How An Awkward Situation Landed Me a JOB.
Hello. Today’s topic is about a very funny story I want to share with you. It’s all related to career management. It’s all related to business. I, myself am a fearless networker and I’m very lucky to be able to travel the world.
Zurich, Switzerland is a big hub for me. I travel there fairly frequently. I’ve got lots of clients there. I stay at the same hotel each time, not too far outside of Zurich. I did not know that it was the air Canada hotel, where they put up all the pilots and the flight attendants.
Culture over in Europe is different from the culture here in North America. When you go into a spa, when you go into a sauna, they go in totally naked. Of course, I’m really from Europe being originally from UK so that’s perfectly okay.
I’m totally naked
So I go into this sauna totally naked, and it’s a big sauna, very steamy as it should be. There was this woman on the third rack up and she said to me, as I entered the sauna, “Hello, how are you?”
I thought, Oh my God, I am in another country and somebody recognizes me naked. That makes me really think, well, shall I make a beeline for the door? Or shall I continue the conversation? So anyway, I wandered over to her and she said, “Don’t you recognize me?”
And I had to really think about it because I was really thrown off by the introduction.
She said again, “Don’t you recognize me?”
And I said, “yes, I do recognize you, but I can’t put a place and a time to when I’d met you.” Bear in mind that I’m totally naked and she was totally naked.
She said, “Come and sit down.”
So I sat down with her and she said, “I am an Air Canada flight attendant, and I know you fly the London route frequently, Toronto to London.” which I do because I have an office in London, UK.
She said, “I see you on that route. My colleagues see you on that route. And we always wondered what you do. So tell me what you do.” She said, “I’m in Zurich because I just wanted a change of scenery for this flight.”
So I said, “Yeah, I’m an Executive Career Management Practitioner. I manage the careers of senior executives and I have lots of clients here in Zurich and across the world.”
I talked a little bit more about my resume writing my coaching and my extensive network through my fearless network. This was about the Thursday or Friday of the week.
She continued on, “My husband in Toronto, Canada has just been terminated. He was a senior executive, and he was just terminated from his job.”
That Monday of that week, he was looking around for a career transition service. He was looking around for a resume writer. And here I am sitting naked in a sauna in another country, thousands of kilometers away talking to somebody who could generate business for me.
So anyway, we continued talking and then it got very hot. So we went out, we put our costumes on and she said, “I’m going to introduce you to my peers, the flight attendants. Some of them might recognize you. Some of them might not.”
So we went down into the pool and we got talking and yes, I did recognize them and some of them recognized me. And then we spent about half an hour, 30 – 40 minutes in the pool.
I waved them goodbye and wished them a safe flight home the following morning, because I was presenting in Zurich that following day…I was staying on.
To cut an exceptionally long story short, about four weeks later, I was in Toronto Pearson airport in terminal one. I was catching my flight, my frequent flight to Heathrow airport in London and I go down the long tunnel into the aircraft. As you all know, cabin crew, are there to greet you. And I recognize this woman and I said, “Oh, hi, how are you?”
I got really, really good service on that six-and-a-half-hour flight to London, Heathrow from Toronto. I also got her husband’s business; He was able to land multiple interviews swiftly after I wrote his resume.
The Moral of the Story
So networking. You never know when there’s an opportunity to network…network everywhere, including the sauna.
Hopefully, you got a chuckle from this because it’s a real story.
I Can Help
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