You are reading further than the initial headline for a reason. You want to believe. You want a little taste of something that has been sadly absent from business in America of late, positivity. Yesterday, I had a person tell me that he thinks that the United States may never recover, that we may never get back to where we were. The timbre of business conversations harkens back to the “Dot Bomb” fiasco several years ago, only magnified. The damage to the American psyche intensifies every day we continue to allow ourselves to engage in this kind of doom saying. If you want to thrive in this market, one of the best ways to set yourself apart is to position yourself as a trusted lightening rod of positivity. Imagine what might happen if everyone in American business made this their goal? I submit that the once famous phrase “American Optimism” would again become a part of the world vernacular and this recession would soon fade away.

Don’t make the mistake of diminishing the impact that you have. It is significant. As a third party recruiter one is afforded the opportunity to play coach, therapist, agent and advisor-sometimes all in a single conversation. Help your business connections see the positive side to their struggles. Coach candidates to bring positivity to the interview table. Remind hiring managers that the best candidates are risk averse and require being sold on opportunities. Remind them that the fact that it is a job doesn’t automatically make it savory. An opportunity in a thriving or well positioned organization with great people is.

Candidates need to know that it is imperative that their conversations yield a positive vision of the future. If two candidates are essentially the same but in the interview one of them speaks about how tough it is out in the market and how he or she has never seen it this bad, and the other candidate says that the tide is turning, there is a lot of opportunity available and that the current situation is extremely exciting….who gets the job? Who do you want on your team? The way one talks about the current economy says more about the person making the observations than the economy itself.

If you are saying, “This is all fine and well Kendall, but there are realities that cannot be ignored here.” To this I say: change your “reality”.

Turn off the television news stations, put down the newspaper and ignore the news websites. Try it for a month and see what happens. Use the time you would have devoted to these activities and instead do something that makes you happy. Focus on being happy and sharing this happiness with those around you. You have nothing to lose except the negative after-shocks of the often dark messaging that you routinely expose yourself to through these negative channels.

When you start sharing this happiness with those around you, I guarantee your business will improve. It seems that every day I receive comments from people who are wondering how I can be so positive all the time. My answer is always the same. It beats the hell out of the alternative.

Kendall Messner
Senior Managing Partner
Bluespeed, Inc.
kendall@bluespeed.net