I meet lots of new people in my line of work and at social events they have a tendency to ask me what I do for a living.

Now this question is a lot more challenging for me than they might think. Most people who have “proper jobs” are given a handy job title which provides a reasonable clue as to what they fill their main daylight hours with. But when you are part of a small business, well, it’s complicated.

Do I tell them that I am a trainer, a coach, a facilitator, an elearning author, a film maker, a tea maker or what?

I did once consider that I would use a different job title for each person I met at an event just to see how many I could come up with. But I immediately realised that I would need to remember which job title I had used with which person, as they might ask a follow-up question later in the evening. I can’t even remember people’s names more than 2 seconds after meeting them so this was  far too ambitious for me.

I also considered such responses as “Well, it’s complicated” or “I always wanted to be a racing driver but…”. However these would just have made things worse.

And then, one day I over heard my partner, who does the same work as I do, being asked the same question and without any hesitation she answered. Her response was confident, accurate and created the right level of interest for the questioner to ask a follow-up question.

And she also managed to answer the question she was asked, “What do you do for a living?” Not, “What is your job title?” Not “What do you call yourself?”, but “What do you do?”

And her response? “I help people feel good about themselves.”

Don’t you just find that some things are so obvious once they have been pointed out to you. It always prompts another question along the lines of “Wow, how do you do that then?” And yet, if you think about it, this answer will fit what most of us do at work. We may be managers, customer facing staff, contact centre operators, delivery drivers, production workers, local authority workers or all of these, however isn’t the underlying purpose of the job to make people feel good? If they feel good, they come back for more. If they come back for more we all get to keep our jobs and feel valued a little bit more.

So every day when you do your job just remind yourself that you are there to help people feel good about themselves and then look for ways to do that. If we all do that every day?  Well…!

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