Have you ever found yourself helplessly complaining about your manager’s unfair micro-management at work? Or the latest corporate policy? Or even your overly competitive co-workers? For years in my career, I’ve complained over and over again, if only to myself, about things I didn’t like, policies that left me baffled and attitudes I could not comprehend. Even as I stepped into new, better situations, small things would trigger old emotions I thought were buried away, dragging me back into old self-victimizing patterns.
As described in Psychology Today, “learned helplessness is an attitude of giving up when we face adversity.” Every time we complain of the world we perceive as unfair, we position ourselves as victims. And the more we feed into this “learned helplessness”, the poorer our performance and our health.
And this is also how we continuously keep giving your power at work, damaging ourselves and our careers in the process. Instead, striving to ask ourselves and others to figure out how to discover new solutions and possibilities can make us more successful, happier and healthier!
What can I do to better this situation? What are my options in the face of professional uncertainty? Should I begin looking for a new job? What are tangible ways to improve my performance? All these are questions to help us see beyond adversity, and give us the one thing that will restore our power at work and in life…It’s called hope!
How do you keep yourself from giving away your power at work?
