توضیحات ای جی

BEC : Free Agent -AJ

Hello, this is AJ of Business English Conversations and time for my commentary. This is a very interesting topic for me, this idea of free agency, and the idea of thinking of yourself as a free agent. I like to use sports as a great comparison, as a metaphor. A ‘metaphor’ is a comparison.

So if you think of yourself like a sports star, if you think of your favorite sports stars, maybe your favorite soccer or football player, you can imagine that they’re free agents.

They usually don’t stay with just one team for their entire career. A few of them might do that, but most of them move around. Maybe they start with one team when they’re younger and as they become better and better then more and more teams want them because they have more skills. They have more ability.

They accomplish more so they get more attention and as they get more attention more teams want them and, of course, as more teams want them they get paid more. The really great players can make huge amounts of money because all the really big teams want them and all the big teams are willing to pay them a lot of money. So they have job security, in a way, maybe not with one team, but any time they want to play they can play. Somebody will hire them, no problem.

So this is the idea I want you to imagine when you think of your own career. Maybe you’re a salesperson. Maybe you’re an accountant. Maybe you’re a teacher or a trainer.

Maybe you are an administrator. It doesn’t matter what you are, you can still think like a free agent. You don’t want to be cut, right? The bad soccer players, the bad football players, they’re cut. The teams cut them and they don’t have a job anymore, but the really great ones they always have a job. As long as they’re still playing and they’re still healthy they can get a job with a team and they make lots and lots and lots of money.

So you want to be a superstar too. You can be a superstar accountant. You can be a superstar salesperson. You can be a superstar administrator, a superstar manager, a superstar teacher. That’s the attitude you need to have. Another way to think about this is that you are a brand. Remember we talked about brand in the conversation. An example of a brand is, let’s say, Coca-Cola, a Coke. That’s a drink.

That is a specific brand. It has a very unique special taste and it has special colors. You know that red and white that Coke uses and they have a certain logo, so it’s unique. It’s different from Sprite. It’s different from beer. It’s different from coffee. And, of course, the Coca-Cola Company spends a lot of money to advertise that brand so that you remember it. So when you see the red can, you think Coke immediately and you know that it’s this kind of sweet drink, bubbly drink. You already know all of this about it.

Well, you want the same thing for yourself. You want certainly your boss, your coworkers and the people in your company to also have a very clear idea of who you are, what you are good at and how you are special. You want all those people to know very clearly how you’re special, how you are strong, what you are good at, what you bring to the table, how you benefit them, how you contribute. This is something you should really think about. Not just the idea, but I really want you to think about what is it that you’re good at? How are you special? What are your strengths and make them stronger and learn how to communicate them and show them more.

Tom Peters, he’s a business writer. His name is Tom Peters, I recommend his books.

Go get some of his books. He talks about this idea of brand you. I think that’s the name of one of his books actually Brand You. It’s this whole idea that you are kind of a special brand, just like Coke or just like an Apple computer or an Apple iPod. That you also want to have a brand, a special image, a unique image that people know.

They know what you’re good at. They know what you can do. They know kind of your personality, what’s special about you and, of course, as you get better, as this gets stronger, other companies will start to know about this too and when you go looking for jobs or if you’re interviewing then also that strong brand, that strong, unique, special quality will come out. It will be clear. This is going to help you long term have a really great career so you can be a superstar.

Now, there’s a good process for this. In the beginning, where you are now, maybe you feel like you don’t have a strong brand. Maybe you are not a superstar yet and that’s okay it’s normal. You have to develop this. It takes some time. The first step in doing this is to learn. My dad talked about this some, learning about your company, learning more skills. I think a great phrase to remember this is, learn first then earn, learn then earn.

So ‘earn’, of course, means to make money, to get, to receive and you know what learn means already. So you have to first learn. You have to focus on learning first, even if you have a job or several jobs that you really hate. You don’t enjoy them and maybe they’re not paying you much money. Maybe you’re earning right now is quite low or maybe your earning right now is not what you want. You want to earn more. You want to make more money.

