Garden Buddha
In an earlier post I wrote about not looking back on my stressful work environment and promised to offer advice to my friends that are still fully involved in stressful work situations. I’m not one to tell someone else how to live their lives, but I’m just putting this out there to basically say, that if I had been more successful at practicing this, I would have found the stress of working less troubling. Maybe it will provide food for thought, or not.
Let me start off by saying, I do not hate corporations, I don’t think they are the bane of society. I voluntarily worked for them my entire work life. I had the opportunity to take other paths but I choose to work for corporations. I do think that the nature of corporation, like so many other things in life, have changed. The changes introduced higher levels of stress, at least for me. If you can wrap your mind around both the benefits and the drawbacks of working for corporations, all my best to you. Hopefully, this will help.
First, what is Work-related Stress?
Stress is the reaction to situations that evoke the ‘Fight or Flight’ response. It is a normal part of life and was crucial for running from predators or defending your village again marauding hordes for the survival of early Man. A necessary survival response, but what has that got to do with making sales call or working in a cube farm? Just because we live in a more ‘civilized’ environment doesn’t mean that eons of genetic engineering gets shut off. All manner of work events both important and trivial generate the same nervous response as your body gets ready to react.
When you are behind on your sales budget or you haven’t completed a goal, your pulse quickens, you breathe faster, your blood pressure increases and your muscles tense as energy courses through your body as it gets ready to respond. However, in modern life that quick burst of energy that it takes to run or fight never happens and all that nervous energy just vibrates through your body looking for an outlet. Dissipating that energy in a manageable fashion in a work environment without it cause unhealthy effects, is what ‘coping with work-related stress’ is all about.
In my post, Cognitive Dissonance at a Job Near You! I said “Insanity is Emotionally Investing in a System that is based on an empty premise of importance, just so the purveyors of that premise can decide if you have worth to the System.”
I offer four key concepts about the workplace and how to relate to the stress it generates. These four concepts stand on their own, but their interaction truly governs their influence in how they impact our work-related stress.
Investing Emotionally
The System
Empty of Importance
Your Worth
Investing Emotionally
The more importance we attach to a situation, the more we invest emotionally in a positive outcome. Our level of stress regarding a situation is directly related to how emotionally invested we are with it. As stressful situations arise, the question to ask yourself is, am I investing wisely with my Emotional Capital? In the grand scheme of things in my Life how important is this work-related event? Be Honest.
The System
In my work experience I have worked for four major corporations, and called on several others in a sales capacity. To be sure each had its own personality, but over time I have noticed most corporations have tended towards what I describe as ‘The System’. The System are mills that churn out money, where more money this quarter is the holy grail. Products and customers are a necessary, bothersome complication and employees are interchangeable, replaceable assets to be deployed, and discarded. Where employees are treated only as well as the job market demands. The System is run by once decent people who have been promoted beyond their moral compasses, who are enticed by enormous monetary rewards for perpetuating and expanding The System. The sad part is, these executives are just as interchangeable and replaceable by their Boards, a self-serving caste of power brokers. I have worked for corporations that weren’t Systems, and they treated their employees and customers decently, they made money and paid dividends. Corporations don’t have to be Systems, but sadly most are.
Empty of Importance
Understanding your place in The System is key to managing the stress that is generated in the workplace. In order to make more money this quarter, The System sets goals incrementally higher than the last goal, employees are Expected to do more, sell more, make more calls, take more orders, keep more records. Periodically, when executives have mismanaged, it is necessary for them to reduce head count, the charming euphemism for the interchangeable, replaceable blocks on the organizational chart that represent real people. The remaining employees not only have to do more to reach higher goals, but the expanded workload is spread over fewer people. Hello, Mr. Stress. Executives will swear that their employees are their most important asset, and I have come to interpret what they mean. The boxes on the org chart are important, but the names in the boxes are interchangeable and ultimately, irrelevant. The System has reduced the importance of the Individual Contributor that differentiates themselves, in favor of drones. The level of job security that employees now feel has been crushed by the The System’s blatant depersonalization, it is little wonder that more employees are realizing that they are just working for a paycheck and benefits that could end at any time.
How important does that make you feel.
Understanding the Roots of Your Worth
The question of how each of us values ourselves is crucial to how we manage stress in the work place. For longer than I care to admit, my Self-worth was wrapped up in the title I held at work. How I was regarded and respected at work meant a lot to me, and I agonized over each evaluation? It took some very unpleasant events to get me to realize that I wasn’t my job, and that I held worth for deeper reasons than the title on my business card. Only you can answer the question of what you value, and how you measure your worth. My day of Awakening came when I realized that the game I was so Emotionally Invested in, was a hallow construct devised by others to suit their aims, with artificial rules and a goal line that kept moving. Playing their game by their rules was very stressful for me because I couldn’t reconcile what I knew were my good efforts with what The System valued.
I realized I could never find my Value in their game, so I decided to change the rules I played by. I Invested Emotionally in my effort at the process by which I worked, I Valued treating my customer honestly and with respect. I devalued the evaluation that The System had of my results, and I understood that any grading by them was artificial and not based on my ‘Value Scale’. My worth now comes from the way I live my Life and how I treat other People.
Was I always successful in taking a more Zen approach to Work-related Stress? Hey, I’m human! But, in those times when I let the rats get ahead in the race, I had some thoughts which helped me to re-center myself and get my reactions under control.
What parts of my job do I value the most?
Do the duties I need to perform contribute to my value system?
Or, are they duties imposed by The System?
Every aspect of life has rules and obligations that I must meet, but how much am I going to Emotionally Invest in what The System requires versus what my Value System says is really important?
Coping with my stress has been a process, I hope these thought may be of use. Working is not life or death.
Is my view of today’s modern corporations an expression of my pessimistic depression or a realistic view of today’s new normal, The System?
You tell me, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
View From The Mountain 