Working Recovery

This week I had the pleasure of attending a training course held by my company for employees across the fifty states. The training was pretty incredible and I wished I could have gone to such a conference in the beginning of my career with the company.  They decided to end the series with a guest speaker (of the motivational type) about the importance of providing excellent service to our clients.  I was already feeling a bit down and bitter since my peers were expressing much love for their jobs and their respective team players, and I was unable to express the same amount of passion for my line of work.  The truth is that up until that point I was unsatisfied with my position and felt that my peers were facing the same hardships.  To my surprise, I was the odd man out in an unhappy working relationship. Since I’ve been with the company, I have been bounced around the office and placed with the most difficult teams due to my “people pleasing” nature.  Whenever there’s a difficult team that my fellow coworkers will not touch, they are automatically assigned to me.  However, when discovery happened back in January, I was in  no condition to handle such a demanding workload.  I was already being treated sub par at work, add to the fact that my personal life was falling apart, I pretty much came to work and underperformed.  I was able to shift a lot of the blame for my tardiness in completing assignments and mistakes to having difficult teams and a high work volume, and slowly but surely, my quality of work diminished and so did my motivation to excel.  I was stuck in the worst kind of rut – I really didn’t give a shit anymore!

So when this guest speaker spoke about doing ourselves and the company the favor by “getting off the bus” if we were not natural service oriented people, I felt panic.  I did not want to get off the bus. I love my service-oriented field, but disliked the difficult teams I was placed with. So after the meeting, I had a bone to pick with this speaker.  I was almost in tears as I approached him.  I asked what happens if you are not satisfied with performing at sub-par standards, but don’t have enough resources and are being stretched too thin? His suggestion to me was to give myself a timeline. Start the process of change with myself, see if there are any behaviors I can continue doing, start doing those added things that will raise my performance above the rest and stop doing those behaviors which are hurting my work performance.  Once I’ve improved my performance, approach management and my teams and express what I need from them in order to continue performing at peak levels.  I am to give myself a mental timeline as well, in order to determine if they are doing their parts as well ( approximately three months).  If at the end of this timeline ( his suggestion is January 2010), I am still feeling the same way I felt during our conversation, then it’s time to look for another position.  This realization startles me, I do not like to consider myself a failure in any aspect of my life, including my career.  And to this comment, he replied: “Listen, Enigma.  It’s not that you’re not a good employee, it’s just that your talents and services can be best suited and appreciated elsewhere. If they are not being respectful of your time and resources, then you owe it to yourself to leave.”

That one statement brought everything full circle for me.  So much of my work situation reminded me of my relationship with my husband – pre and post discovery.  Though my husband came into the relationship with his SA baggage, my reactions to his actions only help create this vicious cycle of emptiness and heartbreak.  Our separation allowed me to focus the attention on myself (What are the behaviors I can continue, start and stop doing?). During this time, I was finally able to concentrate on the root of my own codependency issues.  When the time came to reconcile, I compiled my list of conditions/concerns that would allow me to feel safe and appreciated in this relationship. At this point, it is up to ML to fulfill his side of the equation.No matter how hard one can try, a relationship cannot be successful if only one person is doing all the work. All I can do is clean my side of the street and express my concerns to the other party.  If they do not wish to hold up their end of the equation, then it does not represent a failure on my part – it’s just time to move on.  Though this is not a new concept (change coming from within) as I’ve heard this concept in S-Anon, I am astonished at how much of the 12-steps I can apply to my day-to-day life. I’ve noticed all the positive changes in my personal relationships due to practicing these program principles in my personal life, now it’s time to start applying them to professional relationships. I am going back to work tomorrow with new eyes in which to view my current work situation – there’s still hope!