CareerSherpas: Climbing the Mountain

When you know you’re doing the right things, staying on the right path and delivering really great work. Somehow it doesn’t seem to register with the people who make determinations about your effectiveness. Continuous (and usually stressful) pressure to do more, better or be more responsive can follow.

Left unchecked, this can mark you as a “bad” or “ineffective” employee and even gnaw at your self-esteem. After a while your explanations fall on deaf ears and leave you feeling frustrated and unappreciated. This can expand into a vicious circle where your behavior deteriorates and the perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, who would be motivated to perform with that kind of crushing negativity?

There are ways out! Not that they’re easy or that they don’t require seemingly herculean struggles against your own self-doubt (and likely negative attitude.) From personal experience, finding a positive way out can be worth it, but it requires some forethought, lots of self-control and self-discipline, some luck and an eye to a longer arc to success.

The steps are easy to describe, but very hard to follow.

• Decide to be positive: If you’re caught up in the vicious cycle, you have to be the first change to break the cycle. Deciding to look for positive, constructive alternatives and to pursue them is not an easy step. It is crucial to be open to positive approaches to be able to see a way out when it presents itself.
• Get fresh eyes on the problem: If you can take a step back from the problem and look at it from a different angle for yourself that’s great! Sometimes taking a vacation or finding something else to focus on can give new insights into your situation. If that isn’t an option or you can’t break free of it, find someone you trust to be a sounding board and explain the situation as well as how you’ve approached it. Get the other person to repeat back to you what you’ve said. Both of you are likely to find current opportunities that you’ve missed so far that you can grab, and if not you will probably hear something that changes the way you think about the issues.
• Choose a goal: Pick a goal that gives you hope for a better tomorrow. When you’re in the vicious cycle it can be really hard not to give up or run away from the problem, but accepting either of those options won’t teach you how to solve the problem. The problem may not be you, but it is yours to solve. Find a new goal, refine an existing goal or remember a goal you had before you got sucked into the cycle. Hang onto that goal and look for opportunities.
• Take action: Pick one, two or three things that you can record the outcome of and make a plan with your manager or a co-worker to try them for a week and see what happens. The important thing with the choices you make is that you have to be consistent with them. You have to manage your own reactions and set up whatever situations or reminders will help you stick with them. At the end of the week, consider what effect your new actions had on you and share them with your manager or co-worker.
• Take a risk: Somewhere while you’re executing on your planned activities you’ll start to see opportunities that have some risk associated with them. Consider the risk and the reward to get a feel for how comfortable you are with the idea. Be honest and realistic with yourself about how well you can execute on the decision to take each risk, but be prepared to dive in and grab the opportunity that offers what you want.

Ultimately, these steps only work if you can take them one at a time. If you haven’t changed your attitude, you can’t get clear perspectives on the situation. If you can’t get clear and broader perspective, you can’t choose an attainable goal. Without a goal you can’t pick the right actions and without taking actions that you monitor you won’t see opportunities for what they are.

Grab the bull by the horns and hang in there! It’s not the easy road to confront your problems, but it’s the one that will lead you along the path to success and contentment. If you can face your own problems and solve them, you have a strong platform from which to follow and achieve your most ambitious goals.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, conducting high-level business analysis, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Success, Work Stress, layoff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.