After years of working hard and understanding how the game works, you got promoted. You are happy. You made a few steps forward.
It feels exactly like when you got admission to university more than 15 years ago. Pride. Maybe a bit too much. But you are aware of it so you can handle it.
But life is more than that. Life is more than about making the extra mile for your clients, for your team, for your boss every day. It’s also about family. In fact, it’s mostly about family!
And your family starts to have problems. Serious ones. Due to external factors, but a problem is still a problem.
It’s true that if you consider what’s left of a day after removing the commute, the office hours, the sleeping, there is not much left. As there is just so little time left at the end of the day, you might even think that everything will be just fine and the problems and negative atmosphere would have no effect on you.
Still, if you hear about nothing but those problems at breakfast, then sometimes during lunch at the phonecall with family and during the whole evening, after you arrive home, it’s still a lot. There is no place to run away to. Problems will find you, anywhere you hide. Even if they are not yours and you cannot solve them.
Sitting in the car for a few more minutes after you parked doesn’t solve anything, you know it. Less time for listening to all the problems, but also less time with the kids.
All the problems start to affect you. You start to lose some of the patterns and habits that brought you a relative success in the last years.
You don’t follow up on your schedules and pomodori. You ignore your long term task lists.
You are tired.
You are more tired than otherwise.
You snack quite some, but at least you don’t gain weight. On the contrary, you even lose some, because you are so anxious. But it gives you the false feeling of thinking that it’s okay to eat like that.
No. It is not.
From your previous manager, you barely received feedback. It’s not that he didn’t care or was a bad person, but giving feedback is hard and everyone has to learn it.
His replacement is different. He delivers valuable feedback. Every time you meet he has an idea, he has something to bring even from the big boss.
So he delivers his feedback. The shit sandwich. Two months in a row. The first one was simply not true and he understood it, even defended you what the big boss brought is up. But they are right in the second one.
It finally makes you think. It doesn’t upset you. You value and even embrace real feedback as that’s the only way to move forward.
You finally realize that things are not going well at all, not even at your workplace. You are living off the interests of your past achievements. But even when you realize this, you just keep scrolling and scrolling down.
You know the solution. You know exactly what to do. You don’t have to pull yourself out by grabbing your own hair. You have the tools. You used them in the not so distant past.
Take advantage of those processes again. Build your minutes, hours and days around them.
Get enough sleep and exercise finally, energize yourself.
Live by the principles you felt your own.
The only one responsible is you.
Get up and walk.
