Being more of a New England Patriots fan than a football fan, I didn’t have a lot of interest in yesterday’s Super Bowl  game, but I did watch it.  I’m not one to pass up a party with chili and ribs and other food that tastes really good and is really bad for you!

My favorite part of the game, (besides Springsteen doing the halftime show), was watching the commercials.  I thought most of them were pretty lame this year but I just loved the CareerBuilder.com ad.  If you didn’t see it, it showed a series of people who were miserable in their jobs because of stress, disrespectful and intolerable co-workers and the like.  It showed the symptoms of this stress including crying all the time and the desire to punch small animals.  And it was done in a sort of “I packed my Grandmother’s suitcase” kind of way.  You remember that game you used to play to pass the time on long car rides, where you repeated everything that had been ‘packed’ before and added something that began with the next letter of the alpabet?   So, over and over again, we saw a woman screaming and banging her head against her car steering wheel, an empoyee walking past his co-worker’s cubicle calling him an idiot, a half clad colleague, picking his toes, a man crying and someone punching a stuffed baby koala bear.  And, we saw the alternative to all of that, the woman riding a porpoise in the turquoise sea, having the time of her life. 

This commercial made me think of my many clients who do what they do in many areas of their lives because it’s what they’ve always done and it’s comfortable and familiar and because they don’t know how to get out of the perpetual loop.  They do it, in part, because to do things differently is too scary.  Being safe serves them in some way.   Yet at the same time, there is a little movie running in the background tempting them to a life they love, relationships they yearn for, a way out off the hampster wheel they are stuck on.  

The CareerBuilder.com commercial was criticized because the ‘experts’ felt that in this economy people  wouldn’t be complaining about having a job, any job, given the number of people who are unemployed or fear they soon could be.   I think you can take away a bigger message from the ad.  First, there are jobs out there.  The same companies that are cutting back in some areas may be hiring to beef up other areas.  And, it’s dangerous and self-defeating to think otherwise.  And, for me, the ad is a caricature of life.   We put up with, we tolerate, we let others’ behaviors run us, day in and day out.  We bang our head against the wall, we cry, we allow ourselves to become victims of our circumstances.  But even in challenging times, we can find ways to think differently, show up differently or do things differently in order to increase our satisfaction. And we have the power to make changes no matter what our situation.  

To see all of the Super Bowl ads, go to http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1874549_1874552_1876150,00.html