Two weeks after he was born, Jabez LeBret’s schizophrenic mother shot his father. Growing up, Jabez often existed for days on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every meal. At age 16, he was on his own, penniless and homeless, living in a car. Not a promising start, but Jabez managed to turn his life around by helping other people. Jabez was born in Alaska, raised in Spokane, and now lives and works out of Seattle. At age 31, he’s catapulted himself from a dead-end job flipping hamburgers to a successful motivational speaker. Not bad for a kid who didn’t graduate from high school!
A sentence on his website, JabezProductions.com, summarizes this young man’s philosophy: “There is no sweeter success than knowing you are going to succeed and no better way to succeed than by contributing to the success of those around you.” It’s the heart of the message he shares with huge corporate clients such as General Electric, Sony, Microsoft and Nordstrom.
He’ll be the first to tell you life wasn’t always easy for him. Jabez, whose name comes straight out of the Old Testament, lived with his grandmother until he turned five. His father recovered from the gunshot wounds and his mother underwent psychiatric treatment, finally regaining custody of her young son. He and his mother lived in a tiny house in Spokane donated by a local church.
“We were very poor. My mother couldn’t work or function normally due to heavy medication. I pretty much took care of myself. I ate peanut butter and jelly every meal every day for a long time,” he said.
Things went from bad to worse after his mother met and married his stepfather who adopted him when he was about 10 years old. “He was physically, mentally and verbally abusive. When I was 16, I came home and saw him push my mother again and that was it. We scuffled with him and then we both left.”
His mother took off on her own, disappearing for a month and a half, and Jabez was on his own, homeless and jobless. After staying at a friend’s dorm room for a while and then bouncing from friend’s house to friend’s house, he eventually found himself living in his car. A year and half later he finally got a job at McDonald’s.
“All my life my parents told me I was a loser and would end up with a dead-end job at McDonald’s, and didn’t I do just that?” he said. “Not that it was a bad job or a bad place. Any work is honorable.” But he said it confirmed everything he’d been told about himself.
Nothing changed until he realized one morning that he’d allowed other people to determine where he was in life, and he determined to take control over his own destiny. “I couldn’t blame others. We all have our burdens to carry. We can choose to head ourselves in a different direction.”
“All my life my parents told me I was a loser and would end up with a dead-end job at McDonald’s, and didn’t I do just that?”
Not having a high school diploma made it hard to find a better job, until he finally got one at AT&T selling Lucent phones. But Jabez knew he needed an education so he got his high school diploma by taking a GED (General Educational Development) test. After that, he managed to get himself accepted into Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, a Jesuit liberal arts school.
“The Jesuits gave me a conscience,” he said.
He’s adamant about contributing to someone else’s life on a daily basis without any self-interest. He usually does this by pointing people toward a different path or referring them to someone else who is able to help them in a way that goes a step beyond networking. The idea is to listen and ask questions until they can define their need rather than their goal.
“You have to drill down until you find their most pressing need,” said Jabez.
To explain the difference, he cites an example from his own life. One of his current goals is to make his latest book, “Contribute Your Way to the Top,” a best seller. But before he can achieve that goal, he says his need is to get the book edited and polished to perfection, a process every author needs assistance with prior to his goal of publication.
His previous book, “Good Great Hired,” is aimed at college students and unemployed people who want to get back into the job market. A shocking statement he makes in it is that people are wasting their time by searching for jobs online.
With rising unemployment and a tightening job market, Jabez feels it’s ridiculous to limit a job search to passing out resumes or applying online for hundreds of jobs.
“The truth is that 80 percent of managers are hiring people they know, even for jobs posted on the Internet,” he said. “Blindly applying for jobs online is like throwing spaghetti on a wall and hoping it sticks.” Instead, he tells people to seek “informational interviews” with potential employers to ask what he or she did to become successful. This, he says, paves the way for a job-hunter to learn what skills are needed to get hired for a particular job and build a network of potential future employers.
“Even if there’s no job open at the time, ask a hiring manager for 15 minutes to talk, and say that you’ll buy the coffee. That person will feel a connection to you. Focus on having five to 10 meetings a week with people, informational interviews where you are planting seed. You’re building rapport with them, showing you care.” Jabez says those interviews “move you into that 80 percent.”
Jabez has another piece of unusual advice for those who get an employment interview but fail to get the job. He says they should ask the interviewer what kind of person the company is actually looking for and, instead of being bitter about losing out, try to send in someone else you know who fits the bill better.
“Managers remember team players and those who are creative enough to find solutions that work,” he said.
A big no-no Jabez talks about is getting on Twitter or Facebook after a job interview and bragging about the job as being “in the bag” or, conversely saying the hiring manager is an “a-hole.” More than one job has been lost when a manager got online and read comments like that about him or herself. Jabez believes that people need to be confident in themselves, to dream big and see themselves as successful long before they get there.
“Months before I was a speaker, I started telling people I was one,” said Jabez. He visualized himself as living the way he wanted to live and refused to be “here” when he wanted to be “there.”
A positive attitude is key to both his lifestyle and the advice he gives in his motivational seminars. He advises people to write out affirmations and repeat them in the morning and at bedtime. Using his own philosophy of giving away what has worked for him, Jabez shared one of his daily affirmations: “I easily and creatively solve every obstacle that I encounter.”
Confidence radiates from Jabez, even during a telephone conversation. It is clear that his message has worked well for him as he turned the lemons of his early life into a very tall glass of lemonade.
See Jabez in action on his site: www.jabezproductions.com
Thank you Jabez, for sharing your Story with us.
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