Stop Pissing Me Off What to Do When the People You Work with Drive You Crazy (24 page)

What scenes do you remember fondly from your long life?

What are you most proud of accomplishing? What will others miss about not having you on the planet? Any regrets? Anyone you need to forgive or ask forgiveness from? What did you leave unfinished? Do you care about what’s in your inbox or on your endless to-do list? What flowers sit in the vase by your bed? What music serenades you into your transition?

Take as long as you like to imagine the best possible ending. Yes, there is such a thing as a good death. When you’re finished, write down all the details and then put it away for at least a couple of days, and preferably a couple of weeks. After your scene has had time to “mulch,” take your writing out and read through the passage again as if you were reading about someone else. What would you say about the person who

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14.
  How to Shine at Any Job and Why You Should lies dying in this scene? What was his or her purpose on earth?

Did that person accomplish what he or she came to earth to do? And most important, what can you do today to make sure that you do accomplish your purpose?

you Just need to keep working no Matter what

Sam Moore popularized the song “Soul Man” long before the Blues Brothers decided to cover it. Terry Gross, host of the NPR program
Fresh Air
, recently asked Moore if he ever fought boredom as he sang his most famous song over and over. “Absolutely” he replied. “But sometimes you just got to shut up and get up there and do it anyway.”

Nothing could be truer than that. Bored with your job?

Annoyed to tears by your lying, boring, screaming coworkers?

Shut up and get up there and do it anyway.

You’re probably asking, “How do you put up and shut up when your boss, clients, and coworkers are making you want to give up the will to live?” Try a perspective check. Think your job is bad? On a really bad day go to the Discovery Channel on TV or online and check out the popular Mike Rowe show
Dirty Jobs
. Every week Mike works for a day with some of the

“unsung American laborers who make their living in the most unthinkable—yet vital—ways.”

Consider the lot of penguin cage cleaner, sewer inspector, oyster shucker, sludge cleaner, or mosquito control officer, for example, if you think your job sucks. One of my favorite of Mike’s picks is the occupation of chicken sexer. Yes, it’s just what you think. Workers line up every day to determine whether chicks are boys or girls before sending them to their very different fates. It does give one perspective on our own worst days, doesn’t it?

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 Pissing Me Off!

In the next chapter, you may find some ideas to help you stay on purpose. You’ll learn about focus and intensity—two critical factors for fulfilling any purpose at work.

your

relationship toolbox

How to Move froM PiSSed off to Powerful

PiSSed off

Powerful

Hating your job

Finding a way to give any job meaning

Doing poor work

Doing your best, no matter what your job

Believing purpose doesn’t

Discovering your purpose

matter

Being in a meaningless daze

Purposely being

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15.

TAKE THiS JOB AND LOvE iT

How to enjoy everything at work.

Sarah Jones stares out the window of her office, fantasizing about possessing X-Men superpowers. If she were Angel, she’d unfold her wings and fly to freedom. If she were Wolverine, she’d pop out her six-inch claws and get the idiot in accounting who’d ruined her day. If she were Storm, she’d use her weather power to zap her boss with a lighting bolt for giving her such a lousy bonus. No such luck. With a huge sigh and a scowl, she returns to piling and unpiling the stacks of undone work on her desk, haunted by dreams of improbable rescue.

get intense: work with More energy and Focus

One of the classic works on mood is David D. Burns’s
Feel-
ing Good
. This popular work on cognitive therapy posits that, when we’re feeling down, almost any activity makes us feel better. Even more surprising, we’re lousy at predicting which tasks will make us feel better or worse.

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 Pissing Me Off!

Burns suggested that his patients keep logs of various activities and how they felt before and after performing each activity. One woman planned many activities that she anticipated would make her feel better. What was the one that actually resulted in the biggest mood boost? Balancing her checkbook!

Like most of us, she dreaded this task but had found that once she started, she focused on the satisfaction of getting it done. As you learned in earlier chapters, you are not a helpless victim of your mood. Exercise, healthy sleep patterns, diet, and appropriate expression of our emotions all play a role in our mood and energy level. If we’re unable to lift our mood with these measures, we need to seek medical help and/or therapy.

Working with energy, concentration, and focus is its own reward. Study after study has shown that working at this level actually raises levels of dopamine, one of the “feel-good” neurotransmitters, in your brain. Clearly, you need high energy and a good mood to work with difficult people.

Trying to boost your mood, however, can be a Catch-22. You have low dopamine because of health issues, your attitude toward work, or the crank down the hall; so, you don’t feel like working. The more you avoid working with energy and focus, the more your brain chemistry plunges—and then everyone and everything annoys you. The problem becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is needed here is a dose of good old-fashioned faith and will. You have to believe that you will feel better when you engage in the work rather than avoid it, and then you must will yourself to do it. Your work, of course, includes using all the skills in this book to learn how to manage difficult people. One way to pull this off is to follow Burns’s cognitive recipe. It involves identifying the thoughts underneath your feelings. If you feel sad, depressed, and uninspired, for example, what

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  Take This Job and Love It

thoughts (or cognitive distortions, as Burns calls them) might be underlying these feelings?

