilize our faith in the fact that they are created by God and have within them the presence of the glorious spirit of God. Sometimes we immediately sense their spiritual fragrance; at other times we need to mobilize our faith to break through the layers of stuff—including our own layers of stuff—to discover the divinely created, infinitely loved, spiritually indwelt, evolutionary, free-will, son or daughter of God who is before us.
In today’s society, social time pressures and personal immaturity conspire to make interactions superficial. Much of the time, social media serve to reinforce relationships that stay on the surface. Whether we express indignation or affection, we rarely understand well the persons with whom we interact.
A film titled “What Women Want” was based on the premise that the leading character, could, for a time, read the minds of the women he saw. There was a certain amount of sexploitation in the film, but the drama of the film reached its height when the telepathic man learned of a woman’s intended suicide and put forth heroic effort to reach her in time to save her. After seeing that film, I found myself in the grocery store, not mindlessly walking the aisles for the things I wanted to buy, but alive with the awareness that each person around me had an inner life, that each one was mindlessly or mindfully thinking about something. It was thrilling to have a heightened sense of the presence in others of that inner life.
How little we know of one another! And what a treasure to get to know another brother or sister!
Where can we find people with the time for deeper relating? How can we arrange such time with persons we would like to know better? Who has answers to share about some of the questions in the vocational interview? Who is waiting to be asked?
When we get to know others better, they may want to ask questions of us. Do we not all crave to know and be known more deeply?
Happy getting to know!
Photo credit: By Amstefan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49276613
What a marvelous post. It brought back many memories. During my years as a physician, I have had the privilege of interviewing many many patients as a part of treating their medical complaints. In the course of diagnosing and treating their medical complaints, of necessity, I gathered information about their lives, and how they were reacting to those lives and what if any effect it may have had on the problem at hand. But rather than focus on my interview with them, I would like to share with you a brief summary of my being a recipient of someone who took the time to do a vocational interview with me.
In 1969, I had recently left the Army and had enrolled in college with the intention of becoming a teacher. I was doing a lot of close work, and began to have difficulty with my eyes. I looked in the phone book, and found an ophthalmologist. I made an appointment with him. During the course of his examination of me, he inquired what I was doing. I told him that I had just left the Army and was enrolled in college studying to become a teacher. He asked how I was doing, what kind of grades I was making. As he continued to talk to me about my life and future, I discovered that he had treated my father for cataracts. I had no prior knowledge of this. But as I continued to visit him for follow-up. He suggested that I should go to medical school since my grades were excellent. He said that there was a shortage of black physicians.
The very fact that he suggested this, was a total shock to me. I had never in my wildest dream considered becoming a physician. But he assured me that I could become a physician, and continue to encouraged me to do so.
Now no one in my family had ever gone to college not to mention becoming a physician. The thought of becoming a physician was overwhelming to me and it took some time for me to digest what he was encouraging me to do. Finally I agreed to shift gears and enroll in the premed track.
He has passed on, but I shall ever be grateful to him for taking the time to inquire about my life. In my career, I have also tried to identify talented students and encourage them to enter the field of medicine.
Dr. Perry
What an important variation on the vocational interview! It also shows what more can take place in getting to know another person in addition to gaining information. If our real purpose is to do good, to do something to make the other person’s life richer, then in the process of getting to know someone, we might encourage a person boldly. You never know what may happen if you venture. I can only imagine that you have had a comparable effect on others, mostly without ever knowing it.