Well, to do that you need to learn more first. You need to learn more skills. You need to learn more about your whole business, whatever your business is that you’re in. If you’re an accountant, if you’re a teacher, if you’re a salesperson, whatever it is, you need to learn more. So my dad talked about learning more about the whole company and the big picture, but you also need to learn more skills. You constantly need to be learning.

This is one benefit, maybe the only benefit of a bad job. So any job you have, even if there’s not much to it, there’s not much to do, there’s still a possibility to learn something from it, even if you hate it. As I said, when I was younger I had many, many, many jobs that I hated, but I always learned something from those jobs and over time I learned more skills, more skills, more skills and eventually that allowed me to get better jobs, jobs that I liked more, that I enjoyed more and that paid me more money.

So this is an important attitude to have. Learn as much as you can, especially in the jobs that you hate, especially when you’re not making much money. See, in those jobs most of your coworkers will not do much. They’ll just do the minimum. They don’t care because they don’t like the job. Maybe it’s not a great job, but if you’re trying to learn, learn, learn and to be a superstar at that job then people will notice.

Let’s say you’re a janitor. You’re just cleaning the office, right? You vacuum and you clean. Well, most janitors they just do the basic job, but you could be a superstar janitor.

You could do an incredible job of cleaning, first of all, so that everything is super clean, but then you could also start learning extra skills. You could start learning about the business that you’re working for, the office where you’re at. You could start learning more about the building. You could start learning more about the people who work there talking to them and you could start getting more skills than just cleaning the office.

In this way you start to connect with people. People start to notice you. They start saying wow, that guy or that woman is kind of special. They’re not like all the other janitors. There’s something different about them. A ‘janitor’ is just a person who cleans, but you can be a superstar janitor and eventually that will help you. I guarantee it will give you the chance to go higher or to do something else. This is true for any job you have. Learn as much as possible.

The next step is to push your strengths, to become special in one or more ways. I think the easiest way to do this is to focus on what you’re already good at, what you’re already strong at and make it stronger and stronger and stronger. I’ll give you an example from my own life.

As an English teacher I realized that I had some strengths and some weaknesses. My weakness was I hated paperwork. I didn’t like textbooks. I hated all the normal activities that most English teachers do. So I decided I’m not good at that. I don’t like it and I don’t think it’s useful, but I knew I was very good at having a lot of energy, about really caring about my students, about understanding my students very well and I also knew I was pretty good at coaching and leading and motivation so I decided to get better and better and better at those things.

I read books about leadership, motivation, psychology, language learning, the science of language learning, the biology of language learning. I studied other language teachers. I read research about language teaching and language learning. I read research about motivation and psychology. I constantly learned about these things and tried using them in my classes. As a result, I became different. I became special. I was not the same as all of the other English teachers.

Of course, eventually, I started my own company, but before that I had a lot of different jobs. It became very, very easy for me to get a new job, very easy, because I was different. I wasn’t the same as everyone else. I became a free agent, more like a superstar. It was easy for me to go from one school to another, to get higher job, to make more money or to have more freedom, whatever I wanted.

So you have to increase your strengths. You have to do more than most people do. You have to learn more than most people learn. Even if you’re not getting paid much, you have to have faith. You have to believe that in the long term trying harder and learning more and doing more in your job, even if you hate it, even if the pay is low, you have to believe that eventually that will help you get a better job that you enjoy more that pays more money.

It’s just an important attitude to have. In that way you build your own brand. You make yourself special and you start to become a superstar and that will give you a great career. It will give you jobs that are more fun that you enjoy more, it will give you more freedom and, of course, it will help you make more money, all of these things. So in your job whatever it is right now, if you don’t have a job then go get one. We’re going to teach you how to do that in future lessons. Just be a superstar in your job whatever it is and eventually you’re going to go up, up, up.

All right, see you in the next lesson. Remember, listen to these every day for at least seven days. Ten days is better, 14 days is even better. See you again, bye-bye.

The End.