Helping your career & work life work better for you!
Sometimes I like to write about search terms that get people to my blogs. In this case the words I found were “my boss says I have an attitude problem.” Well … you do. If your boss doesn’t like your attitude, that’s a problem!
Even if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with YOUR attitude, the fact that your boss is singling this out means you need to pay attention. And hopefully take action to help improve things for yourself.
Whether at work or elsewhere, we all have emotional triggers of one kind or another. This is the story of “Marge”, a woman I know who can’t stand her boss. In fact, bosses of any kind drive her buggy.
She’s been working for over 30 years and feels she knows her job as well as anyone. Every time her boss tells her to do something, she feels her temper rise up and wants to bite someone — preferably her boss.
Each day, anything her boss says to her that conveys even the slightest reminder that she actually has to listen to this person, makes her blood boil. Oh those emotional triggers!
And so, even though Marge likes the work she does, she is miserable in her job. And she is also very angry a lot of the time. Which, despite a job she otherwise enjoys, ruins her work life and becomes a topic of complaints the rest of the day.
And yet she does have the power to make herself happier … just by making a few changes in how she handles the situation. And how she reacts to emotional triggers.
Job morphing is when you take your so-so job and, through patience and your own efforts, find a way to vastly improve it. Kind of like magic or alchemy, you work to change your job into something totally different and waaaay better for you.
I get lots of comments from people who feel trapped by their jobs. And granted, at times jobs shove you into a corner with seemingly no room to maneuver.
While some people call it bad luck and passively wonder when their luck will change, others take things into their own hands and find ways to take action, making a much tastier lemonade out of life’s lemons. With the help of job morphing, you can too. [Read more…]
The word “chaos” has been showing up in the news a lot lately. Especially when used to describe leadership management style. Some people actually thrive in a less-than-idyllic atmosphere. While others find that dealing with a chaotic workplace throws them into mental chaos and causes them to shrink inward.
No matter where you are in the personality spectrum, there are still some things you should know. And some things you might want to think about. Even the most experienced and emotionally agile of us can still get hit by a wild bolt of chaotic lightning.
When you’re dealing with workplace drama, you often don’t have a lot of energy left over to deal with actual work! Not only does it distract from what you need to do, it can make your job very uncomfortable. And, if you let yourself get caught up in it — even with the best of intentions — the drama can even come back to bite you.
But a lot of workplaces come jam-packed with drama. And conflict. And intrigue. Even small sub-plots that can turn out to be pretty interesting. And it’s tempting to find yourself listening and advising — and looking forward to more juicy details. Especially if your work isn’t all that exciting.
If you’ve read other articles here, you’re probably beginning to recognize that there are frequently patterns in how we behave at work. And apart from the carefully thought-out choices we make, “automatic behaviors” in the workplace can also step up to play a major role. Especially when it comes to finding success and happiness at work.
Automatic behaviors don’t arise overnight. Over the years, we learn a number of things that help defend us from the unknown. Or at least our subconscious believes these behaviors can protect us in some way. And so it sees them as a good thing — and works to keep them around.
Here it is again — our old friend perspective. And it’s just as important as attitude. In a recent post about attitude, Ryan spent a lot of his workday letting his negative side run wild. Instead, refreshed by a NEW perspective, he could have been using his creative energy to initiate things that both he and his boss would be proud of.
Considering Ryan’s dilemma, an adjustment in perspective might be very helpful. From his point of view, everyone else is to blame for his misery. But what if he stepped back and told his story from a new perspective — his boss’s. Or that of a stranger who had the power to see and know all. Clearly, the view would be quite different.
When you really love something as it is, you rarely spend time thinking about what it is NOT. Especially since the list of what it is not is boundless. But instead we take it in as a totality. And that’s the best way to fully love something, even ourselves. Appreciating it as a whole, and not putting the whole vs the parts in competition with each other.
For instance, when I eat a Chips Ahoy cookie, the only thing I might think about is how delicious it tastes and how nicely the chocolate balances with the rest of the cookie. But mostly, I just think “Mmmm!” I don’t worry about what it could be or what it isn’t. It’s a complete Zen moment, because I’m in the now, mindful of every delicious moment.
What if I start eating that same cookie and notice that it isn’t perfectly round? Or that the color on each one isn’t exactly the same. Or worse yet, what if I focus on every component of the taste? Hmmm … is that a bit of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil that just touched my tongue? Or maybe it was canola oil. Or palm. Or soybean!
On the label, it says it might be any of them. So let me taste it again more carefully to see if I can figure out which it is. And was that a bit of artificial flavor? Not really sure what that means, but yuck. Now the very same cookie doesn’t taste quite as good as it used to. (And I don’t even want to know what soy lecithin is.)
