Relationship Manager

Everyone at CERIOHS is an owner and leader. We own our responsibilities. We lead by building healthy relationships. We are ordinary people working to end teen suicide through healthy relationships and personal responsibility.

CERIOHS is a small, fast growing registered charity with connections across Canada, the U.S., Europe and Australia. We have the intention of building a global presence to impact the lives of millions of business owners by showing them how to end teen suicide.

How we view the world, and what makes us different, is in our name. CERIOHS stands for Cranium Ex Rectum Institute of Happiness Studies. We don’t deal in illusions or wishful thinking. We focus on results.

We’re looking for a detail oriented, enthusiastic Relationship Manager who is a combination of administrative, office, marketing, and social media assistant. Your primary task is supporting the founder of CERIOHS as we build our management team. You thrive on being the person to whom people turn for answers.

Before you invest any more time reading this ad, let us be clear about what we’re looking for. CERIOHS is a newly formed charity aimed at ending teen suicide. We’re looking for people willing to support that cause AND grow into a leadership position.

We have a plan for putting funding into place, so you’ll start with 10-12 hrs/wk as a volunteer focused on executing a crowd-funding campaign (i.e. Kickstarter). The success of that campaign, and your performance, determines how quickly we can move you into being full-time paid staff. (Accommodation can be made for student class schedules.)

If you think ending teen suicide is worth the investment, then keep reading.

What is CERIOHS?

Your first decision is whether you want to work in this environment. CERIOHS works with people in a life crisis and organisations that support those people. Each day may bring you into contact with people crying out for healthy relationships, concerned for a a family member, or actively contemplating suicide. Our approach is illustrated in our name.

CERIOHS stands for Cranium Ex Rectum Institute of Happiness Studies.

We don’t deal in illusions or wishful thinking. Our vision is for a world connected by healthy relationships and powered by personal responsibility. We achieve that vision by focusing on the 8 Personal Empowerment Practices

Honesty
Caring
Accepting
Listening
Encouraging
Supporting
Trusting
Negotiating

These are words we read, say and hear almost every day. Their use is so common, it’s easy to forget they are the foundation of a process.

You have to be honest with someone before you can really care for them. In the process of caring for someone, you learn to accept them; warts and all. Once you have accepted someone for who and where they are, you’re free to listen to them.

Listening allows you to discover what the other person wants. Than you can encourage them toward getting it. Encouragement, of course, only goes so far. It must be quickly joined by supporting the person toward achieving their goals.

Support must be balanced with trust, and the person you’re trying to help is unlikely to accept your support without trusting you. They trust you to guide them well. You trust them to heed advice, make the best choice they can, and be prepared to learn from mistakes along the way.

The final step of the process is negotiating. We all negotiate every day, but it’s most often based on an imbalance of power. Children negotiate staying up past their bedtime. Employees negotiate being able to do, or not do, something at work. Our lives are filled with negotiations that are really the granting, or refusal, of concessions.

At CERIOHS, negotiating is the result of having built a healthy relationship based on the 8 Personal Empowerment Practices. While it’s obvious that everyone’s skills, experience and situations are not equal, we do not use that as the basis for negotiating. Our objective is not to make everyone equal. Our objective is to help each person, and the community, become healthier, become stronger, and move toward getting happy.

Our five core values:

Honesty: Speak the truth
Caring: Speak the truth gently
Consistency: Always speak the truth gently
Creativity: Always looking for right way to speak the truth gently
Fun: Entertain yourself always looking for the right way to speak the truth gently

Since we’re using the 8 Personal Empowerment Practices to achieve our vision of a world connected by personal relationships, and powered by personal responsibility, where do the core values fit, right? We invested a lot of time thinking about that very question.

There is some natural overlap. You have to value honesty and caring for them to become personal empowerment practices in the first place. So they are the foundation of everything we do at CERIOHS.

Now, be careful about thinking that makes everyone at CERIOHS a lovey-dovey, touchy-feely sort of person. That isn’t true. Honesty means sometimes having to say things that are uncomfortable; even painful. Caring means you do it as gently as possible, or as firmly as necessary, precisely because you care about the person to whom you are speaking. After all, if you saw your best friend about to step into an empty elevator shaft, would you speak softly? Or would you scream, shout, and try to tackle her because you care about her safety?

The philosophy that says You shouldn’t tell people they’re wrong is hurtful and destructive. It deprives everyone of the opportunity to learn from mistakes, to demonstrate caring, and to have healthy relationships.

How we work

The most valuable action is being honest with ourselves and each other. Being dishonest in a relationship is like leaky plumbing in a house. It can go unfixed, even unnoticed, for years before the damage is understood. By then the house, and the relationship, may be beyond repair.

Everyone at CERIOHS is committed to being consistently honest and caring.

Everyone at CERIOHS is a Stakeholder. We are sold out to what we’re doing, not employees who punch clocks. We choose the name Stakeholder because we only want people who will own their work, not just do it. Employees have to be told what to do, Stakeholders are proactive and make the job better.

