204. 3 Key Skills for Staying Sane in a Not-So-Great Workplace
Ever feel like your job is sucking the life out of you, but you’re not quite ready to leave? I get it—so many of my clients have been there, too.
That’s why I’m excited to share this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. In this episode, I walk you through three sanity-saving practices you can use right now to create a better work experience, even if your job isn’t a great fit.
I won’t give away all the details (you’ll have to listen to get the full scoop!), but here’s a sneak peek of what we’ll cover:
The surprising way boundaries can improve your workday (even if your boss doesn’t change a thing).
How clear communication around expectations can relieve stress and keep your workload under control.
A mindset shift that will stop your brain from spiraling into negativity and help you feel better at work, without pretending it’s perfect.
If your work situation is tough and you’re ready for relief, you won’t want to miss this episode.
And if you’re thinking, "I need help with this NOW," I’d love to chat about how we can work together to get you feeling satisfied AF at work.
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
The power of boundaries to protect your time, energy, and peace of mind—even in a difficult work environment.
How managing expectations can reduce stress and improve communication with your team.
Why shifting your mental narrative can help you feel better about your current job, without pretending everything is perfect.
Practical examples and tips for using these strategies to stay sane, avoid burnout, and plan your next career move.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about three ways to stay sane in a not-so-great workplace.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, this is Kori Linn and welcome back to another episode of Satisfied AF. Recently, I wrote an article for Elpha, which is a professional network dedicated to helping women succeed at work. And I’ve been a member there for several years now, and it’s got some really good resources and conversations, and I was happy to share my expertise with them.
But y’all know my podcast listeners are my favorite, so I wanted to bring all of this information over here for you as well. And while my article for Elpha was focused on how to stay sane in a not-so-great workplace environment, I just want to take a minute to mention that everything I’m talking about here can help you stay sane in a not-so-great anything.
If you’re in a not-so-great living situation, but you’re not ready to leave yet. If you’re in a not-so-great relationship, but it’s something you’re not going to leave. Like maybe it’s a marriage and you’re not ready to walk away from it. Maybe it’s a relationship with a family member, so maybe you could stop talking to them but you can’t really get out of being related to them.
Or maybe it’s something else. Like I’ve had several people in my life this summer who’ve undergone injuries. Two of them had to have surgery and that experience, while the medical care was great and they did really well, in a lot of ways, it wasn’t so great, right? It wasn’t what they wanted. One of them went into surgery on purpose, but even then it’s a hard experience to go through. And the other one had an accident, so she was not gearing up and preparing herself mentally to have surgery.
So if there’s any situation in which you find yourself that’s not-so-great of a fit for you, this podcast and what it teaches can be really helpful for navigating that because some things we can walk away from, but a lot of things in life we either can’t, or we’re not willing to because of the consequences that would be involved in doing that.
Okay, let’s get into it. I’m going to walk you through three sanity saving practices. I’ll tell you right now, each one alone will improve your experience, but combining all three will yield the best results.
Even if your workplace is not a good fit, there are things you can do to improve your experience for as long as you choose to stay there and also help you get your next role lined up too. And obviously that will apply as well, whether it’s a workplace or something else in your life, that’s not a good fit for you, but it’s where you are right now and you want to be somewhere else eventually.
So ultimately, many of the clients I’ve worked with over the years I’ve been in business came to me because they wanted to leave their jobs. But at the moment that they hired me, they were not ready to do that yet. Therefore, much of our coaching focused on how to stay sane or even feel good in a job or workplace that wasn’t ideal for them.
Being able to leave a workplace on your own terms and timeline is empowering. The tools I’m teaching in this podcast episode will enable you to do that by showing you how to create a better experience for yourself, no matter what your workplace is like.
Okay, sanity saving practice number one, establishing boundaries in order to thrive in any workplace, or situation really, you need boundaries and they’re especially important in a not-so-great workplace. Boundaries are how you protect your time, space, and energy.
While the idea of having boundaries with others is gaining a lot more cultural awareness, I want to tell you right now, you may also need to use boundaries with yourself to direct your own behavior towards ways of working or relating or being that enable you to show up the way you want to, so at work that would be like excellent performance, while steering clear of burnout, creating activities.
And as we know, burnout can show up in so many areas that aren’t just work. Burnout is especially a big risk if you’re in a not-so-great work environment, but it can be a big risk too if you’re in a not-so-great situation in any area of your life. And boundaries are going to help you protect yourself from that.