It’s like that with jobs, too. When you look too closely at anything, you most likely can find some pretty worrisome things. Nothing is perfect. But as time goes on and a job feels less than perfect, the parts start to call to us. “Look at me! I’m so wrong!!” “No, look over here. Did you hear what Mary just said?”
Unfortunately, most of us do have a tendency to get caught up in the details of the parts. At least at some point of our lives. Think about the way we obsess on our looks. Have you ever stared into the mirror and noticed things about your face that look glaringly wrong?
Your lips aren’t balanced. That new wrinkle looks huge. The dot-sized blemish on your cheek suddenly looks like a neon sign screaming PIMPLE BOY! When you focus on small parts of the whole, things can quickly look and feel like they are out of balance.
And I’m sure you’ve also had this happen with your mate or a good friend: things are going along fine And then suddenly that person says or does something that drives you crazy—not something HUGE, just some irky little thing. But you find yourself dwelling on it.
And “it” begins to loom larger and larger, dwarfing the other parts of the person you’ve always loved. Replacing the accepting feelings you once had toward the very same irky things. Before you know it, your dissatisfaction with “it” begins to color the rest of the relationship. And that’s what happens to many of us on our jobs.
Fortunately, most of us catch ourselves and put things back into focus. But sometimes, we hold on to the part we’ve isolated and make that our relationship. And when we do that, we have a problem. Very little may have changed, but the parts have won the fight. They’re in charge now!
What’s important to see is that, although the other person may have said or done something that bugged us, WE ARE CHOOSING TO MAKE THIS INTO A PROBLEM. By focusing on the part rather than the whole and feeding it, we let the part grow huge in our minds.
Now, I can almost hear some of you saying, “But they caused it! It’s their fault.” Yes, they may have done something to annoy you, whether on purpose or not. But even if you’re not fully aware of it, you’re helping to feed it.
As we continue to feed the hurt, anger, or annoyance, it grows bigger and bigger. Eventually, the piece of the person you’re focusing on becomes your whole experience of them. And you lose something important in the process.
This is exactly what many of us do when we think about our jobs. Maybe one of your coworkers gets more attention than you. Maybe your current project is boring even though the last one was pretty good. Maybe your boss said something to you that didn’t sit right.
Whatever it is, the problem occurs if we start to view the job ONLY with that close-up zoom lens we spoke of earlier. And we start to only see the parts. We forget to zoom out and see the whole picture. So while we obsess about the parts that aren’t working, we forget about the good stuff. And we also miss chances to get involved in things that we would enjoy.
When we let our minds get caught up in the parts we lose sight of the whole. And we are out of balance. The good news is that we simply need to recognize what we are doing. And then, with that awareness — plus the choice to zoom back out — we can help re-balance ourselves.
When we’re trapped in the small picture, we wind up missing out on the big game. There’s so much more we could be adding to our workday. Positive stuff. Even fun stuff.
But hanging out in negativity and frustration are not going to get us anything. Except the chance to really wallow in our own misery. And no one causes that or does that to us. We choose that for ourselves. I know that may feel harsh, but I’ve seen that simple realization turn a person’s life around.
If you want to re-balance the whole vs the parts in your work-life, there are some things you can do:
That’s all you need to do for now. Later on we’ll learn some additional techniques. But for now, just stop and see what’s happening. And take a moment to smile at your ability to break a longstanding pattern. Even if it’s only for a moment, you are making progress.
I used to have a dear friend, who I also once worked for. At least once a week, you’d hear her voice energetically proclaiming “This is a DISASTER!” And suddenly we were all expected to rush about and do something. But more often than not, there was no disaster. Just disaster thinking.
So what is disaster thinking? It’s when your mind grabs hold of a thought and pumps worst case scenarios and negative thoughts into it. And so whatever is really happening blows up way out of proportion. With little or no evidence to support the imagined disastrous conclusion.
Strangely enough, my former boss and friend was also an extremely innovative and dynamic leader. She created many important projects that changed kids’ lives. Perhaps it was that same wonderfully imaginative mind that got working overtime when things went wrong. [Read more…]
When you’re thinking about leaving a job, it’s usually because you’ve decided it doesn’t have much to offer you. Or simply that you can do better elsewhere. But rarely does the idea of changing YOUR attitude enter the picture. And yet, if you do it right (it’s not just about smiling more), it can make a big difference even beyond your job.
It’s easy to construct a checklist of things that are wrong with the job. Haven’t we all taken a piece of paper and listed “Good Things” and “Bad Things”? And depending on our mood at the time, we can make either column come out the winner, especially if we don’t try to match the weights of each item.
One of the things we don’t usually add to that checklist is our own attitude toward the job. And our attitude toward our boss and coworkers. We need to ask ourselves “have you really given it your all when it comes to managing, and if needed, changing your attitude?” [Read more…]