Well, since the EU referendum we do not know what the Prime Minister is going to look like and the one we have has resigned. The Leader of the Opposition Labour Party, is so not what his party colleagues think a leader should be and look like that that regardless of him having a huge mandate to lead the party from the ordinary members, yesterday in The House of Commons one of his own members told him to sit down and shut up, as he spoke on the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war. Most of his party members have spent the days since the referendum trying to get him out of office ...He is not their type and Tony Blair was …. Even Ed Miliband managed to look the part, though he did not produce the goods and win an election. This is Jeremy Corbyn and he is not what his party colleagues want for a leader.
This got me to thinking about some blog articles about leadership, while my blog is mainly about looking for jobs as an older and or disabled person, and midlife career change, many of the principles of what makes someone look like a leader also apply to anyone looking attractive on the very competitive job market.
Recently, my friend the
author Rhonda Partin-Sharp referred to knowing things that she does about my past that I was touched to read her say that she had realised I would have been unprepared for leaving home and being thrown into the world of work as young as I was 17, because I had not been to college or to uni and so had no experience as one does there of living independently but with others around to share and grow the experience with. Instead my mother took the view that as she told me, ‘I have stayed with your father for long enough because of you and now you are old enough to be independent and you bloody well get out and find yourself a room ‘ and so I found myself at 17 in a bed sitting room , with no experience of independence and working two days a week in a nursery and going to college on the other days for the theory training , but this arrangement was like being a working woman, I did not have the support and back up that comes from being a full time college or uni student .
Rhonda was very right to spot that I would have been ill prepared for such independence, but she does not know just how ill prepared I was. My mother was an older mother, who herself had not married until she was thirty, late for the times, 1958, and had married a man she admitted to me she did not love but was fond of, never a good omen, and she was desperate to leave home and getting married was a means to that. She also did not keep from me that she did not want children but knew that my father did and so she agreed, though I do not think he realised she only intended to have one. This was definite when after a very difficult delivery taking so she said nineteen hours, when she never let me forget I nearly killed her and three years later when I lost my right eye to eye cancer and again have never been allowed to forget that I nearly killed her with the worry, she made sure there would be no accidental pregnancy by never letting my father touch her.
The marriage was not for my mother happy , not just for the difficulties she had being a mother and especially to a child with a disability and for years an uncertain life span but also because my father was not a high achiever and home was an upstairs rented flat with no heating , no washing machine and not even a fridge until I was seven , the 1960’s certainly did not swing for everyone . My mother coped by keeping very firm boundaries on me so that I would not and could not be the cause of any further strain for her. Indeed, the most important person in the house was not me a child, but the elderly, for most of my childhood disabled landlady downstairs who my mother did love, strange considering that she has in the past admitted to me that the person she loved most of all in her life was her mother. The rent was cheap because the landlady whom my mother chose to be my Godmother needed my parents and my mother needed her. Widowed in the First World war and her only child dying within hours of birth, the landlady needed me too and I was always being sent downstairs to sit with Doris, who never bathed and had a terrible cough, when I was due to have my TB injection at school, I was found to be immune. When where I had acquired immunity from had to be traced, her doctor who visited weekly admitted that she probably did have TB but he had long felt there was nothing that could be done for her.
Keeping her happy, and my mother too for that matter and the rent cheap, meant that I was not allowed to play my own music, and had no birthday parties after the age of seven, I only rarely had a friend home to play and just as rarely was ever allowed to go to friend’s houses, life consisted of only the things that the law demanded, that I went to school, and the diversion of Sunday school every Sunday. I did not immediately realise that my mother’s intention, indeed what she assumed would happen was that I would leave school as soon as possible as she had to do at 14 and be out at work, and she would then leave and divorce my father. However, I was to be the first school year affected by the government raising the school leaving age at which a child could leave full time education from 15 to 16 and when I brought the letter home for my mother she was so disturbed by this that she beat me , claiming that I had gone to the school office and typed it myself, she had already physically beaten out of my plans to go to university and called me a lily livered lizard hiding from the real world in education and that I was jumping out of my class …until I managed to convince her that she would make an idiot of herself as well as me she was going to write to the school and seek permission for me to leave early.