So whether your workplace is a giant global company or a small, local startup, it’s important for you to know that setting boundaries will not control other people or how they interact with you. Obviously, this is also true in your personal life. Instead, boundaries are for you, even when they apply to a situation that involves another person.
What is a boundary? It’s not a rule. It’s not a request. It is you deciding what you will do in response to whatever is happening. It’s something you do for yourself to move yourself closer to the life and career and relationships and situations you want and to protect yourself from situations, habits, and decisions you don’t want.
That’s why your boundaries apply to your own self as much as they do to anyone else, because sometimes it’s our own actions that are our biggest risk factors. For instance, it’s possible that if you inform someone you have a hard stop at 5 PM, they’ll end the call promptly. But much of the time, you’re going to need to be the one to enforce your boundary. This could be as simple as politely saying, “Hey, it’s 5 PM. I need to hop off this call, I’ll follow up with you via email.”
Another way of thinking about boundaries is that they are your best practices and you stick to them unless there’s a reason not to. As an example, I’ve had several clients who’ve established strong boundaries around what time they begin and end their work day. If someone invites them to a meeting outside those hours, it’s an automatic no, unless there’s a special circumstance.
Sometimes at work there are things that qualify as an emergency. Sometimes also in your social life or personal life, obviously too. Or sometimes there’s like a senior leader at work that if they invite you to something, you say yes, even if it’s outside of your hours.
You always get to choose what your boundaries are and you get to choose what the exceptions are too. You just want to think about again, what is going to enable you to have that life and those experiences and that career that you want to have. And then your boundaries are like railroad tracks that lead you to that. If we get off the railroad tracks, we might wind up somewhere else entirely.
Another way my clients have created boundaries with themselves in particular is in how they relate to their email. So a lot of people have their email open all the time and it becomes this huge source of distraction. My clients who’ve set this boundary with themselves choose to only open their email at certain points throughout the day when they’re going to focus on it and do email as their activity. And then they close it the rest of the time so they don’t become distracted by the emails that are obviously always rolling in.
In all of the examples I’ve mentioned, the boundaries are about what is going to help you work well without overworking. In the first two examples, both ending the call at 5 PM and automatically declining meetings that are outside of your working hours, that boundary is about keeping work from creeping into your personal life. In the last example about limiting when you look at email, the boundary is about allowing you to work more effectively by eliminating distractions.
Whatever boundaries you choose for yourself, like I said before, it’s so important to know your boundaries are for you. They may feel uncomfortable at first as they involve shifting how you engage with others and yourself, but their job is to support you so that you can do good work while you’re working and live your life in peace when you’re not working.
So how do you actually create and use boundaries? You design your own boundaries based on what you know about how you want your life to be and how you want to work. Then you use those boundaries as a guide in your decision-making.
Here’s an important note. Your boundaries will likely need to be somewhat informed by the workplace you belong to. For instance, when I was in corporate tech, the standard hours for my team were 7 to 3:30. So it wouldn’t have made sense for me to have a boundary that I didn’t respond to emails until 9 AM. But I could select other boundaries that worked better within the standard hours, such as not continuing to check email after I’d logged off for the day.
As with all things, when we’re learning something new or developing a skill set, when you start setting boundaries, it may feel uncomfortable and maybe awkward at first, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Also, if you’re interested in learning more about how to set boundaries, let me know.
If you have a specific situation that you’re really curious about what the boundary setting would look like, write in and tell me that too. I can do a boundary Q&A podcast to answer your questions and give you some expert guidance on how to use boundaries to make your work life, and let’s be honest, your personal life and all your relationships and everything else much more manageable.
Okay, let’s move on to sanity saving practice number two. Managing expectations. Managing expectations is an essential tool for both your workload and your work relationships. Basically what it means to manage expectations is communicating to others what you can do, what timeline you can do it on and what you need from them to do it. And it’s also asking others or clarifying with others what it is they’re requesting that you do, what timeline they’re requesting you do it on and like what they need from you, right?
So it’s kind of a two way thing. It’s like sometimes managing expectations is you telling other people what’s available. But sometimes managing expectations is you finding out from them really clearly and specifically what is it that success would look like on the task.
Of course, this is for work, but this also applies in relationships. Think about things like the way you break down household labor. That’s something where managing expectations could be a game changer.