We don’t have office hours or vacation policies or a central office. We’re not interested in whose car was in the parking lot first or who left last we believe in working together as a Committed Community to get results. (Even if sometimes we look like a community that ought to be committed.)

We work from our homes or places like breakfast joints, meeting rooms, and workshops. We might get an office someday, but only when it makes sense.

Our preference is to work with existing agencies, and to build upon existing programs. We use community centres and libraries for meetings, businesses and agencies for delivering programs, and the health of our communities as a measure of success.

Who are you?

If you like a fluid, growing, expanding organization that is local and quite small, and getting attention on six continents (sorry, we just don’t know anyone in Antarctica), and if you enjoy helping us figure out how to get build our funding and end teen suicide, we could be a good fit. If you are looking for a box within which you will find a clear list of tasks to perform and regularly set times to be at work, please do not apply we don’t see life that way.

If you enjoy meaningful work, a focus on RESULTS not activity, working very closely with other Stakeholders and clients half the time and completely on your own from home with no one watching the other half, we might be a good fit.

What do we want you to do?

If you find fulfillment in:

Performing a range of simple to very complex office work – entering contact info, updating flyers, sending newsletters and multiple email campaigns every week, helping out with book keeping, keeping schedules for events, working with event locations, keeping spreadsheets of existing clients, updating and managing multiple websites, adding/deleting/changing, printing, collating, assembling,
Helping us build our brand – cleaning up formatting on documents, making training materials look more professional, making sure our marketing materials stay clean and professional, taking instruction on producing new materials,
Running our Social Media – not the main job (see 1-6 above), but definitely a very important secondary one – helping us communicate with clients via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, YouTube, Stumble, Digg, changing schedules on our own sites, Meetup, Google+, Survey Monkey, and other ways to communicate with clients and potential clients. You would be making these come alive for us by being the real human being behind the curtain,
Working with word documents, spreadsheets, presentation software, basic graphic design software and maybe even casually with accounting software,
Event setup/breakdown – finding locations, printing and assembling attendee materials, bring and setting up refreshments, room setup, being nice and saying hello and making people feel comfortable, taking registrations, meeting needs during the meeting and breaking down afterwards, all with little or no supervision at times,
Working together with a few other people in Committed Community to live well by doing good, and to take business owners and leaders to the next level by transforming their lives,
Not knowing exactly what every day will hold – driving yourself to three different meetings in three different locations one day, being all day in your home office the next day, half and half the third day,
Not working 9-5, but 8-3, 9-4, 10-6, 9-noon, nothing today go for a walk, 7-6 etc,

…Then we might be a good fit.

Preferred skills:

Very high attention to detail – please don’t apply if this isn’t a great asset you bring to the game – it’s going to be the most important talent you’ll bring with you to do all the things we want done.
Sense of urgency – things can’t happen tomorrow (tomorrow never comes). We need someone who will get hives if things aren’t getting done today.
Excellent communication skills in person, on the phone, and in writing – ESPECIALLY in writing (you’ll be involved with everything from tweets to video scripts and e-mail series)
Skill and talent in graphic design is particularly useful.
High competency in word processing, spreadsheets, database management, email campaign programs (i.e. Aweber) is also useful, but expect to do some learning as we go and CERIOHS grows.
Ability to organize, monitor, and track numerous ongoing and one-time activities, events and projects
Ability to logically solve problems with little supervision
Strong attention to detail, did we mention this already?
Initiative and the ability to figure things out on your own
Comfortable with change and working in unknown situations
Discretion in handling and communicating sensitive information
Ability to manage multiple projects at once in a fast-paced environment
Willingness to work under pressure in a dynamic environment
A positive attitude and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done

What is the Compensation?

This position is volunteer (10-12hrs/wk) to start, with the aim of having you full-time and paid before the end of 2015. The biggest part of your task is helping us get the funding up and running for CERIOHS. You’ll be working directly the CERIOHS founder to connect with Toronto Business Improvement Areas, service clubs and city councillors. You’ll also be deeply involved in the execution of a well planned crowd funding campaign this year.

When funding is in place, this is a position with a salary base plus expenses (as you grow with the position, there may be travel involved). Compensation will be in line with your experience and the value you demonstrate. We want someone who wants to be here for the long haul and become part of our company leadership team as we grow our program and funding base..

What is the Next Step?

We don’t need to see your resume yet. Please do not send it and please do not call. For now just email us answers to the following questions:

How is this position a fit for you?
What would you get out of working in the environment described here?
What are the three biggest strengths you could bring to us?
How can we support you – what do you need from us to be successful?
Where do you want to go with your life (career is a part of life, not separate)?
What’s the one thing standing in your way to getting where you want to go?
List three things, in descending order of importance, that you bring to CERIOHS to take us to the next level.

What other helpful info did we forget to ask?

