429. When You Hate Your Job

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 429, When You Hate Your Job.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hey there everybody, welcome to the podcast. I haven’t talked about this topic in this way before, I don’t know why but I’ve been coaching a lot on it, I feel like lately. It seems to come up with a lot of men, although of course it can come up with women as well. But I wanted to talk you through this topic of when you hate your job. And coaching is a really, really powerful way to take a look at this and create more of what you want in your life, no matter what your job and no matter what’s going on with your particular job situation.

So the first way or the first thing I should say that I want to encourage you to try on, I want to just offer it to you is that we have to shift out of blaming the job. That is the temptation is to list all the reasons why this job is worthy of hating. And I get it, you don’t have to tell me all that. You don’t have to tell me how terrible the conditions are or how horrible your boss is or how demanding it is or any of the things that I know you’re probably pretty practiced at talking about. And I’ve been there, believe me.

You’ve probably gotten really good at the story. You’ve probably thought of details that make it even more dramatic, because that’s what we do. And you’re really good at talking about all of that stuff outside of you, your co-workers, again, whatever the situation is. You have to be willing to stop focusing on that and willing to start focusing more internally on yourself. Now, that doesn’t mean that we go from blaming the job to blaming you, that’s not what I’m saying.

And that’s the temptation when I tell people, “What if we stop looking at all the external things and we start looking internally?” Then they go, “I shouldn’t think this. I shouldn’t behave this way. I shouldn’t have such a bad attitude. I know I should do this and I shouldn’t do that.” That’s not what I’m saying. That’s not going to work either. What I’m saying is, shift your focus internally and make it a focus of curiosity instead of a focus of judgment and blame. You have to get curious about what’s going on for you, because I’ve got to tell you something. There is nothing wrong with your job.

And by the way, I’m not saying you should stay at that job. Maybe you should leave that job and get a different job. We’ll talk about that in just a moment. But there’s nothing actually, literally, factually wrong anyway with the work you do, the people you work for, the amount of money they pay you, any of that. Your job just is your job and the people there are the people there and what they pay you just is what they pay you.

We want to, again, we sort of describe it as neutralizing all the outside factors only because those are things that we can’t directly control. We might be able to impact them, but we can’t control them. And so we want to put less emphasis on them.

And when you tell your brain, those things are actually neutral until I judge them as not being so, then your brain can stop looping on them and putting so much focus and emphasis on them. Your brain stops thinking those things are really relevant. And we want to shift your awareness to what is really relevant, which is what’s happening internally for you. So you can’t start judging yourself. Again, we just have to get curious.

Now, the next thing I want to say, and this is the way that I was trained at The Life Coach School that my teacher recommends and I do like it, that in most situations, unless you’re in real literal danger, being really mistreated in a way that is dangerous. Then I would say not to leave your job until you do at least a little bit of work to get to a better place.

And the reason for that is just because if you leave before you do that work, that internal introspective personal development work that I’m going to tell you about in just a minute here. If you leave before that, odds are you will find yourself hating whatever’s the next thing. Most likely it will be the next job that you will hate at some point, if not the next job, you will find something else to dislike instead. And we don’t want to bring that problem if you will, with us wherever we go.

So we want to use opportunities like this where we’re really struggling, really frustrated, really unhappy, whatever it is, really overwhelmed or burned out. We want to use those opportunities to better understand ourselves and to evolve ourselves to know how to not become negative, not become overwhelmed, not become burned out. So that whatever thing comes up in our life, we don’t bring that problem with us. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m not saying it has to be perfect. I’m not saying you have to get to where you just love your job and can’t wait to go every day.

I’m just saying, let’s do at least a little bit of introspective personal development self-evolvement work before we just swap out the job. Because these challenging situations are the opportunity for us to do so and then they make other parts of our lives better or at least easier. Are you with me? So what does that work look like? Well, it looks like first of all, doing a bit of introspective, taking a look at the stories in your mind, writing down your thoughts.

And this is probably going to be something you’re going to have to do more than one time. I would say consistently for a period of time, maybe a couple of weeks at least I want you to come home from work, or maybe in the middle of the work day if you have a chance to stop and write down all the sentences in your mind or as many of them as you can access about your job. Now, here’s what’s tricky about it. You’re going to think that they’re just observations of your job.