Okay, so let’s look at an example to get a better understanding of what this actually looks like. Years ago I had a client who was always getting last minute requests from her team. She was understandably frustrated by this and it was disruptive to her workflow. But she didn’t feel like she could say no because everyone in the office knew she was really diligent and she always got things done.
So it didn’t feel okay for her to just let things go undone, but then she ended up having to be really stressed out and working really hard at the last minute. It wasn’t working for her, right? That’s part of why she hired me.
To resolve this we created a turnaround policy that clearly outlined how much time she needed between the request and the finished product for the most common things that her team was asking her to do. The policy also indicated what her direct reports would need to provide in order for the work to be completed on that timeline. Creating this expectation with her team trained them to behave in a new way. And guess what? They did.
Expectation setting is not just for direct reports. You can also use this for peers and leaders. It’s simply a way of communicating, like I said, what you can do, how long it takes you to do it, what you need from others in order to get it done or asking other people, what is it specifically they want from you? How long do they want you to invest in that? Like what level of effort, what quality of work do they actually need? What does success look like for them? And what do you need from them or other people in order to do that work?
So how do you actually communicate expectations? Setting and managing expectations generally just means having a conversation with people, whether it’s your direct reports, your peers, your leaders, your significant other, your children or your own parents. It might look like instituting a turnaround policy like my client did, or it might look like informing your supervisor that you only have the bandwidth to complete one of two projects on the original timeline, and discussing which one it makes more sense to prioritize.
Like I said before, managing expectations can also look like being curious and asking more questions. Before you agree to a new task, you can ask questions to gain a better understanding of what the other person is expecting. What’s their desired timeline? What quality of work are they looking for? What final product outcome is needed?
There have been so many times for me and other people I know, whether they’re clients or friends, where their boss asked them for something and they think it has to be this really high quality piece of work. And then it turns out later, their boss just wanted a rough draft. So one of the ways that we can reduce burnout and have a better experience is to actually get really clear with other people on what it is we are each looking for and what we each have available to give to get it done.
When you’re used to moving really fast at work, you may make assumptions that ultimately lead to more work, a misunderstanding of priorities or other issues. While you can’t always avoid that, you can stay ahead of it as much as possible when you have clear conversations about expectations, and that will make your work life and the rest of your life more manageable and more enjoyable.
Okay, sanity saving practice number three, building a useful mental narrative. As we talk about all the time, the human brain has a bias to remember and focus on negative information. When you’re in a job that’s not a great fit for you, this bias can create discomfort, overwhelm, and even a sense of hopelessness.
You may find yourself frustrated and upset at the end of every work day, ruminating on the impossible deadlines, or the way a senior leader bullies people in big team meetings. It may feel difficult to pull your attention away from all the things that are not working. Building a useful mental narrative is not about gaslighting yourself. You’re not going to pretend that this job is amazing. You’re going to create a perspective that helps you have more of what you want without lying to yourself.
In order to counteract that negativity bias, you need to seek additional information to balance the brain’s overemphasis on the negative. This means intentionally looking for things that are going well, even if not everything is. And if there’s not a whole lot in that category, you can also just look for what’s going neutrally. Any non-negative data will help counterbalance the negativity bias.
Please note, you’re not doing this so that you can excuse anyone’s bad behavior. You’re doing this to help yourself feel better in a situation you’d prefer not to be in until you can leave that situation on your own terms.
So how do you actually do it? How do you actually build a useful mental narrative? Lists work wonders. Make a list of what’s going well and another of what’s going okay, and add to each list daily. At first, this might feel weird or silly, but if you stick with it, you’ll start feeling much better. When you spend time looking for ways your situation is positive or neutral, you will find them.
And again, I’m not talking about gaslighting or lying to yourself. What are you building by staying in the role? What skills are you honing? How is the choice you’re making to stick with the current work situation or any other situation in your life, how is that serving you and your larger goals?
When you reorient your decision around what you’re creating for yourself, you will feel much better. And sometimes the reality is like, I need to pay my bills. I need health insurance. But those are gifts you’re giving yourself by choosing to stay. Do I wish we lived in a different kind of culture where that wasn’t necessary? I absolutely do. But if you’re choosing to stay, it orients to something that matters to you and framing it that way for yourself is going to feel more powerful.
Staying in a not-so-great workplace or any other kind of situation is tough, but it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to feel stressed and unhappy. There are things you can do to feel better. Start one by one or implement all three at once. When you implement these sanity saving practices, you will feel so much better.
