Lessons learned about work
Feel free to chime in if any of this corresponds to your own experience. Or if it's the opposite. *g*
1. Professional anything, especially if there is other human contact involved (phone or live), is kind of a sucky field for emotional people to work in. I mood-swing more at work than I ever do in the rest of my life; all it takes is someone refusing to help me, or being given the run-around by more than one person, or making one major mistake, and I'm (invisibly) floundering for some kind of level head. I've gotten pretty good at holding that stuff in, as well as judging how long I can go before I need to run away and hide for a few minutes.
But it's like Vulcan training! "I have no emotions. What are emotions?" Riiiight.
2. This is the professional standard for a reason. I recently had my very first burst of actually caring how something came out at my job; a guy whose check went astray badly needed the $$ and I sort of became his advocate to get that check recut in a timely fashion. Problem: though I crossed all the "t"s I knew about, there turned out to be one that I didn't. Result: error on check, even though it got to him this time. *sigh* Caring = mistakes?
3. You're supposed to be perfect at the job. Nobody is. But that's the standard. So there's always going to be a tug-of-war between one's self-esteem and the fact that you can never meet the gold standard. (aka: work is not where you look for validation, ever, of any kind.)
That's it for now, because the rest of the stuff in my brain is even less fun that those, and those are the ones I've been thinking about lately, anyway.
1. Professional anything, especially if there is other human contact involved (phone or live), is kind of a sucky field for emotional people to work in. I mood-swing more at work than I ever do in the rest of my life; all it takes is someone refusing to help me, or being given the run-around by more than one person, or making one major mistake, and I'm (invisibly) floundering for some kind of level head. I've gotten pretty good at holding that stuff in, as well as judging how long I can go before I need to run away and hide for a few minutes.
But it's like Vulcan training! "I have no emotions. What are emotions?" Riiiight.
2. This is the professional standard for a reason. I recently had my very first burst of actually caring how something came out at my job; a guy whose check went astray badly needed the $$ and I sort of became his advocate to get that check recut in a timely fashion. Problem: though I crossed all the "t"s I knew about, there turned out to be one that I didn't. Result: error on check, even though it got to him this time. *sigh* Caring = mistakes?
3. You're supposed to be perfect at the job. Nobody is. But that's the standard. So there's always going to be a tug-of-war between one's self-esteem and the fact that you can never meet the gold standard. (aka: work is not where you look for validation, ever, of any kind.)
That's it for now, because the rest of the stuff in my brain is even less fun that those, and those are the ones I've been thinking about lately, anyway.