I‘ve read recently that as many as 60% of workers intend to leave their jobs this year. Assuming that there’s some economic upturn to enable it, that’s going to be one heck of a lot of people circling the job market. At least the recruiters will be happy!

It’s no wonder things are this way. In my client work I’m hearing some real horror stories of how people are being managed at the moment. And as you’ll recall from my last post, research is only affirming that people’s satisfaction with work is on the skids.

So I can quite understand why you’re burning the midnight oil blogging, revamping your LinkedIn profile, getting onto Brazen Careerist, getting your CV out there, or all of the above. It’s soul-destroying to feel overworked on the one hand, undervalued on the other. It’d be great to land a brilliant new gig so that you could give the middle finger to the bosses that are treating you so badly.

But is a quick exit the most you-loving strategy?

Pain of any kind is distressing. Our natural reaction is to escape it. If we have a headache we take aspirin; if we burn ourselves, we pull away from the flame. Emotional pain is particularly insidious. We try to fix it as best we can. Sometimes we medicate ourselves with food, alcohol or drugs. Or by taking action that feels like it puts us back in control. If a job consistently makes us feel bad, the default remedy is to quit.

The danger with escaping, however, is that it doesn’t always help you deal with the real cause of your work upset. And you can end up carrying that with you, unconsciously of course, into your next scenario, where the chances are you’ll reinvent it in one way or another.

I’m not suggesting you don’t take yourself off in a new direction if part of you needs to do that. Meantime, there’s an opportunity, should you choose to see it, to dig into what’s behind your current dissatisfaction and give it a chance to resolve itself.

What do I mean?

Well, there are a few things to think about. For a start, as much as we might wish otherwise, we are not innocent victims of the life dramas that befall us. As children, we learn the kind of situations, circumstances, characters and story that are a “fit” for us. We then carry them around through life, like we’re jigsaw puzzle pieces seeking our corresponding parts.

The thing is that what fits us doesn’t always make us feel good. Yes, some bits of what we’ve learned are healthy and positively support us. We repeat these things to our advantage. But some of the things we’ve osmotically absorbed and put our own meaning to have caused us pain in the past. And our recreating these scenarios just causes a recurrence of that. At one level that’s a bummer. Seen positively, it’s our clever psyches seeking resolution. If we’re smart, we’ll understand that and give ourselves the healing we need.

This is true of our whole lives, of course, not just work. But given that work is, for most, a major part of that picture, if something’s going to play out, it’ll play out here.

Am I saying that you’ve got yourself to blame for bad bosses?

There are indisputably some shocking bosses and companies out there. No argument. And as recent online dialogue details, they need to be thinking about their own part in transforming the working experience. (If you’re interested in this line of thought, check out Work. Life. Balance; The Mama Bee; Work+Life Fit and the related conversation threads on these posts.)

What I’m suggesting here, however, is that you ask yourself: how come you’ve ended up in your current scenario? What can you positively learn from it? And how can it inform your next steps?

My own story is a classic example of what I’m talking about. I was a serial job-jumper for a while and, with one or two noteworthy exceptions, always ended up with bullying bosses. Sure, each one was different, but they would all sooner or later start demonstrating one form of intimidating behaviour or another. Working, finally, for the woman I nicknamed The Poisoned Dwarf brought things to a head. Here was someone who was a tyrant in her general approach; whose expectations and standards were ever-changing and crazy-making. Her support or dismissal of me was completely unpredictable. She was so toxic that she drove me to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In an attempt to rescue my sanity, I found a good psychologist with whom to do some work. In the process, I discovered that, yes, my boss was a nightmare, but I was prone to being shaken by her because bullying had been a fundamental feature of my childhood. My father had been the big cheese in our family, needing to be the centre of attention, and being both charming and punishing in equal but unpredictable measure. He needed me to be his version of perfection to support his fragile ego. When I was fitting his picture, he exalted me. When, in the course of being myself, I stepped outside of his narrow strictures, he turned his wrath on me.

Knowing that I was not only dealing with The Poisoned Dwarf, but also with the emotional ghosts of my father’s behaviour, really helped me. I could slough off the unhelpful childhood stuff I’d been unwittingly carrying around with me, and confront my boss as an adult, knowing that she could never damage me the way my father had.

• I learned to challenge her irrational assertions about me,
• I stopped needing her to tell me I was okay in order for me to feel okay about myself,
• I became able to say “no” to her unreasonable demands of me, and
• I could turn a blind eye to her sulks, door slamming, head-shaking and other emotion-provoking behaviour.

Before doing my inner work, I was ready to take the next good job that came along in order to give myself the temporary feeling of being in charge. Calming the angst, however, took the pressure off things and opened me up to new and different possibilities. I started to be able to hear what my heart was saying and trusted that I could follow it. The tough, bullied me would never have thought that an HR person at the top of her game could reasonably quit corporate life, study psychotherapy and coaching, and turn the skills from all these arenas into something to give back to people having similar experiences as I used to. The more resourceful me, however, took the risk of beginning the journey.

I’ll leave you with some words I’ve read before, but had forgotten until a friend reminded me of them just the other day:

“The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations. This field can orchestrate an infinity of space-time events to bring about the outcome intended. But when our intention gets locked into a rigid mindset, we lose the fluidity, flexibility and creativity inherent in the field. Attachment to a specific outcome freezes our desire into a rigid framework and this interferes with the whole process of creation….”

Deepak Chopra: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success