Your current workplace will stop consuming your thoughts. That alone is a great outcome. And it will give you so much time and energy back, which you can use to network up skill and research so that you can land a new role at a workplace. That’s much better suited to your preferences. And once you’re in that new workplace, your ability to set boundaries, manage expectations, and build a useful mental narrative will help you enjoy your new workplace and do good work without burning out or over-performing to the point of resentment.
If this episode resonated with you and you’d like more help navigating a not-so-great work environment of your own, I’d love to support you with that. Reach out and let’s have a conversation about working together to get you feeling Satisfied AF because you deserve nothing less. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need too. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, this is Kori Linn and welcome back to another episode of Satisfied AF. Recently, I wrote an article for Elpha, which is a professional network dedicated to helping women succeed at work. And I’ve been a member there for several years now, and it’s got some really good resources and conversations, and I was happy to share my expertise with them.
But y’all know my podcast listeners are my favorite, so I wanted to bring all of this information over here for you as well. And while my article for Elpha was focused on how to stay sane in a not-so-great workplace environment, I just want to take a minute to mention that everything I’m talking about here can help you stay sane in a not-so-great anything.
If you’re in a not-so-great living situation, but you’re not ready to leave yet. If you’re in a not-so-great relationship, but it’s something you’re not going to leave. Like maybe it’s a marriage and you’re not ready to walk away from it. Maybe it’s a relationship with a family member, so maybe you could stop talking to them but you can’t really get out of being related to them.
Or maybe it’s something else. Like I’ve had several people in my life this summer who’ve undergone injuries. Two of them had to have surgery and that experience, while the medical care was great and they did really well, in a lot of ways, it wasn’t so great, right? It wasn’t what they wanted. One of them went into surgery on purpose, but even then it’s a hard experience to go through. And the other one had an accident, so she was not gearing up and preparing herself mentally to have surgery.
So if there’s any situation in which you find yourself that’s not-so-great of a fit for you, this podcast and what it teaches can be really helpful for navigating that because some things we can walk away from, but a lot of things in life we either can’t, or we’re not willing to because of the consequences that would be involved in doing that.
Okay, let’s get into it. I’m going to walk you through three sanity saving practices. I’ll tell you right now, each one alone will improve your experience, but combining all three will yield the best results.
Even if your workplace is not a good fit, there are things you can do to improve your experience for as long as you choose to stay there and also help you get your next role lined up too. And obviously that will apply as well, whether it’s a workplace or something else in your life, that’s not a good fit for you, but it’s where you are right now and you want to be somewhere else eventually.
So ultimately, many of the clients I’ve worked with over the years I’ve been in business came to me because they wanted to leave their jobs. But at the moment that they hired me, they were not ready to do that yet. Therefore, much of our coaching focused on how to stay sane or even feel good in a job or workplace that wasn’t ideal for them.
Being able to leave a workplace on your own terms and timeline is empowering. The tools I’m teaching in this podcast episode will enable you to do that by showing you how to create a better experience for yourself, no matter what your workplace is like.
Okay, sanity saving practice number one, establishing boundaries in order to thrive in any workplace, or situation really, you need boundaries and they’re especially important in a not-so-great workplace. Boundaries are how you protect your time, space, and energy.
While the idea of having boundaries with others is gaining a lot more cultural awareness, I want to tell you right now, you may also need to use boundaries with yourself to direct your own behavior towards ways of working or relating or being that enable you to show up the way you want to, so at work that would be like excellent performance, while steering clear of burnout, creating activities.
And as we know, burnout can show up in so many areas that aren’t just work. Burnout is especially a big risk if you’re in a not-so-great work environment, but it can be a big risk too if you’re in a not-so-great situation in any area of your life. And boundaries are going to help you protect yourself from that.
So whether your workplace is a giant global company or a small, local startup, it’s important for you to know that setting boundaries will not control other people or how they interact with you. Obviously, this is also true in your personal life. Instead, boundaries are for you, even when they apply to a situation that involves another person.
What is a boundary? It’s not a rule. It’s not a request. It is you deciding what you will do in response to whatever is happening. It’s something you do for yourself to move yourself closer to the life and career and relationships and situations you want and to protect yourself from situations, habits, and decisions you don’t want.
