“I wasn’t getting enough, wasn’t getting my share,” said Mary (not her real name), a vice president at a major bank who handles commercial real-estate loans in Pennsylvania.
A few years ago, just after 9/11, business had slowed down. Mary was anxious because there weren’t enough loan requests coming in, and these are the meat and potatoes of her work. So her boss assigned her to work with new customers who hadn’t done business with her bank before.
Brand new prospects like these have a reputation for being more difficult to work with than long-time customers because you don’t know what their needs are. Also, they usually like to bargain shop, checking a large number of banks for quotes. With long-time customers you know what their needs are, so it’s easier to make competitive loans.
While starting on this new project, Mary discovered that one of her colleagues, a senior vice president, had gotten first pick of the prospect list. Feeling undermined and undervalued, Mary went to her boss to see if there was a way to more fairly distribute the workload. Although he said he would try to do something he never did.
I was very frustrated
“I was very frustrated by that,” she says now. She felt short-changed.
Although it would have been easy to let anger and resentment eat away at her, Mary knew she had a choice to make. She could either stew about the unfair treatment or look higher for a solution. She chose prayer. Her first step was to quiet her thought and listen to what God had to tell her. Mary likes to think about God as infinite Love watching over her.
“God fills all space and there is nothing outside of all,” she says. Since God is the source of all good and the loving Creator of all that exists, then, Mary believes, He must give each one of us good equally. A passage from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy inspired her: “When will mankind awake to know their present ownership of all good.” Mary prayed to understand more deeply the spiritual law that God doesn’t take from one to give to another. All good is available to everyone abundantly.
“I had as much good as this man did,” Mary says now, speaking of the senior vice president. “It was right for me to have customers who would bring business to me, who liked working with me. There was plenty of work for all of us.”
Every job can be broken down to the expression of qualities.
Ultimately, Mary believes true employment is employing God’s qualities in whatever you do-and you can do it 24/7. Every job can be broken down to the expression of qualities. Those qualities were what the prospects wanted to work with, not merely percentages, dollars and cents. Thoroughness, intelligence, wisdom, common sense, appreciation and interest in their project-these expressions of God’s nature would draw customers. Instead of outmaneuvering her boss, Mary decided to trust and rely on God to provide the opportunities for her to express Him.
As her attitude changed about it, Mary began to see that she was getting more leads that had a higher probability of closing. And close they did. “As I was going along, I really wasn’t watching the numbers or focusing on that,” she says now. “But I knew that I was doing more business.”
Imagine her delight when her boss told her she had underwritten the most loans in her department that year and it was double her performance of the previous year. He even selected her to go on an all-expense paid trip to a leadership conference.
Mary still does business this way. Her spiritual business “strategy” keeps her from being flustered by economic downturns. She no longer feels she’s getting the small piece of the pie, but has access to the infinite source of goodness that’s available to everyone.
Article by Valerie Minard, from Spirituality.Com
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