I was indeed ill prepared for the big wide world when at 17, I found myself in a bed sit and working in a nursery part of the week and going to day college the other days, a job my mother found for me and even applied for ..when I started , the head teacher of the nursery school where I did my practical work told me that she assumed I was mentally deficient as my mother had done the applying for me , the same happened again when the two year course had finished and my mother again , as if to keep me firmly in the world of work with no chance of applying for a grant perhaps and going back to college full time to try to get to uni and be the teacher I wanted to be , arranged an interview at a nursery she had seen advertising for staff at the job centre where she worked, again the manager told me she interviewed me mostly out of curiosity to meet this apparent idiot who could not apply for the job herself …
At the first nursery, I had an interesting experience of learning what it means to go to work ….I found the being thrown out into the world of both work and living independently in a bed sit very difficult , well actually I am not sure I did , but the nursery head teacher felt that I did , and not surprisingly I actually failed my first assessment , I would not have been too worried since I actually did not even want to be a nursery nurse , but the grant money paid my bed sit rent and I had no experience of any other kind of work but was good with children . I did not see any warning signs that the head teacher was going to fail my assessments but she did so, telling my tutors that she did not feel I was sophisticated enough for work ...was I? I got on well with my colleagues, loved the children, had no problems with the parents and looked good as I always did love clothes, but clearly that certain something that makes someone see you as professional was missing …. until an event where I shocked her and all of the staff ….
The nursery school had a new young teacher, who tragically had been recently widowed before starting work at the nursery school. She recognised that I had not gained the approval of the head teacher. I was not at this stage going to lose the job as to do that I would have to also fail my second year, and this was only my first, but it was a very worrying time for me, especially as I could not go back home if thrown off the training scheme and I lost the grant, my parents had split up and I had no home to go back to. I worked very well with Rosemary until one day I arrived at the nursery school and the head teacher took me into her office ...Rosemary had committed suicide the previous night. She then said to me that she knew I would be very upset and she felt I should go home right away ….I realized what this was about and what she was trying to trap me into , to being seen to not cope with what had happened and instead I replied that I had no need at all to go home and would run the classroom myself until they could get a supply teacher …which was exactly what I , the not sophisticated enough student nursery nurse who had failed her assessment did ….
However, these two experiences in my life of seniors whose good impression of me I needed, thinking I was some kind of idiot , because my employment in both cases had never recovered from my mother applying for the jobs for me and indeed, my not being really ready for the world of work, taught me what is needed to be successful …that right from the off you have to gain the respect of those you work with , you have to look and act the part and walk the walk and talk the talk !! The greatest leaders in history have been those who had the ability to gain the respect of and a good impression from their colleagues.
If you find yourself in later life needing to look for a new job or start a home business because you have been or are affected by issues such as health problems or domestic issues, take advantage of any support and counselling that is on offer and you think may help you. when making applications for jobs, research as much as you can about the company and about the role, so that even before you get the job if you do, you have an insight into the characteristics and image of the company and the role, it is not a bad thing at all at any stage of the application process, preferably before even applying, that you realise it is not for you. These days businesses are not allowed by law to advertise a job as being only open to applicants of a certain age, however I often see companies get around this by saying the company is a young and funky environment, so there is not much point applying if you are over 50 with arthritis . Also, certain work environments attract certain people, you may well think that if you are older and less physically active a job in a call centre may be just right for you, but before I started to freelance I often applied for a role I would have loved, as a charity fund raiser in charity call centres …going for interviews will show you that these roles are mainly filled by young graduates and students .
Maybe your budget has suffered badly and you no longer have interview and work clothes, try schemes such as your local Freecycle network where people give things away for free and other schemes ~ looking good can be expensive but take advantage of things such as free or cheap model nights at hairdressers …Look the part, walk the walk and talk the talk !!!
Valerie Hartland
