- Rather than reflecting your disdain for the boss, make an effort to be supportive and to pull an even greater share of the responsibility in the department. It's good for your self-image and will impress even the most inadequate of supervisors.
- Extend your reach into other departments within the company and see where you can make a contribution. This will take extra time and effort, but it will broaden your horizons, give you a sense of not being trapped, and gain for you that important exposure, and ultimately it might result in a transfer and promotion without your having to leave the firm.
- Put into effect my recommendations about becoming a better communicator. Use those skills to promote yourself within the company and outside it. If you have a great deal to offer and are stymied by the dead-end nature of your present job and boss, it's up to you to do some public relations on your own behalf.
Ask for help. Go to your boss (as difficult as he or she might be) and state clearly your reasons for needing additional help. If that fails, ask your boss if you can call upon some of your colleagues within the data processing department to get the help you need. (You can always offer to return the favor when your work load has slackened and the other person is faced with the same sort of deadline.)
Besides these specific approaches, the most important thing you can do is to analyze yourself and the reason why stress caused by this project is taking an unusually high toll on you. It could be that you are experiencing undue fear of the ramifications if the project is not finished to perfection precisely on the day it was called for. A serious illness is something to fear; an occasional failure on the job is not. If you fail with this project because you haven't applied yourself, and haven't used every resource available to you, you have some reason to fear the consequences. However, if you have given it everything you have, there's nothing to be ashamed of... and nothing to fear.
This concept of how we tend to exaggerate our fears in business is well known to industrial psychologists and has a great deal to do with the way we view ourselves. Let's take an example of this.
You are a bright, educated, skilled, experienced, and hardworking programmer in a large company. You do a good job because you have the skills and you are motivated. Still, when your boss calls and asks you to come to her office at four o'clock to discuss something important, your mind immediately assumes the worst. You are going to be reprimanded for something or be asked about your current project and not have the right answers. The list of imagined scenarios goes on, and by the time you reach the four o'clock meeting, stress has turned you into a quivering mass of fear, which is sure to make your performance at the meeting a disaster.
Instead, considering your attributes, you might have countered those negative thoughts with some logical thinking. If you are to be called on the carpet for something you've done in the past, that isn't a matter of life or death. You know that you're good, and that you work hard, and even if there is something negative to be brought up, it doesn't mean you will be told to clean out your desk and be gone by five. By the same token, there's no disgrace in not having some answers on the tip of your tongue for every question asked by a superior. In fact, one of the most appealing attributes of anyone in business is the ability to say "I don't know, but I'll get the answer for you."
By changing the way we view ourselves and by reevaluating the importance of most events in our working day, we can virtually eliminate free-floating stress from our business lives.
But we don't want to eliminate all stress. If we did that, we wouldn't function very well as interested, striving human beings. Ask any performer whether they feel nervous before going onstage and they will invariably say, "Of course I do. If I didn't, there would be something wrong with me."
A certain amount of stress is healthy and productive. It keeps us on our toes and reminds us that we have to be prepared for what happens in our daily lives. Stress, a healthy amount of it, is the fuel for pushing beyond our normal boundaries and accomplishing things we thought we weren't capable of accomplishing. It gives us a competitive edge, picks us up when our spirits are down, and propels us toward the next goal in our lives. But, like everything else, it's a matter of balance. Stress might be natural and normal, but we must make use of it to benefit ourselves, rather than allowing it to destroy us.