EP 277: Feeling unseen by your boss?

Hello, hello. Welcome to the Get a Six Figure Job You Love and Thrive podcast. This is a little bit of a different episode. It's a bit of a voice note that I did when I was walking. I might start doing some more of these. They're just thoughts that I'm having about things that my clients have brought up, and I thought I'd bring you along for the ride and share with you in case it's helpful. Okay, so I was talking to a client today and she was struggling with her boss not listening Mm-hmm. To her ideas, and she was feeling shut down. She was feeling like her boss only wanted to hear the idea if it was already something she had suggested, or if she did hear the idea, then she would immediately say, oh, well, what we need to be doing is this other thing, and completely disregard my client. And so, what this made me think of was, in situations When I had somebody who wasn't receiving or wasn't picking up what I was putting down, how did I think about it in a way that ended up bringing us closer in seeing eye to eye, or at least being able to hear each other out and make a decision forward versus resistance, which is what usually happens when someone feels shut down or they're taking it personally? So my client was— Taking it personally, not intentionally. She knows it's not about her, but sometimes in those moments, it's hard to separate that. So, she had fallen into kind of taking it personally, and she had started to get bitter and just feeling like, ugh, I don't need this. Like, I could be somewhere else with someone who's appreciating me, and this isn't what I signed up for. And she kind of started down that path, right? And so then she started withdrawing, and, like, not presenting her ideas anymore, not really moving in the direction. And that was— that, when you do that, when you withdraw and you just kind of give up and say, I'm gonna just forget it, I won't even give my ideas anymore, then what happens there is you take yourself out of the game that you were in to make a difference, to make— Mm-hmm. Make a path forward. You're no longer kind of in the running to do that, and you've distanced yourself from your boss. So there's really a stalemate there. Like, you're not happy, your boss is not happy, and really it's just— it ends in disconnection and bitterness, and it's nothing helpful or good, right? So I was thinking about how I thought about this, and it's like the analogy of your house. Say you are in your house, or you're You're coming up to your house and you realize you have locked yourself out of your house. So you might try— first of all, you're going to try to maybe see if the back door is open, right? That's the— if you go to the front door, you realize you don't have the key and you can't get in. The first thing you're probably going to do is go to the back door, right? And then maybe the back door is also locked. So that's one try, right? And then you're like, okay, so the back door's locked, then what do I do, right? So then you might try to crack a window, right? You might try to find a window that's open so you could crack a window and jump through the window. So let's say you can't find a window on the ground floor or an easy window to access, so that doesn't work. Maybe you try a few and that's— those are not the way in, right? So then you're like, okay, I need to climb up my balcony so that I can See if my patio door might be open, and I can get in that way, right? And then maybe you do that, and you finally get there, and you open the patio door, and then you're in. And it took you, like, 3 or 4 tries to get it done, but you got in. And that is how we have to look at communicating with people, is that sometimes it takes a few tries to get in. We don't get in the first try, or even the second or the third. But every try is very Different. It's not just hammering on the front door over and over and over till you break it, because then you got repairing to do. And even if it's you call a locksmith and get, you know, someone to let you in through the lock that way, then that's fair too. That's a way, right? And for my clients, that is they call me or they call a coach and they say, hey, I need some help with getting through to this person. And I know that we can eventually get to The point where maybe we're not getting along great, and we're not friends, but we can have a decent working relationship where we can both feel heard, and we can both make decisions that are going to move this project or this cause forward that we're both working towards, right? And that's something that's doable in many, many cases when we are able to have some creativity in our thinking. But when we're shut off, and we're thinking it's about us, and we've maybe lost access to our creativity, We're not in a place to do that. And that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with us. We just— we're human, and that happens. So if you would like to get some help with anything related to your working relationships with your boss, your coworkers, so that you can advance your career faster, let me know. Thank you.