So if it helps you to write down, here’s what my job is like right now. Here’s what’s going on at work that’s so challenging, then I’m fine with that. Give yourself, I like to when I journal like this, I’m trying to look at my thoughts. I like to give myself a prompt that will help me access my thoughts. So it could be this is why my job sucks or it could be this is what’s so challenging at work right now or this is why I hate this job or some kind of a prompt like that. And then you’re going to write down everything that comes to your mind.

And you’re going to think that you’re telling us, when I say us, this is not meant for anybody to read necessarily. I don’t care if you don’t share it with anyone. In fact, I recommend you don’t because I don’t want you to edit yourself or think that it has to be well written or anything like that. It’s just for you. But you’re going to think you’re telling us about work. You’re going to think you’re telling us about your boss, about the kind of work you do, about the pressures that exist, about the people, other people you work with.

But what you’re doing is you’re telling us your thoughts. I promise this is true. There are not difficult co-workers or negative people or a negative toxic culture. None of that is reality. And at the same time, it is reality, there are those things. So please don’t think that I’m saying you’re just making it all up in your head. You have a valid reason for these thoughts. You have lots of proof and evidence and I don’t doubt that a lot of people agree with you, maybe most everyone agrees with you. It doesn’t matter. My point is they’re still just sentences in your mind that are creating your current experience.

Again, some of the things that I hear from people when I coach them on this topic is they say again, difficult boss, difficult co-workers, negative people. They expect too much of us. Their expectations are unrealistic. There’s not enough support. They don’t support me or they’re not supportive of my department or there’s a lot of red tape. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through. There’s a lot of bureaucracy. There’s no way to make a change. The people at the top don’t care.

These are all thoughts, I want to be clear. People tell them to me as though they’re like, let me tell you about the place where I work. We don’t have enough, sometimes, it’s there’s not enough staff, we’re short staffed. There’s too much work. We don’t have the supplies that we need to get our job done. Again, I’m not saying these thoughts are wrong. I’m just saying they’re all sentences that when you think them, they generate a certain emotion within you that most likely doesn’t feel good. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be thinking it. Are you with me?

Here’s some more. They don’t appreciate me. I’m undervalued. I’m underpaid. There are no opportunities for advancement here. There’s no opportunity to make more money. Are you with me? Listen, how can I say these are thoughts and not facts? Some of you are like, “Let me tell you about where I work, it’s a fact.” I promise you it’s not. I promise you, it’s just a story, even if it’s a totally understandable, believable story. It still makes you feel trapped, frustrated, etc., when you think it.

We’re not going to try to change the stories yet. We’re just taking a look at them. We’re writing them all down. Now, here comes the hardest step. And when I say hard, only because of this thing we all have called an ego or the natural man that wants to be right. This part of us that’s like, “I don’t think you get it. Let me tell you my story”, has to step aside if we’re going to do this step, which is you have to want to be wrong. Not only do you have to let go of being right, you actually have to want to be wrong. What? That is tough to do, my friends.

Now, here’s the good news. Right and wrong are very binary terms. I’m right about this or I’m wrong about this. I always begin with that on purpose because I’m just trying to bring you out of the depths of despair that you’ve dug yourself into. And believe me, I do this too. We dig ourselves into a hole of despair. And I’m just trying to get you out of the hole at least partly, I’m trying to get you climbing out. So I’m trying to go all in on what if we’re wrong.

But the truth is to get the relief that you might want, to create what you want at your job or for yourself in your life, you don’t have to climb out, all the way out of the hole. In other words, you don’t actually have to be completely wrong. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a bunch of co-workers who are really negative, these are your thoughts. I have negative co-workers. They don’t pull their weight. I have to do everything. I have to compensate for everything.

Or here’s a better one. I hear this a lot. They’re like, “I work with these people and they just don’t like me.” This is what people tell me, “I can tell they don’t like me. They’re mean to me. Maybe one of my co-workers tattled on me to the boss or turned me in or reported me as doing something, whatever and I didn’t do it. Or my boss doesn’t like me, he or she is out to get me.” So when I say you have to want to be wrong, this thought, they don’t like me. Do you want to be wrong about that?

