Imagine being holed up in an office cubicle with your coffee cup at arm's reach, and you decide to get some work done. A few hours and thousands of memes and dog videos later, you are still staring at your screen without having done anything.
Have you ever had something come up in your life that feels eerily similar to an issue you've dealt with in the past?
A while ago, I entered into a business partnership that was all wrong, and while my intuition was sending me alarm signals the entire way, I chose to ignore them. Sure enough, the partnership had to end, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Something came up recently within a completely different context, but it had the same icky texture. Since our brains like to find commonalities and make sense of new experiences, my brain immediately declared, "This situation is just like that other one was, which means it's horrible and you need to get out!"
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Most of us have an aversion to the unknown. We're uncomfortable with whatever's unplanned, mysterious, or hidden. A lot of us were raised to believe that things should be known - that if we don't know something already, we need to learn it, measure it, shed light on it, etc. There's an air of desperation behind this belief, and it can drive us to create a false sense of knowing and control through excessive planning and worry.
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I grew up as the oldest of five kids. Our family of seven was...bustling, to say the least.
As the oldest, I thought it was my job to minimize the stress on my parents as much as possible, and so I got very good at being obedient (until my teenage years, anyway - but that's a post for another day).
I was a pretty mellow kid and didn't get bored easily, and my siblings were fairly similar. One thing we heard over and over again at church was "you kids are so well-behaved!"
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I've been hearing from a lot of people lately who feel completely undervalued in their jobs. They use words like "under-appreciated," "replaceable," "a cog in the machine," and their hearts are heavy. It's a pretty depressing state to be in. You know you've got good ideas, you know you can contribute more, but you feel stifled. Overlooked. Dismissed.
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