My response to a posting on Puttylike.com seems relevant to reproduce here. Puttylike.com is the brainchild of Emily Wapnick, whom I encountered as a fellow traveller on the journey to find words and metaphors to explain the misunderstood or unseen value of the multi-interested, multi-faceted and multi-tasking creatives we know. The ones who hear “Pick something and stay with it!” from frustrated family and friends who worry we will never settle down and make a living. Emily, author of ‘Renaissance Business’ – already a great step in the right direction – calls us Multipotentialites, and has started a supportive community (of which I am a member – no surprise but full disclosure) called the Putty Tribe.
For those of you who have heard me use the metaphor of the ‘leading’ in the stained glass window to describe what I pay attention to in the big picture (checking to make sure that the pretty and useful window is secure and completely supported) and in my work with artists and cultural workers and other such-like folks, you can see how alike are our thoughts. So I urge you to go read Janet Brent’s guest post “How to Brand Yourself as a Multipotentialite in a Way that Makes Sense to Conventional Employers” that I respond to (with my comment reproduced here) and add your thoughts to the dialogue.
There’s a step missing here, and it’s a marketing step: figuring out what the ‘pain point’ is for the potential client or employer that brought them to seek a human resource solution. Then the ‘ideal client’ and the appropriate pitch become more than finding the formula that matches these, like finding a wound the same size as your band-aid and slapping it on. There’s a conversation that needs to happen between the finding and the slapping on.
Old school marketing says ‘who needs it, whether they know it or not? Find out and then go sell it to them”. There’s a ‘why do they need it’ component missing that is invaluable in getting anyone to listen to your offered solution. That’s why applying for J.O.B. jobs can be so futile for us as multipotentialites. You are applying for a job as a screwdriver when you are a fabulous Swiss Army Knife. By the time an employer has formulated a ‘position’ to be filled, the space is defined. They may see those other tools in your toolkit as detracting from expertise as a screwdriver rather than being the kind of asset that will come in very handy when the landscape shifts, as it will, and very rapidly. It’s the same kind of approach that makes it hard to fund prevention in health care, easier to justify expensing a solution to a problem we know than to prevent one and never know if there was one after all.
Employers do not always know what they need, but assume HR experts or a little of their own experience can tell them. When we uncover the real ‘what keeps you up at night or holds you back’ questions that people are asking, and speak to those, it enables the subsequent steps. Suddenly it doesn’t matter whether we have an advanced degree in what-ever, so much. We know what they struggle with and they will listen and understand how we can be a partner in conquering the challenge.
I learned this through many years of working with artists, and I think the idea that we are selling ourselves when we market to employers or clients comes from our own intuitive sense that the middle step is missing. The empathetic one that helps US see that we are bringing our skills to a problem someone else has, and that our creativity and variety of tools and experience is the best asset we have.
For people like us, instead of letting the many parts we play make us feel torn apart into fragments, we can think of ourselves as many-faceted diamonds. Others need to see the facet of our surface that they can relate to, and which will help draw them into a place where they will begin to see the many other parts. Having many facets does not make us less whole. In order to help others gain access to all of us, we need to understand them more, and shift our old thinking instead of shifting shape.
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