No, it feels like of course I want to be wrong about that. Of course I don’t want people to not like me, but it’s really a valid question because of what I said before, this part of us, this ego part of us, that’s like, “I don’t want them to not like me, but I just know that I’m right.” And I just say, “But do you want to be wrong?” Because until you want to be wrong, it’s going to be really difficult to see it any other way. So as long as you’re like, “If I were wrong about that, it would be good news.”

And remember being wrong doesn’t have to mean they love me, this person adores me. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s not the opposite of this person doesn’t like me or maybe that is the opposite, but there’s a lot of other options that could go along with you being wrong. For example, maybe I’m wrong about this person not liking me. Maybe what’s more true than that is that they don’t really like anyone. Doesn’t that thought feel different? That person doesn’t like me, feels very different than that person doesn’t really like anyone. It’s a totally different feeling, isn’t it?

Let’s try another variation of it. If I was wrong about that person not liking me, I could be right about that person is in a lot of pain. That person doesn’t really like themselves. Isn’t that probably true? Think about the most difficult people in your lives, the person in your life who at one time or another you just knew didn’t really like you. Isn’t it true that that person, at least in that situation, in that setting, doesn’t really like themselves? That person doesn’t really know how to embrace people.

That person is threatened by me or that person is threatened by other people in general or that person has a lot of trauma or pain, they must have or they might have anyway that has led them to be the way they are today. Those thoughts feel very different than that person doesn’t like me. But before you can get to that, you have to want to be wrong. It doesn’t mean that you are wrong. You just have to want to be wrong about what you’re thinking and believing because you have to open yourself up.

So I want to add a couple other things, but I will give you some other thoughts. First, I want to say, do not indulge in the story fondling that might be taking place. And this is really tempting to do. I’ve worked in a lot of different jobs in my previous life before as an entrepreneur. I worked in corporate for many years and then I have done every kind of job you can imagine, restaurants, retail, all those kinds of jobs that I had in college, etc.

And it’s really tempting, whether you’re a waitress or a director or a C-Suite level person at an organization. It’s really tempting to indulge in story fondling, to get together with a co-worker who sees it the way you do and talk about it and complain about it and validate one another and add to each other’s stories, add proof to why the other person is right. It makes us feel really connected to the other person. Makes us feel powerful in the company, especially when we do it in secret, but it’s all a lie.

Maybe it’s not a lie that you’re connecting with the other person. It’s just kind of one of the lowest forms of connection, I think. But it is a lie that you’re making yourself more powerful in the company. You’re actually making yourself weaker, I would argue, in the company, but it feels powerful to us. It feels big, feels like we’re in on some kind of inside information that some of these other people just don’t get. It makes us feel elevated when it’s the opposite of that.

So you have to be careful, especially if you’ve been talking to people about this. Maybe you have certain people that you work with who you guys tend to get together and you know that you see eye to eye on these topics. You’re going to have to break that cycle, that’s not going to be easy. I would probably say something before the conversation comes up just so that you don’t want them to feel like you’re calling them out, telling them that they shouldn’t be talking about it.

But you might say, “I’m really working on myself here. I’m doing some personal development work.” I’m trying to picture if a man would say that. Maybe you just say, “Dude, I’m just tired.” I’m trying to talk like a man, don’t mind me. “Dude, I’m tired of feeling miserable so I’m trying this new thing where I don’t complain about work anymore. I don’t know if I can do it. It’s going to be tough. But just a heads up, I’m going to need your help with it. If you want to complain about it, it’s zero judgment from me, but not to me. I’m not the one anymore. I’m trying this new thing now.”

So you’ve got to have conversations with people if you’re going to break your patterns like that or else it’s going to be challenging to do. So then the next question I want you to ask yourself is, who do I want to be in this situation? This is one of my most favorite questions to ask myself and to ask my clients, especially when something really challenging is going on. The more challenging the better. Whatever is going on in your life, it’s really easy to be who I want to be when things are going well.