In Sarah’s case, those thoughts might be “globalization,”

the belief that the nut in accounting will
always
behave in an annoying way and that her boss will
never
give her a decent bonus. If she looks under her mood to these thoughts and talks back to them, she discovers that—even though her bonus last year was disappointing—the year before that she’d received a bonus that was more than she’d expected. Similarly, although Patrick in accounting could be a jerk, he had helped her out on end-of-quarter deadlines more often than she could count. Other cognitive distortions include black-and-white thinking (for example, people are all good or all bad), mind reading (I know my blind date hates my blue skirt), catastrophizing (no matter what project I take on, I’ll fail). If you learn to talk back to your mood when it’s founded on such unrealistic thoughts, you can sometimes pull yourself out of a funk.

when to seek help

If these “at home” remedies don’t work, you may need to decide whether you’re clinically depressed. If you are, you’ll find it nearly impossible to manage difficult people at work. How to tell? The American Psychological Association
(
www.

apa.org
)
offers this test in order to tell the difference between the blues—or occasional mild depression—and a major depressive disorder. The difference is one of frequency. The following symptoms are possible signs of clinical depression: n Persistent sadness

n Diminished interest in your favorite activities

n Difficulty concentrating

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 Pissing Me Off!

n Loss of appetite—or increased appetite

n Trouble sleeping—or sleeping too much

n Feeling restless or agitated

n Feeling worthless

n Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide

If your symptoms interfere with your everyday life, if you find that you’re canceling all social plans, or you keep missing work because you can’t get out of bed, talk to a mental-health specialist.

Be aware also that the most recent research finds a definite link between physical pain and brain chemistry problems such as bipolar disorder or depression. This doesn’t mean that it’s

“all in your head,” but simply that the neurotransmitters in the brain that govern physical pain are, in some way that we don’t totally understand, connected to those that govern mood. Treatment for these mood disorders can sometimes help solve physical problems as well.

work is easier with energy and Focus

The truth is that 95 percent of what we do in a day is a bitch. We don’t want to get up at 5:00 a.m. to go the gym, we don’t want to work on a particular project, or deal with certain people, and so on. However, you’ll feel much better if you’re totally committed and engaged in what you’re doing in the moment—even if it’s not exactly what you want to be doing. You may make a decision to do something different tomorrow or next week, but today, if you can work with 100 percent commitment, that level of engagement will turn out to be its own reward.

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  Take This Job and Love It

If you doubt this, read the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. In his classic work
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Expe-
rience
, he tracked ordinary people to find out what put them into the state that winning athletes and creative artists reach when they’re performing at their peak, totally engaged in the moment, and “flowing” without effort or strain. What he found was that ordinary individuals also achieve this state, frequently without knowing how they managed to do so. What worked, in part, was that they dove into what they were doing with 100

percent commitment, even when they didn’t feel like it. Essentially, Csikszentmihaly contends that most people are not happy because the universe wasn’t created to make them happy; on the contrary, life and the universe serves to frustrate us and help us grow. Yet “flow” states happen to people despite the challenges of the universe, and they happen to people from all walks of life, from all cultures, throughout the world. People who are in “flow” achieve a state of consciousness that’s in harmony with their surroundings and feelings. They don’t make distinctions between work and play; they create an inner state of being that brings them peace and fulfillment that’s separate from their external environment. They’re focused and feel that what they do is meaningful and has purpose. They’re absorbed in their activities, with a sense of connection to their inner self and also with others. The flow state helps create enjoyment and satisfaction with one’s quality of life, including work. Some people experience flow for minutes, some for hours, some for days on end.

While the faith that we can move into flow can be difficult to muster when the annoying boss or colleague takes us to task, the latest psychological research shows that motivation follows action not the other way around, as we may believe. You may be wondering, “What does all of this have to do with working with the jerk down the hall? I’m supposed to be

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 Pissing Me Off!

learning how to work with difficult people, not how to change my own mood.” The thing is, if you let your curmudgeonly colleagues determine how happy you are, you are setting yourself up for failure. Life is unfair and there will always be a jerk somewhere. Will that person bring you down? Bet money on it. However, by knowing how to manage your mood you can love (or at least like) being wherever you are even if your boss is a brute, your coworkers are awful, and the job or organization is hellish.

Before you abandon your current job, however, I’d urge you to consider that you might be able to use more of your strengths and therefore work happier by tweaking your work just a bit. As Marcus Buckingham points out in
Putting Your Strengths
to Work
, most people feel drained by too many activities at work that don’t use their strengths, but they could still find a good fit in their current position. What it takes is to discover your strengths and do more of those activities, while doing less of the activities that play to your weakness and drain you. In addition to self-analysis, of course, you also need to learn how to communicate with your boss and coworkers so they’ll support your efforts.
Beat the Flow-Busters