Work has been voluminous of late, but I will be blogging more often now that my schedule has freed up a tad bit. Today’s entry arose out of a conversation I had with someone recently about the BaZi of a prospective employer. Our conversation was conducted over Blackberry Messenger so it sort of went something like this.

Him: is it okay for me to be employed by a Rat, born 17 xxxx . I was told it’s not okay for me to work for a Rat.

Me: That’s just superstition.

Him: So how?

Me: What exactly is it that you are concerned about vis-a-vis working for this person?

Him: Will I be able to work for him?

Me: Obviously the chart has some issues but the question is, what are you concerned about with regards working with him? What kind of problems do you NOT want to have?

Him: I don’t want to have problems with him like I have with the current boss.

Me: But you do realise that your chart shows that you will always have problematic bosses.

Him: I don’t want to work for someone who gives me vague instructions.

Me: Now we’re getting somewhere…

Now, what’s interesting about the conversation we had was that this person was asking me to check the BaZi of a prospective employer.  That makes sense – it’s a good idea to know who you are going to work for. BUT, the crux of the issue was that he didn’t know what he wanted to know about the boss. He just asked a very vague and broad question: can I work for this person?

Now, the short and long of it is that the answer to any question along the lines of ‘Can I work for this person?’ has to be – surely that depends on whether or not you want the job/need the job? In the case of the individual who I was attempt to provide BaZi by Blackberry advice, he has always had the same problems in the past with bosses because in his chart, the Officer Star is a Star that is not favoured by his Day Master, which is Bing Fire.

So naturally he is keen to avoid ‘problems with the boss’ but yet, he does not actually know (until pressed) what is the problem that he wants to avoid.

In this case, I could foresee that his prospective employer might be facing some issues with partnership and potential legal issues. Is that going to affect him? Well it depends on exactly how he’s supposed to work with this future employer. Seeing as this person who sought my advice is a fairly senior management employee type, he obviously will be working very closely with his future employer as part of the senior management team. So the boss’s partnership issues and legal issues are likely to be his issues to some degree.

But the fundamental problem here is that this person simply has not been able to adjust or modify his expectations of his superiors, despite what his chart tells him. The fact is that HIS CHART shows that he will always work for the same TYPE of superior. So to expect something different each time around seems to be rather futile. And somewhat foolish.

But at the same time, to ask if you will be able to work well with someone, without really knowing what it is that you want out of that superior or what you are trying to avoid also is a rather unwise course of action. It comes back to my persistent siren call to clients, students, or anyone who asks me about BaZi. Don’t be vague. Be specific. If there is something in particular that you are trying to avoid, you need to know what it is.

Otherwise, how the hell do you know if that’s what you don’t want?