Do The Work

I took the day off today. When I woke up this morning, I had that familiar feeling. The feeling of disdain when thinking of another day of work. It's been over a year since I've been at my job and up until recently, I've enjoyed it. For the most part. But these past couple of weeks have been trying. I've experienced what I call 'work dread' in past jobs and it's not the business. 'Work dread' consumes your life. You spend weekends living it up way past the point that you should all to mask the eventuality of 5 days of prison. So I've made a decision. I'm going to do the work and fortify myself. I'm going to make the decision to not have that old experience again.

So I'm revisiting a book by Amy DuBois Barnett that had a profound effect on me in my 20's. While I'm in a different place in my life now, I can probably pull some quotes out of it that'll help me. Like this one...

"We don't appreciate the good things we may already have and we certainly don't value the experience of adversity and the strength it gives us to make the life we truly want." ~ Two things... My job is a good thing. It's a blessing. I'm financially comfortable and appreciate that. Secondly, the adversity that I'm going through right now is only going to make me stronger. Maybe I'm learning tools that'll help me to be a good wife or mother. I should always look at the adversity and say 'what can you learn out of this?'

"For the first time in my life, I was truly happy because I'd created this life for myself." My sis Tiff has been posting thoughts like this on instagram lately and it's forced me to think. Happiness is a choice. It's a unilateral choice. No one can help you be happy and no one can force you to be unhappy. My manager cannot force me to be unhappy. I have to create my own happiness.

"When you fall in love with who you really are, it's that much easier to be you, always." This isn't work related. Just something that strikes me and is worth typing out. I think I was at my best when I lived in LA. It wasn't so much the location as it was the space I was in. I was learning, growing, understanding, and defining myself.

"Living a full life is actually experiencing the entire range of emotions we have...being able to understand challenges as experiences in one long adventure will change your whole attitude." This is a good one. If you understand the challenge as that, then you can also understand the positives.

"Learn from others' successes and failures." This is under the subheading Stop Comparing Yourself To Others. I think this will help me with my manager. He's a bit of an overachiever which means that sometimes the work he has me do is over and above. I'm a numbers person and if you know anything about math, engineering and technical people, you know that we look for shortcuts. We're lazy. We try to complete a task with the least amount of steps. So my manager frustrates me when he asks me to do things that I feel are unnecessary. But I need not focus on that. The fact of the matter is that he's a smart guy who leaves no leaf unturned. He is more thorough than anyone I've ever met. I can learn from that. I need to learn from that. There's no problem with stretching myself a little bit more.

Ok, I think that's enough. I'm going to keep reading but I'm done with typing. I'm all about doing the work today...