— Jordan Peterson
I've been doing a lot of listening of late. Many things happen when you stop talking and start listening. You tune yourself in to things. It's amazing what you can perceive and learn when you start actively listening.
Seeing as I have a long commute to work, when I'm not on the phone, I'm listening to podcasts and one that I listened to this morning I found exceptionally poignant. Jordan Peterson was talking about having a moral compass while traversing the world we live in, having a level of fear about making mistakes that could essentially create a rip in the fabric of the universe and believing that you would be able to get away with it. It was an interesting concept, similar to Karma that he was talking about where what we put out into the world essentially has a ripple effect and if you approach the world with malevolence and are going to be an immoral person, then you may get away with it for a while but it will catch up with you as every little thing that we do is connected to the next and so on and so forth.
I walked into work today with a level head after listening to it and I was almost even excited to get my teeth stuck in to whatever lay in store. It came crashing down pretty quickly as my supervisor dumped so much work on me today that I felt like I started hyperventilating at one point.
Putting my head down, I soldiered on and got started. I misunderstood a brief from my supervisor and published something I wasn't supposed to without it being vetted first and well, I made a mistake. It happens, we are human but I think I went as pale as a white horse when I walked into her office claiming she was going to kill me.
She didn't actually kill me, probably because I owned my error and fessed up to it as well as being willing to accept whatever fallout and punishment lay in wait. This may only happen tomorrow but I know it's coming.
After that stupidity, I decided the best thing to do is to simply work through it. Through hours without breaks, through lunch time - I looked at the time twice the entire day and after about 7,5 hours of working straight, I simply couldn't do it anymore. My brain felt like jelly. There are plenty of things that I do well and plenty that I don't. There are loads of things I dislike about myself and some that I'm quite proud of. It's taken me a long time to get to a place where I am comfortable in acknowledging that both sides of the coin exist within me and make me who I am. One thing that I've had to acknowledge is that while I can work under immense pressure for stretches of time to a point, I then start buckling and high pressure environments tend to make me frazzled and I don't produce my best work. Sure it's still of a relatively good standard, but it's more prone to errors. I know this. I own this.
It's left me in a conundrum currently as the workload seems to increase every day and I found myself wondering today if my manager is testing me. I later discounted it because I learned what the real reason is behind it (that's for another post entirely), but I left the office wondering if I'm perhaps the wrong person for the position after all.
It left me feeling like I'm between a rock and a hard place because I won't leave the company in the lurch so close to a major event, but the lack of balance, the expectations of 3 hours of unpaid overtime each day plus other factors is making me question whether it's me or them, or maybe a bit of both.
All images are my own unless otherwise stated
