Troubling, repetitive patterns in your work history should send up a personal red flag, indicating you have a problem that needs fixing. If the problem centers around "bosses" or authority issues, you may be staring at some unresolved childhood conflict you have with less than perfect parents.
Writing teacher Gerissa French in Chicago believes you can achieve better self understanding through a technique she calls "Discovery Write." Here's how this exercise works:
- Make a list of all the bad bosses you've ever had.
- Below each name, write down any symbols, objects or phrases you associate with the person.
- Put a plus or minus sign next to each symbol, object or phrase.
- Count up the minus signs. The person with the most blemishes will be your writing subject.
- Write a character sketch or story about that person. Make it as negative as you want. Write down everything you hate, fear and would like to change about that per son. Don't hold anything back. (The key here is not to edit your thoughts and feelings.)
- Put your story away for a day or two. After you've let it settle a while, review what you wrote. How does it look once you've vented your feelings? How true do you think your feelings are to the reality of that person?
- Now, go to the second person on your list and complete the same exercise.
- Compare the first story to the second. Are there any similarities? Think about the two people you're investing with so much negative energy. How similar are they? How different? Are you sure? (If someone you know and trust knows both your subjects, you may want to ask them to review your story. Do their perceptions match up with yours? Or are your fantasies out of control
- Think about the traits that really trigger your hostilities and drive you crazy. Are they similar to those of any of your family members? If so, you've found the link between your bosses and your childhood history, an important first step toward resolving the conflict.
French experienced a personal epiphany regarding a family member who'd been inculcated with the message that he was an "ugly duckling." To compensate for that diminished status, her relative often "strutted his stuff" behaving more like a bantam rooster than an ugly duckling. To this day, French has a love hate relationship with bantam rooster type men.
What does all this have to do with your career? By knowing what kind of people and behaviors trigger your emotional vulnerabilities, you can either steer clear of those types altogether. Or, you can take measures to ensure that your working relationships with such individuals develop along the lines of healthy professionalism, not as reruns of some well worn emotional tapes from your childhood.
Wrong Employer
Some people are simply better suited to self employment than to working for a company. Figuring out that there's an entrepreneur lurking in your soul can be the solution to a long string of unhappy jobs.
Hollywood movie producer David Brown, whose credits include such blockbusters as Jaws and Cocoon, considers himself an expert on the subject of failure. Brown was fired from four jobs (including two top posts at 20th Century Fox) before figuring out that he's too much of a risk taker for conventional corporate life.
Once he came to that realization, he formed his own production company where he's free to be as creative and daring as he chooses. But it took four failed tries as a "wage slave" to figure out that he couldn't find the solution to his employment problems in corporate America.
Of course, he'll never repeat that same employment mistake if he can help it. As former baseball catcher and sportscaster Joe Garagiola says: "Experience is mistakes you won't make anymore."
Hubris
Harry Truman once said, "The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all."
Success can be a powerful aphrodisiac, especially when ac companied by money, fame and power. It can lure you into thinking you're omnipotent: that nothing and no one can touch you.
Witness the case of boxer Mike Tyson, who didn't have the character or inner strength to handle his own success. Behold also the downfalls of Jim Bakker, Leona Helmsley, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, all of whom have had the opportunity to contemplate the error of their ways from inside a jail cell.
Prison time must have its pluses: Boesky found God and professes to want to be a rabbi, Tyson converted to Islam, Milken discovered the joys of public service and has been seen escorting poor kids to baseball games, while Bakker has repented for his sins and wants his pulpit back to try again. Ms. Helmsley, on the other hand, seems sorry most of all that she got caught.
The Watergate folks also seemed to find religion in the wake of their downfall. Whether these religious conversions are real remains to be seen. Being humbled by defeat (and finding out that, no, you aren't God) can motivate you to search for and discover the true source of omnipotence.
Similarly hard lessons in humility were learned by hundreds of financiers on the traumatic day the stock market crashed in 1987. That event forever altered these capitalists' understanding of their own power and place in the world. Too much, too soon has also been the downfall of many entrepreneurs who failed, in some fundamental way, to anticipate and prepare for success.