That’s why your boundaries apply to your own self as much as they do to anyone else, because sometimes it’s our own actions that are our biggest risk factors. For instance, it’s possible that if you inform someone you have a hard stop at 5 PM, they’ll end the call promptly. But much of the time, you’re going to need to be the one to enforce your boundary. This could be as simple as politely saying, “Hey, it’s 5 PM. I need to hop off this call, I’ll follow up with you via email.”
Another way of thinking about boundaries is that they are your best practices and you stick to them unless there’s a reason not to. As an example, I’ve had several clients who’ve established strong boundaries around what time they begin and end their work day. If someone invites them to a meeting outside those hours, it’s an automatic no, unless there’s a special circumstance.
Sometimes at work there are things that qualify as an emergency. Sometimes also in your social life or personal life, obviously too. Or sometimes there’s like a senior leader at work that if they invite you to something, you say yes, even if it’s outside of your hours.
You always get to choose what your boundaries are and you get to choose what the exceptions are too. You just want to think about again, what is going to enable you to have that life and those experiences and that career that you want to have. And then your boundaries are like railroad tracks that lead you to that. If we get off the railroad tracks, we might wind up somewhere else entirely.
Another way my clients have created boundaries with themselves in particular is in how they relate to their email. So a lot of people have their email open all the time and it becomes this huge source of distraction. My clients who’ve set this boundary with themselves choose to only open their email at certain points throughout the day when they’re going to focus on it and do email as their activity. And then they close it the rest of the time so they don’t become distracted by the emails that are obviously always rolling in.
In all of the examples I’ve mentioned, the boundaries are about what is going to help you work well without overworking. In the first two examples, both ending the call at 5 PM and automatically declining meetings that are outside of your working hours, that boundary is about keeping work from creeping into your personal life. In the last example about limiting when you look at email, the boundary is about allowing you to work more effectively by eliminating distractions.
Whatever boundaries you choose for yourself, like I said before, it’s so important to know your boundaries are for you. They may feel uncomfortable at first as they involve shifting how you engage with others and yourself, but their job is to support you so that you can do good work while you’re working and live your life in peace when you’re not working.
So how do you actually create and use boundaries? You design your own boundaries based on what you know about how you want your life to be and how you want to work. Then you use those boundaries as a guide in your decision-making.
Here’s an important note. Your boundaries will likely need to be somewhat informed by the workplace you belong to. For instance, when I was in corporate tech, the standard hours for my team were 7 to 3:30. So it wouldn’t have made sense for me to have a boundary that I didn’t respond to emails until 9 AM. But I could select other boundaries that worked better within the standard hours, such as not continuing to check email after I’d logged off for the day.
As with all things, when we’re learning something new or developing a skill set, when you start setting boundaries, it may feel uncomfortable and maybe awkward at first, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Also, if you’re interested in learning more about how to set boundaries, let me know.
If you have a specific situation that you’re really curious about what the boundary setting would look like, write in and tell me that too. I can do a boundary Q&A podcast to answer your questions and give you some expert guidance on how to use boundaries to make your work life, and let’s be honest, your personal life and all your relationships and everything else much more manageable.
Okay, let’s move on to sanity saving practice number two. Managing expectations. Managing expectations is an essential tool for both your workload and your work relationships. Basically what it means to manage expectations is communicating to others what you can do, what timeline you can do it on and what you need from them to do it. And it’s also asking others or clarifying with others what it is they’re requesting that you do, what timeline they’re requesting you do it on and like what they need from you, right?
So it’s kind of a two way thing. It’s like sometimes managing expectations is you telling other people what’s available. But sometimes managing expectations is you finding out from them really clearly and specifically what is it that success would look like on the task.
Of course, this is for work, but this also applies in relationships. Think about things like the way you break down household labor. That’s something where managing expectations could be a game changer.
Okay, so let’s look at an example to get a better understanding of what this actually looks like. Years ago I had a client who was always getting last minute requests from her team. She was understandably frustrated by this and it was disruptive to her workflow. But she didn’t feel like she could say no because everyone in the office knew she was really diligent and she always got things done.
So it didn’t feel okay for her to just let things go undone, but then she ended up having to be really stressed out and working really hard at the last minute. It wasn’t working for her, right? That’s part of why she hired me.
To resolve this we created a turnaround policy that clearly outlined how much time she needed between the request and the finished product for the most common things that her team was asking her to do. The policy also indicated what her direct reports would need to provide in order for the work to be completed on that timeline. Creating this expectation with her team trained them to behave in a new way. And guess what? They did.
