One of the fascinating things about jobs is the way they alter over time, not because the field has changed but because the person holding the job has changed. 

You see it again and again. A man or a woman enters a field, and lo! the job they are to do, is predefined. They therefore measure their competency by whether or not they learn to do the job as defined.

But come back some years later, and if they are still in that same job you may see a wondrous change. Now, instead of the job defining them, they define the job. As they have grown, as they have matured, so has the job description. A new spirit, and life, now animates even the old familiar tasks.

How A Job Gets Changed
Well, let's look at an example. Here, let us say, is a young woman who since childhood was always hearing people ask, at parental get-togethers, parties, meetings, dinners and so on. "And what do you do, for a living?" Since the question fascinates her, she eventually decides to become a career counselor, whose very definition runs: "helping people decide what they want to do."

After proper training, she becomes good at doing that job, as defined. Doing, doing, doing.  That was the key.

But if we see her in that same job some years later, we often see that the thing she used to do has undergone death and transfiguration – and her job has moved from preoccupation with "Doing" to preoccupation with "Being." 

Yes, the job has changed, but the change was first of all in her. After countless hours of counseling she became aware that (to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson) "Who you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you are saying." (Or doing.)

The Education of Ms. C.C.
If we are curious to know how she came to this awareness, well, the journey varies from individual to individual. But more often than not (as I have observed) it seems to begin with some dramatic encounter with meanness. 

Even if she was shielded from meanness as she grew up, part of her education in her job as career counselor consists of listening to the meanness that is in the world. As her clients tell her how they lost their job, she hears one story after another of genuine meanness abroad in the land, alive and well in this organization or that. 

Many businesses, to be sure, are wonderful, wonderful, places to work. But if even one fifth of the tales clients tell are true, there are other businesses out there, which – in their subterranean levels – are soap operas of meanness, because crude harassment, mindless insensitivity, rudeness, maliciousness, double-dealing, spiteful gossip, backstabbing, betrayal, and revenge are all too common.

Ah, it would be bad enough if we could leave it at that. But, after the tales are told, sometimes our budding career counselor notices something. She tries to ignore it, to continue to think the very best of those she is trying to help, but she cannot help noticing that the meanness her clients ascribe to their former bosses and co-workers, sometimes resides also in them. To which they are totally oblivious, of course.

And it does not even end there. Sensitized as she is by all of this, when day is done and she has any kind of quiet time to reflect, she often notices that the meanness she decried all day in corporation and client, resides also in her – slumbering, not yet fully activated, but ready and willing to leap out at a moment's notice.

It takes only a parking lot encounter – someone quietly reprimanding her for taking a space they had first claim on – for the meanness to leap out of her as she shouts "Oh, get over it!" and then, the raised and angry finger.

And she realizes something within her is kin& #150; albeit, distant kin – to the rampant meanness in the workplace and the world.

What the World Needs Most
All of this experience in her job, and to the world, is what changes the way our now-experienced career counselor redefines her work. She finds herself mulling the question: which does the world need more? One more computer programmer? Or: less meanness in the world?

She knows the answer of course is: both. But were she to give greater weight to one over the other, she knows that the world needs less meanness far more than it needs another programmer.

And so ends our tale, except, as you have already guessed, this journey is the journey we all take in life: learning to do battle with meanness within our own breast and in our own daily life. For, to everyone it is clear: there is already too much meanness in the world. And the healing must begin with us.