First off, I am not an HR professional. By the way, real talk, hug your HR professionals (if that is allowed in the handbook and by them). They are human beings and they have a job to do. Also real talk, some of them just like some of the quality professionals you know aren’t handling their gigs well. I get it. But the same people that give us a bad rap and don’t understand the job we have to do, are the same people that give HR a bad rap. Empathy people!
This isn’t employment advice. These are just tools and musings that I have had when going through the job life cycle.
There is an ebb and flow of the normal gig. If you are going through your work life without a set of basic tools there is not much I can do for you. I am considering writing something on basic tools and what I use currently for what that is worth. For those needing an answer now, contact me.
But let’s talk about when it really sucks. I am talking ethics issues, I am talking where budgest suck, everything is a problem, there are 400 initiatives and you are on every team (or conversely nobody is listening to you and it’s your process).
Now full disclosure, I have never googled, “what to do when the job sucks”. I just haven’t. I work the problem but that is my nature. But as with everyone else that tends to be human (I am part robot somewhere on my father’s side) you get to a point where working the problem just F’ing does not work. I leave you with this little nugget:
“I am not my work.”
Your brain is giving away rent free space to people you would not let in your front door.
I mean, you can be your work if you really want to, free country and all. BTW, I am in the US and that previous statement is up for debate in the coming months and years. Too soon?
So if you are amenable to the thought technology (props to Merlin Mann) that you are not your work and that you are a human being that has the choice in your brain to find a perspective other than FAAACK THIS PLACE, then here are is an alternative. BTW I was going to write more but I only have like 20 minutes to write this.
We are creatures that tend not to see good things until they have lit our face on fire (not literally). BUT OHHHH….how we can detect negativity and turn it into our central focus 1000 miles away and at the bottom of the F’ing Mariana’s Trench. Use that to your advantage. When you ID the neg, fast forward your brain.
Being in my 50’s (ow that hurt to write) I lived through movies that I had to pay once to see, pay even more money when they came out on video tape, and then a bit more when laser disc came out then the rationale world came with DVD. Then we now have YouTube. All that to say is that during the first part of my life when sitting through bad movies I wanted, F, I NEEDED the ability to fast forward through some pretty horrific movies. (By the way the movie analogy still holds with work because you can always leave the movie unless you brought someone with you then you are kinda F’d or a tragic asshole). As I got older and the technology got better, so did my thought technology. I learned that you can fast forward your good parts. And by the way, props to the new generation that just bail out of a video or fast forward when it sucks. You little F’rs are going to go far with this whole empowerment and agency thing.
YOU. HAVE. SEEN. THIS. MOVIE. BEFORE.
Or at least you have heard how it ends from other old timers. This will pass. You will get through it. But in the end. You are not your work just like you are not the movie. Yes both of those can change you in ways deeply and for a time. But I say to you, how sane are you if you let it own you? If you let it own you it means someone was selling it.
Now, there are people who don’t know that work is not a mental contact sport. Those people just suck. Don’t work for them. I mean work for them as long as you are healthy and can fast forward through their crap. In those cases, document everything. You are a person who deserves respect. I don’t give a F who is dishing it out.
Not saying report everything, but have your journal. I want you when you are feeling rather put down upon to read through what you have to realize, you are not crazy, and that this is not normal. Leave yourself mental breadcrumbs as to why you feel what you feel and who was a party to it. Journaling is a key discipline that evovled into this blog here. You should see some of the stuff I journal.
Be well. Stay Strong. They can’t eat you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0hSeQ5s_k&pp=ygUQbWVybGluIG1hbm4gZmVhcg%3D%3D