Expectation setting is not just for direct reports. You can also use this for peers and leaders. It’s simply a way of communicating, like I said, what you can do, how long it takes you to do it, what you need from others in order to get it done or asking other people, what is it specifically they want from you? How long do they want you to invest in that? Like what level of effort, what quality of work do they actually need? What does success look like for them? And what do you need from them or other people in order to do that work?
So how do you actually communicate expectations? Setting and managing expectations generally just means having a conversation with people, whether it’s your direct reports, your peers, your leaders, your significant other, your children or your own parents. It might look like instituting a turnaround policy like my client did, or it might look like informing your supervisor that you only have the bandwidth to complete one of two projects on the original timeline, and discussing which one it makes more sense to prioritize.
Like I said before, managing expectations can also look like being curious and asking more questions. Before you agree to a new task, you can ask questions to gain a better understanding of what the other person is expecting. What’s their desired timeline? What quality of work are they looking for? What final product outcome is needed?
There have been so many times for me and other people I know, whether they’re clients or friends, where their boss asked them for something and they think it has to be this really high quality piece of work. And then it turns out later, their boss just wanted a rough draft. So one of the ways that we can reduce burnout and have a better experience is to actually get really clear with other people on what it is we are each looking for and what we each have available to give to get it done.
When you’re used to moving really fast at work, you may make assumptions that ultimately lead to more work, a misunderstanding of priorities or other issues. While you can’t always avoid that, you can stay ahead of it as much as possible when you have clear conversations about expectations, and that will make your work life and the rest of your life more manageable and more enjoyable.
Okay, sanity saving practice number three, building a useful mental narrative. As we talk about all the time, the human brain has a bias to remember and focus on negative information. When you’re in a job that’s not a great fit for you, this bias can create discomfort, overwhelm, and even a sense of hopelessness.
You may find yourself frustrated and upset at the end of every work day, ruminating on the impossible deadlines, or the way a senior leader bullies people in big team meetings. It may feel difficult to pull your attention away from all the things that are not working. Building a useful mental narrative is not about gaslighting yourself. You’re not going to pretend that this job is amazing. You’re going to create a perspective that helps you have more of what you want without lying to yourself.
In order to counteract that negativity bias, you need to seek additional information to balance the brain’s overemphasis on the negative. This means intentionally looking for things that are going well, even if not everything is. And if there’s not a whole lot in that category, you can also just look for what’s going neutrally. Any non-negative data will help counterbalance the negativity bias.
Please note, you’re not doing this so that you can excuse anyone’s bad behavior. You’re doing this to help yourself feel better in a situation you’d prefer not to be in until you can leave that situation on your own terms.
So how do you actually do it? How do you actually build a useful mental narrative? Lists work wonders. Make a list of what’s going well and another of what’s going okay, and add to each list daily. At first, this might feel weird or silly, but if you stick with it, you’ll start feeling much better. When you spend time looking for ways your situation is positive or neutral, you will find them.
And again, I’m not talking about gaslighting or lying to yourself. What are you building by staying in the role? What skills are you honing? How is the choice you’re making to stick with the current work situation or any other situation in your life, how is that serving you and your larger goals?
When you reorient your decision around what you’re creating for yourself, you will feel much better. And sometimes the reality is like, I need to pay my bills. I need health insurance. But those are gifts you’re giving yourself by choosing to stay. Do I wish we lived in a different kind of culture where that wasn’t necessary? I absolutely do. But if you’re choosing to stay, it orients to something that matters to you and framing it that way for yourself is going to feel more powerful.
Staying in a not-so-great workplace or any other kind of situation is tough, but it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to feel stressed and unhappy. There are things you can do to feel better. Start one by one or implement all three at once. When you implement these sanity saving practices, you will feel so much better.
Your current workplace will stop consuming your thoughts. That alone is a great outcome. And it will give you so much time and energy back, which you can use to network up skill and research so that you can land a new role at a workplace. That’s much better suited to your preferences. And once you’re in that new workplace, your ability to set boundaries, manage expectations, and build a useful mental narrative will help you enjoy your new workplace and do good work without burning out or over-performing to the point of resentment.
If this episode resonated with you and you’d like more help navigating a not-so-great work environment of your own, I’d love to support you with that. Reach out and let’s have a conversation about working together to get you feeling Satisfied AF because you deserve nothing less. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need too. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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