Sell Sell Sell!

My dad is a salesman.  He's amiable and convincing and very good at making people want things they'd never heard of until he started talking to them.  This does not make him akin to a used car salesman, who has the reputation of being greasy and unrelenting.  If any of you are car salesmen, I'm sure you're not like that, just all the rest of them.  Growing up in a house with a salesman bringing home the bacon meant I heard about closing deals and hard sells.  This leads me to the rite of passage into the adult world known as "job interviewing". 

Job interviews are like sales calls, except you're not selling a set of encyclopedias or stethoscopes, or even French collard greens.  You're selling yourself.  That sounds a bit cheap, like you're making a deal with the devil.  You're not really, you're just trying to convince someone you have what they want and make them willing to give you a contract, salary and benefits in order to get it.  Convincing someone they can't live without you means that

a.) You are fully convinced in your own mind that you can do the job better than the girl in the grey sweater dress who's interviewing after you.

b.) You aren't fully convinced you can do the job better, but you've got to sell the idea anyway or you'll forever be living on refried beans and tuna wondering why you got a college degree in the first place. 

c.) You aren't fully convinced you can do the job, you tell the interviewer that, and sit crying in your car for a full 7 minutes afterwards wishing you had more false confidence. 

Job interviews make me nervous.  I'm the well dressed secret agent, and the woman sitting across the desk from me is an expert interrogator, looking for chinks in my armor.  She could notice that I didn't do the best job taking off my nail polish from last week's wedding, or that my eyes wandered around the room nervously when I answered question 5.  But maybe that's going a little far.  Sometimes when I pretend I'm in the most dramatic of situations, it's easier to steel myself into unshakeable finesse. 

Yesterday, I wasn't really thinking about secret agents being interrogated.  It was all I could do to procure successful situations from my student teaching experience to hand over on a platter to the principal across the desk.  She was nothing like an interrogator, though I've never met one personally.  She was more like an elementary principal, smiley and upbeat, with a hint of I-have-about-1,000,000-things-going-on-right-now.  Either she was too distracted by those 1,000,000 to notice my chinks, or they didn't bother her too much because the interview seemed to go well.  She even used the c-word a couple times -CONTRACT. 

Whoa.  What?  Me?  A teacher?  Of children?  By myself?  Oh dear.  I guess there's a first time for everything.  I guess the daringest dare devils didn't have the luxury of doing a trial run before they climbed Everest and kayaked the Amazon.  They just packed some sandwiches, laced up their adventure boots and said, well, I don't know what they said.  It was probably in a different language. 

Yes, I'm learning how to sell myself.  After all, I do have a degree in building blocks and differentiated instruction and Vygotsky and play dough.  It's not as though I'm a professional snorkeler who's trying to be a guide across the Sahara Desert. 

Much love,

Little Miss Sunshine