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LEARNING TO “WALK THE LINE”: RED FLAGS AND ME TOO

My sales experiences started with me feeling “I’m Thumbody” special, but once I decided to pursue a sales career, I quickly learned that the joy of selling is just one part of the career journey.

With every new job, there is a learning curve. Each new opportunity means we need to figure out how to navigate the culture and new rules of our office and company. It’s important not to make mistakes and recover as quickly as we can when we inevitably do cross a line invisible to a newbie. And what about those learning experiences that we remember forever because they were serious red flags we should not have ignored?

Over the years I’ve learned how to walk the line between professional and personal behavior. I was lucky in my early career days to have sidestepped minefields that could have landed me in trouble. Sometimes experiencing uncomfortable circumstances will teach you what to look out for in the future. Remember, once you recover, these red-flag encounters make great stories.

I was looking for part-time employment in high school when a classmate told me about her job as a telemarketer for a real estate newspaper. Her boss wanted to hire more high school girls, just like her, to work for him after school and on weekends.

Previously, I had worked as a prep cook at the Murphy Mart and disliked the work. I could never seem to please the lady manager who had a seriously bad attitude. Anyway, making Jell-O salads and frying breaded fish shapes were not skills I needed for a college application. I thought nothing could be worse than that. So, I applied to become a “telephone solicitor,” as they called it, and got the office phone job.

I never aspired to be a telemarketer. Even back then, people outside the business thought of the work as annoying, persistent calls, always asking for money at ungodly times of the da