My dog has a collection of pinecones. She started collecting them as puppy. They are not allowed in the house, so my smart girl either leaves them next to the door or takes them to the patio where she has a bucket for all her pinecones. We are blessed with many pine trees around us and with every walk we take she finds additions to her collection. She is so happy and excited to find new ones and every time I see her I get a little jealous as I too strive to find such happiness from the simple things.
My goal in life is to find joy in the little thing, so I am following her lead (pun intended), learning how to find joy from simple things , seeing her when she finds a pinecone, seeing a butterfly passing by, my basil plants sprouting and even smiling when the pesky neighborhood squirrel eats my vegetables.
You go to work every day, happy or less happy, interacting with all your co-workers and with your clients. You get to the last day of your work week, a week that you thought was good, productive and had no issues. And then you get a call from your boss, a call that causes you to pause and look at your week and ask yourself did I miss judge my week? Did I miss anything?
You start to question yourselves and your actions during the week and after questioning yourself and asking the people around you, you understand it is not you. You just have a bad manager .
A manager that not only does not value or appreciate you but is also actively trying to depict you in a bad light while lying about your performance or constantly finding fault in what you do.
How do we deal with bad and toxic leadership when there is no one above said manager that you can speak to?
When we work in small or family owned companies, we sometimes lose when a family member who is also your manager has no one to be accountable to. Issuing a complaint to HR will not do anything as even they are beholden to this family and their job is at stake as well. God knows that the annual anonymous employee survey is not really anonymous or even if it is no one will do anything about what you write.
Dealing with a bad boss is not easy, especially when you know that they are wrong. Do we keep our heads low until we find a different job? But what if you really like what you do and your co-workers, do you give it all up for one bad leader?
As you can tell I am in a quandary, so for now I will enjoy my weekend and try to cleanse all the bad mojo out of my life and will look for all the positive things that I had this week.
If you are reading this on a weekend, I hope you have a great one, otherwise keep your spirit strong .
I was asked recently why I am starting a blog, there are many reasons. One of my friends mother passed away recently and when they organized the house later they found notebooks filled with stories and poems that the mom never showed anyone and they decided to publish them after her death, I don’t want my kids to read my notebooks after I’m dead, I want them to see them now, I want the world to see them now,
The other reason was the pandemic, in a way the pandemic made me think about my priorities and what I would like to do in the remaining years that I have. I lost my hearing during the pandemic and that added to my introspection time, I started listening to podcasts while walking the dog and discovered Mike Rowe’s podcast (yes. The Dirty Jobs guy), on several episodes he had his mother Peggy Rowe, Peggy spoke about her road to becoming on the national bestseller list and how she fulfilled her dream and all the ups and downs that led to that and that inspired me to no end.
The other reason that might seem mundane is just a simple quote from Farrah Gray “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” that was posted on Linkedin. This post made me stop for a second and think hard as it touched a nerve. I have worked for other people all my life, not always were my capabilities appreciated and when they were I was expected to do more for the same pay while someone else reaped the rewards. Mind you I quit from that company after I saw that my hard work was not appreciated but that belongs to a different post about toxic management.
All of these reasons plus several others that I did not mention made me think and think hard about how I would like my future to look like, i do not want to miss opportunities or reflect in years to come on how I missed them. I know many of us have the same feelings, especially after the last 3 years we had, at this point in my life I am choosing to forge ahead with a new view – I will not stop myself anymore, I will believe in my capabilities and if ever my bucket list if full I will simply get a new bucket!
We all have that dreaded back to work day, for some it’s monday, for others it’s going back to work after a vacation or a long weekend. For others it’s every day. There really is no wonder that many songs were written about Mondays and none of them positive, The Bangles have their Manic Monday , the Carpenters have Rainy days and Mondays (always make me cry – continuing lyrics) and i’m not even going to talk about the Boomtown rats – I don’t like Mondays, which is a very dark song. Does Monday morning blues have to be a Monday, probably not. By coincidence today is my day, not because it is a Monday, I work on Sundays so technically my Monday is a Sunday, instead I have meetings that I am being forced to attend with people I do not value and meetings that just drag on and on as some people just like hearing the sound of their own voice. You go to bed the night before with that terrible feeling of dreading tomorrow and wake up to the same pit feeling in your stomach.
So what do we do to make us less anxious about our “monday”? Suffer in quiet, look for a new job or be a Pollyanna and try to find the positive in this. Frankly I don’t want to be positive today, really not in the mood! But what I did instead was to find a course that looked interesting on Coursera about entrepreneurship and freelancing. Will see how my day ends.
My husband recently discovered that our dog knows how to get water from the fridge, the rest of us knew that she could do it at 5 months old so when he came to tell us we all shrugged our shoulders and said what else is new.
Our dog is wicked smart from a breed of self sufficient and smart dogs that was used during world war one to send messages, the breed used to be police dogs as well, but they are very independent and don’t always or really rarely listen unless they want to.
But I digress, my husband was very shocked that she can do this, while we all knew about this for 5 years, and started getting very worried about all the other stuff she knows to do and how much damage she can do. The rest of us looked at him and smiled, not because we think her eating chairs is funny or because she knows how to use a fridge, but we saw this as a sign of intelligence and were trying to figure out – how can we use her abilities for the good while my husband only saw the negative aspects of her capability and all this is a matter of perspective.