Send the responses to stakeholders@CERIOHS.org. We will acknowledge your submission by email. Those we contact again by email will be invited to a short phone interview. The next step will be to assess your fit for this position. Remaining candidates will be asked to provide resumes and a list of references we can call, followed by personal interviews with our leadership team. We are looking to fill this position as soon as the right person finds us.

Here’s a lot more about us:

Our current site is www.GettingHappyBook.com. There’s a lot to learn about the founder of CERIOHS at that site, and why CERIOHS was formed.

CERIOHS is at the beginning of its journey, and we have high ambitions. Our first project is aimed at ending teen suicide.

When we know each other better, we can take lots of time to walk through the programs CERIOHS runs and is planning. For now, it’s important for you to know the larger picture we envision.

Our primary work is a book series that picks up where the Chicken Soup for the Soul series left off. The series title is Getting Happy… (that’s why you’ve seen that phrase a few times already). Each title in the series addresses a life crisis. So it’s Getting Happy… when you wish you were dead (for teen suicide), after retirement (for Boomers), in your first career, and so on.

Each book in the series tells the story of someone who has met this life crisis and come through to the other side having achieved some measure of getting happy. This doesn’t mean they have everything they want or that life is just hunky-dory. Remember, we believe happiness is transient. That means life is a bowl of cherries complete with pits and stems.

Each book tells a story of inspiration. With each book goes a Personal Workbook. This is for every reader who is experiencing the life crisis. The workbook gives them advice and direction for finding their way past the crisis and toward getting happy.

There is also a Teaching Guide with each book. This is for people who run support groups, do counselling, or offer coaching. It gives them a resource to help people – yep, you guessed it – find their way past the crisis and toward getting happy.

The book series is supported by a podcast (a.k.a. Internet Radio Broadcast). The podcast is weekly, 30 minutes, and makes use of editorial commentary, interviews with experts and experiencers (people who’ve lived through a crisis), and some good, old fashioned rants.

So how does all of this support our goal of ending teen suicide, right? Good question.

There are two major components that contribute to someone considering suicide as an option. The first is feeling disconnected, and the second is feeling ineffective. Naturally, the antidote for these components is to help people feel connected and effective.

Building the book series gives CERIOHS an immense network of opportunities for youth to make connections (healthy relationships) and be effective (personal responsibility).

A big part of our work in this, our first year, is a crowd-funding campaign designed to get attention for the book series – and especially the first book. This is, of course, something with which you’ll be intensely involved. The crowd-funding campaign is our vehicle to making connections with Toronto’s 78 Business Improvement Areas, the University Health Network, community centres, service clubs and individuals. (We’re already listed to receive a Google grant to help propel this effort.)

CERIOHS Beliefs

Getting Happy is a result more than a goal

The most successful comedies have moments of poignancy. We appreciate happiness, joy and satisfaction precisely because they are not always with us, and because they come from different activites. We can get as much satisfaction from a well earned vacation as we do from a hard won achievement.

Mental Health has a spectrum

We believe mental health exists with the same spectrum as physcial health. Getting happy is possible because we are able to recover from mental illness just as we recover from physical illness.

Personal Responsibility and Community Accountability

All we can control is our choices. We are responsible to ourselves for choosing well, and rely on our community to hold us accountable for our choices.

Honest, Clear Communication

We believe in speaking honestly and directly to every situation. Tact is used to minimize hurting someone’s feelings. Avoidance – in any form – only creates more pain, for more people, over a longer period of time.

Failing Forward

John Maxwell makes this point eloquently in his book by the same title. We believe mistakes are our best sources of learning. The faster we make mistakes, the faster we learn. The faster we learn, the sooner we arrive at Getting Happy.

Education

We believe in equipping people with information and skills makes it possible for them to choose their transformation and conation.

Trapeze Moments

We believe in embracing the moments between knowing where I am and where I will land. It is in the fear of flying from one trapeze bar to anohter that we grow most, and discover the most about ourselves.

Individual Worth

We believe all of us are made to do, and be, something significant. We use work as one way for people to find and create that significance.

PLORK

We believe in the unification of play and work to achieve Plork. That which makes life worth living, and moves us most quickly toward getting happy.

Yield Per Hour

We believe in always making the highest and best use of our time. Sometimes that’s working 14 hour days to meet a deadline. It also means making time for family and friends, for rest and relaxation, and for appreciating what you have.

Speed of Execution

We believe in implementing now and perfecting as we go. Michael Masterson said it best: Ready. Fire. Aim.

Choice is Wealth

We believe wealth is the freedom to choose what we do. We guard that wealth by building healthy relationships with people who support honesty and caring, and taking personal responsibility for our choices even when it’s uncomfortable to do so.

Conation

We believe committed movement in a purposeful direction is the surest path toward getting happy. We make progress every day; some days a little, some days a lot, but every day brings progress in some way.

Transformation

We believe transformation comes from replacing POOP with PEP. Since nature abhors a vacuum, trying to rid ourselves of a bad habit makes no sense. Far better to replace the bad habit (POOP) with a good one (PEP).

Please respond to stakeholders@ceriohs.org

We look forward to hearing from you!