Getting to know you

A little break from ethics today, in favour of some blurb about unsung talent.

It occurs to me that I often hear of people saying they are shy until they get to know people. It's the kind of thing you see a lot on dating sites. I know that because I have looked at dating sites and even say something similar on the one I use **cough** - I say use, I think I haven't been very successful yet as I still haven't stuck my mug on my profile and probably won't do until I've solved more of my self-esteem issues. Which is funny, because my friends say I look like Brad Pitt, but good looking, you know. Ahem. Anyhoo, I digress...

If these people are shy then I imagine they may have some difficulties being engaging and witty in a spontaneous way in public. (Hence the dating sites?) On the basis that expression normally finds its own way, they might also, therefore, be people more inclined to express themselves by crafting their words more carefully, by writing or some other literary pursuit (or something else entirely for that matter), where they can say what they want to say whilst focused and relaxed. Steering clear of the actual reasons for people feeling like this for a moment, it occurred to me that these people are a vast untapped resource of potentially brilliant ideas.

Blogs, for example, have probably unearthed a plethora of this stuff, which otherwise would have gone to waste. I don't know if there are any statistics yet on the number of great things to come out of blogs, but along with the assorted navel-contemplating and drudgery that floats blogging boats, there must be the odd gem surely?

So, this moves me on to the fact that like many other people I have always felt in my element writing things down, as a means of explaining ideas or communicating whatever it might be I want to get across. I make no claim to being any good at it - it has always been a useful way to express things for me though, all the way from simple stories to essays at school, through the massively angst-ridden poetry stage so beloved of teenagers, onwards to journalistic aspirations, through to my own particular brand of navel-contemplating and dallying now.

Undoubtedly the web is providing many and varied resources for people like this (for use alongside all the other people who do have 'the gift of the gab') - and this is all good I think. The web is a great way to get these ideas released into the wild.

This brings me round to stage two of the problem - translating communication skills into things that are helpful in the day-to-day. Specifically, let's consider whatever we do for a living. I am constantly amazed at the number of really intelligent people I find doing dead-end jobs. They will tell you straight-out they are doing a dead-end job and then continue doing absolutely diddley-squat about it. Why is that? I reckon it is less general apathy, it is more related to self-esteem. Some of these people could be doing a much better job running the country than many of the career-politicians we have.

That's the problem though, isn't it? They aren't running the country because they can't always 'do-the-do' on the spot. In a world of ever-increasing immediacy, we see the evidence everyday that you can take all those years of hard work at school/college/university and to a greater degree you might as well not have bothered, if you think a satisfying career in your dream field is what awaits you at the end of it - because often regardless of your capacity to do the job, someone with the right patter will out-gun you at interview. What we need is more and better ways to engage these people and use their skills, without penalising them for taking a few minutes longer to come up with something. Because what they do come up with might be really special. We need ways to encourage these people to have their say in situations that matter.

As you might have guessed, my own career path flags quite a lot of these issues, which whilst not attesting to the intelligence, I do find myself now, at the age of 32, looking at my catalogue of jobs to date and asking myself questions like: 'How did I end up doing that job?', or thinking 'I am so massively wasted here' or more and more frequently it seems, asking, 'Why is that complete and utter buffoon getting paid double what I am? In fact, how did they get the job in the first place?'...

The thing is, I don't think training is necessarily the answer. I'm all for encouraging people to come out of their shells a bit, however I don't want to start a slippery slope towards people making the leap from increased self-esteem, straight into massive over self-confidence. People seem to plaster that one over their cracks all the time. I actually really like it when people are quiet and unassuming - and are reasonably aware of what they can and can't do. Dang it, I reckon the training might work. We factor things like 'social nicety observation' and assertiveness training straight into the National Curriculum. For all I know it's already there - I think there is something called 'Life Studies' which sounds like it's in the right area, although taking a quick squizz of the interweb I think it probably doesn't go far enough.

Okay, pair up this approach with better general thinking on how we gauge people for the things we want them to do - interview techniques and the like - and we might be onto something.