Reveling In One's Saturday Night Essence
I was planning to write on a totally different topic for this post, but I received a very exciting telephone call a couple nights ago from someone who connected with her Saturday Night Essence.
It wasn't from one of my staff or a respiratory therapy colleague from some exotic region of world, but from my second oldest daughter, a mother of five children and a grandmother to 2. She has been an interior designer for nearly three decades and works with clients who have million dollar homes in southern California.
From time to time I share some of my articles with my family and several months ago I gave them the address for my blog. Unbeknown to me this particular daughter actually read that series of articles I had written on one's Saturday-Night Essence.
While she enjoyed being an interior designer, she felt that there was more she could and needed to do to fulfill her dreams. She made a list of all the things she enjoys doing, especially in her free time, but nothing seemed to be her Saturday-Night Essence.
One of the things she does extremely well is floral arrangements--with most of her arrangements selling for $150 to $500--so she decided to give that a try. She created floral arrangements for several wedding and, although she enjoyed doing them, it wasn't something she wanted to do forever and make into a career.
Again, she read and reread Finding Your Saturday-Night Essence, Discovering Your Saturday-Night Essence, Pursuing Your Saturday-Night Essence and Goals For Your Saturday-Night Essence and she continued to ponder these blog posts for days to determine what her Saturday-Night Essence might be.
About a week before she called me, she received an unexpected telephone call from an executive in New York City from a company that has numerous interior design center showrooms across the country. He wanted to know if my daughter would be interested in a new position that was open for a design center manager.
Initially, she was overwhelmed by this invitation and asked for more information regarding the open position. She was given a very generic description of the job--which would be like someone calling one of us and asking us if we wanted a job as a respiratory therapist.
Since she had been reading my blog and pondering her Saturday Night Essence for several weeks, she decided to accept his invitation for an interview. Afterwards, she called me to ask about the do's and don'ts to consider during a job interview as she hadn't been to a job interview in about 30 years. At this point I was unaware that she had read my blog and I simply told her to be herself. Be honest and let the individual conducting the interview know of her dreams and aspirations, I said.
The day of the interview came and everything appeared to have gone very well. She called me two days later to tell me everything that had happened since we last talked. She told me that once again she spent hours reading and rereading the articles on Pursuing Your Saturday-Night Essence and setting Goals for Your Saturday-Night Essence.
Then she reviewed for me a most exciting part of this adventure. During the interview, she felt extremely comfortable and very much at ease. She said that a strange thing had happened during the interview: she heard words flowing effortlessly from her about her dreams and aspirations that she had never shared with anyone before. She wondered who was talking, because they didn't seem to be words that she would express. I suggested that she had connected with her Saturday-Night Essence and that her thoughts and ability to express herself came easily to her at that point.
As the interview came to a conclusion the executive from New York began to elaborate more fully on the exact details of what the job entailed and it was much more then just a manager of a design center showroom. It was my daughter's dream, her Saturday-Night Essence. Within a few hours, she was offered the job and what had only been a dream had turned into reality. The executive told her as he extended the job offer to her, "We've been looking for you a very long time."
So often I write articles and never know if anyone ever reads them let alone actually puts them into practice, but this is one series of articles that did have an effect on at least one individual and it appears to have helped her pursue her dream and to find her Saturday-Night Essence.
I would love to hear if anyone else has a success story to share.