AskPolly: “I’m in my mid-30s, and it just feels like I’m way too old to still be treated this way. But I don’t know how to be any other way. Do I have to change my personality to be successful, or have I just had really bad luck?”
I know how it sounds but, seriously … everyone is mean to me.
I’m in my mid-30s, and it just feels like I’m way too old to still be treated this way. But I don’t know how to be any other way. Do I have to change my personality to be successful, or have I just had really bad luck?People pleasers have a lot of tools in their toolboxes . When we’re thrown into bewildering situations, we dig frantically through our big bags of tricks to find something to charm people and win them over.
There are trustworthy people in your office, I guarantee it. But you have to stop blowing air horns and setting off fireworks and dancing on tabletops in order to recognize who they are. You have to calm down and watch and listen. You have to expunge the word “mean” from your mind and start picturing a much more complicated dance of matching anxiety and defensiveness and shame.
Someone asked me recently, “Why didn’t you start writing for TV a long time ago? You’re funny and you live in L.A, it seems like a natural fit.” Instead of explaining myself through a fog of shame, on a giant wave of neurotic words, I just felt this flood of empathy for myself. I remembered how impossible it felt for me, for more than a decade, to walk out the front door and proclaim myself worthy.
Living inside your curiosity is the exact opposite of working hard to please people and proactively answering their imagined complaints and preemptively cutting off their inquiries about you with jokes or flaming arrows or trapeze acts or dancing bears shot out of cannons. Just five years ago, the question, “Why didn’t you do that a long time ago?” would’ve sent me into a deep, dark hole for at least a day or two.
But before you make any sweeping changes, OBSERVE. Cultivate your curiosity and your compassion for the people around you. Take careful internal notes on who seems attuned to the needs of others, and who seems defensive, threatened, and perpetually locked in a fighting or “fixing” stance. Notice who leaps in with unnecessary words, repeatedly. Pay attention to whether or not the people who loudly proclaim their own power ARE actually powerful. Question your assumptions.
Brace yourself, because your perspective on your workplace is about to shift so dramatically that it’ll give you vertigo. That’s the power of curiosity and trusting yourself. Try to stay grounded in reality. Try to patiently process the rejections that still feel very real to you without drawing sweeping conclusions from them.
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