When everybody’s behaving how I want and everything’s going smoothly and as far as I know, there’s no funny business happening behind the scenes and everybody’s happy and positive. It’s really easy to be generous and positive and hardworking and all the things that I want to be. But when none of that’s happening, when I think people are lying or cheating or being dishonest or they’re greedy or they’re selfish, they only care about themselves, they have a terrible attitude. They’re taking advantage, they don’t care about me.

All these things that come up, when that’s happening, now can I be who I want to be? That’s tough. And I don’t know who you want to be. I’m not saying you should always want to be happy. I’m not saying you should always want to be positive or hard working or take one for the team. Please don’t misunderstand. I just want you to choose who you want to be. I don’t want you to let your circumstances dictate who you’re going to be. Do not let some company that maybe doesn’t even know that you exist, most of the company, don’t let them dictate who you’re going to be.

Don’t let somebody who’s in pain and who’s suffering and who’s struggling and who has a bad attitude or whatever, don’t let them dictate who you’re going to be. You choose who you’re going to be. And the more challenging the circumstance, the stronger your ability to be who you want to be becomes. The stronger your ability to navigate yourself and not delegate it to people or situations outside of you. Who do I want to be? Now, I like to think about it first in terms of the energy that I bring, the attitude that I bring, the emotions that I operate from.

And then I think about the actions I’m going to take. I just like to do it in that order because I don’t know about you, but I was trained to go to the actions first like what do I want to do here? And that’s a valid question. What do I want to do? Maybe I need to have some difficult conversations that I haven’t been having. Maybe I need to set a boundary. Maybe I just need to work harder. Maybe I need to have a better attitude. I don’t know, but I like to begin with the attitude, energy, thinking and feeling part of me.

What do I bring to this company? Here’s the irony. When we sit around talking about how negative our co-workers are, we are being very negative. When we’re talking about how difficult our boss is and how nobody in this company is supporting me or us, our team maybe, we’re being difficult and not supporting the company. I don’t want to bring the same thing I’m accusing them of bringing. I want to bring something different. I want to bring solutions. I want to bring selflessness.

I want to bring dedication and excellence and integrity and truth telling and all of that stuff. That’s actually a lot harder than just sitting back complaining. So who do I want to be? What do I want to bring? And then, what do I want to do here? Alright, so I’m going to give you an example here.

Before I give you that, I want to just say that I’m going to teach a masterclass that if you’re struggling in your job, if you hate your job. Maybe you want to just not hate your job. Maybe you want to leave your job and get a different job. Maybe you want to leave your job and start your own business. Whatever it is, if you’re stuck and you want help with your career, I’m going to teach a $59 masterclass that is called The Career Reinvention. I want to teach you how to use these tools to reinvent your career.

We’re going to go deeper on some of the things I’ve talked about here. And I’m also going to be interacting with those of you who come so that we can get really specific and I can show you how to utilize this with wherever you’re at in your job or your career. So you’re going to be able to register for that at jodymoore.com/masterclass. We have a couple of other masterclasses there too, if you want to check those out, one for young single adults who want help dating and one if you’re feeling stuck trying to find your purpose.

So let me give you the example I wanted to share with you. So I had a job that I loved and then things in the company changed. This is when I worked in corporate, things in the company changed and I found myself reporting up through a totally different structure with a different boss, kind of different objectives even, quite a bit of things changed. A lot of that, meaning that the people I now reported to and even most of my direct team were all off site in different states even. So everything just, I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me.

A lot of the things that I loved about my job got taken away or changed and I didn’t like it at all. So I didn’t like the way it was and I had the way it used to be to compare it to. And so I had a lot of complaining and venting to do about what was wrong. I had a terrible attitude. Now, I wouldn’t have described it that way at the time. I would have said, “They should never have made this change. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not good for the company.”

I would have acted like I had not done anything wrong, but in hindsight, they made a lot of changes and then I had a really bad attitude about it. And one of the things that was the most frustrating to me was I had a boss who, like I said, was remote and I had a really challenging time communicating with her. At the time I would have said she’s terrible at communicating. I would have blamed it all on her. I would have said, “She never replies to my emails. When she does reply, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

And this is not just me, I could walk around my building and ask 10 people who interact with her, what they think about her communication style, and they would tell you, “I don’t understand a word that woman says most of the time.” I was like, “This is just the truth.” This is not just me. She would accuse me of doing things wrong or not good enough and she would always say it in a weird way like, “Why would you ever do that?”