This week was a week of firsts for me, I don’t have them that often. First time I saw an Okra plant ,I really dislike Okra, so growing it was at the end of my list. First new pilates instructor in 6 years, I loved my usual pilates instructor, the gym I attend has decided to switch instructors for most of the classes. Not sure what they are trying to do and why as my old pilates instructor was very popular and all her classes were full, but i am not gym management. This instructor was terrible and this was the first time ever I left a class before it ended. I debated with myself the whole time I was in class how rude is it really to leave before, but she was so bad that I just decided to leave.
My other first was seeing a new doctor, my doctor for the last 25 years retired. And finding a new doctor is like going on a first date. You don’t quite know what to expect, you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. You check the doctor on all social media, make sure the doctor is part of your insurance plan and look for acquaintances that saw this doctor just like you would try to find any potential information about a first date. Except looking for a new doctor sometimes is a longer commitment. Although I was very worried I did like this doctor and that added to another first – a Monday that I did not hate!
First we had the great resignation, then we had quiet quitting followed with quiet firing. Now my feed is flooded with articles with explanations of how to deal with a bad manager. Maybe google spied on me again and heard me complaining about one of my corporate bosses again.
These articles Include all the possible psychological explanations for the manager as to why the manager is bad with explanations such as the manager being insecure and what strategies to use to handle these difficult bosses. When I read the articles my first thought was -Really? How come us employees how to figure out strategies to cope with difficult bosses, when did we as employees become therapists? I’m not sure about any one else’s job description, mine despite having a B.A. in psychology does not include providing therapy sessions.
Lord knows that if I continued to get my degree in counseling I would have been making a lot more. Going back to my original question, why do we even have to learn how to deal with a bad manager in the first place. Yes, some of us have no choice and are stuck for whatever reason at the place we are, we learn to play the game with said manager. But shouldn’t the emphasis be on training managers, training them to be better managers and also leaders in the first place. We are treating a symptom instead of looking for the cause and prevention. Training managers to be leaders or better managers should be the responsibility of the corporate or company you work for as better managers create better employees and in return a better company.
This morning i got in the car to go to the gym,i turned on the ignition and the radio started playing and the song that played was the Sound of Silence. Those who know me are aware that I lost my hearing overnight somewhere in the beginning of the pandemic, I went to bed hearing and woke up to silence, well almost silence, the tinuutis that was bothering me for several days was still there. In the beginning of my hearing loss journey this song would make me cry, cry for the silence, cry from understanding I will not be able to hear again , cry from the need to adapt to a new reality that I did not choose for myself.
Silence has a sound, even quietness has a sound. When I wake up every morning before I put my hearing aids in, the world is silent, kinda, since as the song goes silence does have a sound.
Somedays the silence is difficult, it reminds me of what i can’t anymore and what will never be my normal again, what i have lost and what i will miss in the future. Other times the silence is welcomed. The world is a very noisy place. All this noise causes listening fatigue as hearing with hearing aids is not easy on the brain, it requires extra work and some days my head hurts like no tomorrow. These days the hearing aids are removed the instant I enter the car and the silence in the car is just what I need.
We constantly hear about pros and cons of working from home, but all of this is coming from the point of view of either the employer or the employee. No point of view from the other people who share the same home.
My husband had a period of working from home many years ago when our children were small, we had 3 kids in elementary school and a dog. House was semi quiet from kid noise in the mornings, however as I was a stay at home mom at that point, this was my prime homework time – vacuuming, cleaning, cooking and such. My experience of working from home as the other person in the house was terrible. His office space was the kitchen, this meant stopping the dishwasher as it was too noisy during his meetings and forgetting to turn it on again, no vacuuming as he had phone calls, using the kitchen was impossible. I hated it! I was very happy when he switched jobs and worked back from the office full time.
And then the pandemic started and we all worked from home and had to navigate space, phone calls and everything else. Granted this time around our kids are adults, but with everyone returning home for a while we managed, in the begining with one dog and then with two.
This year the house started to empty again as workers returned to the office, however my husband still works from home.His company does not seem keen on returning back to the office for whatever corporate reason they have. How does that affect me, you ask? We work opposite hours, i have been relegated to the downstairs in the mornings. Our dog is not allowed to bark as it interrupts meetings , i am not allowed to sing in the shower and not because i am off key. Vacuuming is still not allowed during zoom calls, using the blender is not allowed, singing in the kitchen is not allowed and I’m not even talking about listening to music, at least in this aspect I am lucky as my hearing aids have bluetooth and it streams straight to my ears. But my home balance is off, i am a guest who is too afraid to interrupt during the day.
My point of view is if you do not let your employees back in the office then you must endure barking dogs and human activity in the house. Be reasonable as an employer about what the expectation is for working from home if you refuse to give a work from the office alternative. Not all of us have big houses with dedicated office space, most of us have normal size houses and live in a suburban town with shared spaces, with neighborhood kids screaming outside, our own dogs barking and the other humans in the house living. I know some work from home is great, but have you ever stopped to ask how the others in the shared space feel about this? Sage (our dog) and i just want to bark at the amazon, ups, fedex drivers, i really don’t want to vacuum but i don’t want to be forced to have 5 minutes break between zoom class to clean a space and really i do want to sing out loud and not only in the shower!
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