She even one time, reported me to some higher ups in our organization as having broken some trust by sharing some confidential information, which I never did. She incorrectly accused me. So in my mind she was out to get me. She doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t like me and she doesn’t communicate with me. And I can’t win at this job because she won’t tell me what winning even looks like. That’s the way I would have described it.

Luckily, one of my friends at this organization and somebody else I indirectly worked with was a coach certified in the model. I was not at the time, by the way. And so one day I called her up and I was like, “I need your help. I need to talk through this because I’m just so frustrated.” And as we talked through it, she said to me, “Okay, let’s just pull out the facts. Here’s the facts as I hear you tell them. You have a boss who doesn’t reply to emails within the 48 to 72 hour window that you feel is appropriate. You have a boss who sends you emails and often you don’t understand what she wants. Is that what you’re telling me?”

The rest was a lot of drama, we could pull a few facts out but those were the two facts that I was like, “Yeah, okay yeah, I’d say those are the facts.” She was like, “Okay, so who do you want to be? What do you want to bring to this situation and to this organization?” And she’s like, “Let’s just take it out of this relationship with your boss. Let’s just talk in general, who do you want to be here at this organization? And what do you want to bring to this organization?”

Now, by the way, at the time I was like, “I think I’m kind of done here. I don’t know how long I’m going to stay at this company.” So it wasn’t like I want to be the CEO. That’s not what I mean. I just mean for now, while I am here, who do I want to be in any given situation in my life, who do I want to be? I want to be someone who brings excellence and compassion and openness and honesty and is able to be real and have real conversations and tell the truth and all of those. That’s who I want to be. And that is not who I was being.

And I want to bring that to this organization even if I’m only here one more week. Any place that I am working with and interacting with, I want to bring goodness to and I want to bring excellence to. And I want to be the employee that makes a positive impact on people and on the organization, whether I stick around here or not. So given the facts that we’ve pulled out, leave all the drama aside and then given who I want to be, what might I do?

If I was that employee who was generous and kind and gave people the benefit of the doubt, or at least stayed out of other people’s business, when it comes to judgment, sometimes just being, none of my business, not my journey to figure out who she’s being. Who do I want to be? Then I could just decide what actions an excellent, generous, good employee would take. And it was so simple when we laid it out that way.

We decided that I would email her and say, “This is the work I’m going to proceed with on this project and this is the way I’m planning to execute it. If I don’t hear back from you by Monday at noon, I will assume this is good and I’ll run with it. If you’d like anything different, let me know.” I was like, “That’s so easy when you put it that way.”

And then if she replies and I don’t understand the reply, I could simply write back. “I’m interpreting your reply to mean a, b, c. If I don’t hear back from you by this time and this date, I will assume that’s correct. If that’s not correct, please feel free to let me know.” It was actually really simple in the end for me to still be excellent at my job, even when I didn’t have the support from the people above me that I was used to having. And that was life changing for me because I realized I can be successful anywhere and I can find positivity.

I can find happiness and joy even if I decide in the end, it’s a lot of work to do that here, I think I’ll go to another organization instead. That’s what I mean by do at least some of that work on yourself before you walk away, unless, like I said, you are in some kind of immediate physical or emotional danger, in which case just walk away and let’s find a new situation. But usually that’s not the case in this setting anyway. In my experience, usually there is some internal work that can be life changing because you’re going to come across difficult people.

You’re going to come across not ideal circumstances, whether it be the next job or volunteer work at your church or in your family situation. Welcome to life. Now what, how do we be who we want to be? Alright, so again, I will see you at the career reinvention masterclass if this is a topic that you’re struggling with. Head to jodymoore.com/masterclass and I promise it will be worth your while, otherwise, thanks for joining me today on the podcast everyone. Have a beautiful rest of your week. Take care.

Coaching changed my life and I’ve watched it change the lives of thousands of men and women since, but is it right for you? You’ll only know by giving it a try. Try it out today at jodymoore.com/trial.