WHEN YOU WORK FOR A TOXIC BOSS

When you work for a toxic boss, but you don't know it. Stay tuned. Hello, hello. So early in my career, I got an amazing opportunity, and at the time, I was so grateful for this opportunity. I was very naive, very young, so I didn't know that this boss was. Toxic. I didn't know that her behavior wasn't really acceptable. So let me tell you what happened. I was I just started. I was in my first couple of weeks of the job. I had my new boss who had met in the interview, and she had given me some tasks to do. I was doing the tasks. Everything was going really well. Everybody was really nice. And then she gave me a kind of a random task, and the task was to research how much it would cost. To order 3 beer kegs. And so I started calling around. I was like, oh, that's a fun task, right? So I started immediately working on that task out of my excitement. I didn't really think about prioritizing things. I just thought, okay, yeah, she wants me to get that information, I'll get it. So I started calling around to ask about how much the beer kegs would cost. And where we live, there's a ton of beer local breweries, so there was a ton of options. So I was getting like Quotes. I figured I'd get quotes from three places, and so as I started calling around, one of the developers in the company heard me calling about beer kegs on the phone, and he came over and he started asking what was going on, and he wanted to give some input. He wanted to be a part of the conversation, and so then another developer came over, and then I had kind of a gathering around my desk casually chatting about beer and like what beer kegs we should get, and. Yada yada. So this kind of went on for a little bit long. Maybe it was like 20 minutes, and I didn't—I didn't—I wasn't thinking. I was like, yeah, this is fun. This is a casual, laid-back environment. You know, we're having fun. I'm getting to know my coworkers, and then my boss comes up out of nowhere, and she gets really mad at me. She yells at me in front of everybody there, and she says, "You're not prioritizing that, are you?" She's like, "You have—you are being paid a lot of money." A lot more than I have been paid until just recently. And you are not doing what I asked you to do because I did ask you to do that, but you're not prioritizing this other stuff, and that is not acceptable. Anyway, she publicly humiliated me and didn't give me any warning about it, like, and I was kind of oblivious to it. So here's what I did. I cowered. I said, "I'm so so sorry." Everyone else went back to their desk, and I tried to hold back tears. I was super uncomfortable, and I said, "I'm so so so sorry. I will put that aside. I will get everything else done first. I will go buy you a chocolate, a latte, so that you're not mad at me, and please don't fire me." So that's what I did. And looking back. This person, this boss that I'm talking about, she was fired like not long after because she had other tendencies that were very toxic. And I should really define toxic, but for now I'll just say unpredictable behavior. Like one moment she's really happy and everything's great, and the next moment she's hopping mad red in the face yelling about something unrelated. Um, just very hot and cold, unpredictable. And that's not healthy or settling for anybody's nervous system, and it's not a good work environment. But anyways, this is how she was. After working with her for a while, we discovered this, and she was shortly fired because the, the culture didn't really like that. They didn't accommodate it. But at the time, I didn't know that was toxic. I thought immediately, I just thought, oh yeah, that's my fault. I did that wrong. I can't believe I did that. I'm so sorry. I should have thought about that first. I should have prioritized. I should have known better. I should have been smarter. How could I have been so stupid? That those were my original thoughts. And then now, after a lot of years looking back at the situation, I'm like, no, that's not acceptable. Right? So here's how I would go through it now if I were if I were me in that situation again. I would say, you know what? You're absolutely right. I can see why. I shouldn't be prioritizing that, and I can see why I shouldn't be spending more time on it than you know necessary. So you are totally right about that. However, I'm curious why you felt the need to yell about it and why you're so upset at me because that is something you can talk to me about. You know, like normally you don't have to yell at me publicly and make it worse. So I would say something like that, right? And this is all knowing that. You know, she was right. She probably was right. I shouldn't have been prioritizing that. But that doesn't make me a bad employee. It doesn't make me a bad person. It doesn't mean that I don't deserve the job. It doesn't mean any of that. It just means, oh, I could have used a little reminder, or maybe we need to have a, um, a conversation about how I prioritize things in the future so I don't do that again. But I was 2 weeks on the job. I was relaxed. My nervous system was settled because it had no reason not to be until she came in and kind of felt like it dropped a bomb on me and then kind of unstabled me. And then I was like, oh no, am I going to get in trouble again? And like, that's kind of how it was. I was like on guard after that thinking, oh no, is she going to be mad at this? Like, should I be doing this or this? And kind of made me question everything. And, and then when somebody is in that state, they're not doing their best work, right? They're just trying to please the person, trying to do everything, make sure that the person isn't mad at me, right? And that is not a good place to be for, for me or for that person, right? It's not the most productive. It's not the best way that we're going to get results. So now, speaking from where I am, I'm like, yeah, I've been through a lot of those situations where I've been on guard, where I felt bad about something, where I felt scared that someone was going to get me in trouble. Right.

And so

now my mission is to help people identify that really quickly because people don't know. You wouldn't know if that was happening or not. Like, I didn't know. It was completely blind to it. I really thought that I did that wrong. I should have known better. It was all my fault. I could have deserved to get fired for that. That is what my naive brain believed. And I have compassion for her. I say, yeah, of course you couldn't know what you didn't know. You did your best, and now you can see it more clearly. And that's called a growth mindset—being in a growth mindset and growing in a growth mindset—and being able to be confident to handle situations now if anything comes up calmly and groundedly and rationally, and not have that initial response where my nervous system is on guard because I know it's not about me. I know it's about the person and how they. handling it, how they are seeing the situation. But also, I've learned how to have my own back. And that's really important because when you always have your own back, no matter what anyone says, no matter how people come up, come at you harshly, there will be nothing that can really rattle you. And if it does, then you have the tools to have compassion for yourself, see what you could have done differently or would have done differently, if anything. And readjust for the next time, but it doesn't traumatize you anymore. It doesn't make or break you anymore. It doesn't phase how you move through your life and have other successes in the future. Like it doesn't do that anymore, right? But I'm not saying I'm not rattlable. Of course I am, but I'm a human and I pride myself on that fact. But I'm a human who's very emotionally elastic, right? So I can. Like one of my friends used this metaphor, which I love, and I don't know if you knew this, but palm trees—they in a storm—they can actually fall down and they can come right back up, and they—they can kind of go back and forth, and they can bend a lot, like all the way down to the ground, and then they can just come back up, and they don't like completely die. They're not like done, right? Whereas another tree, if it falls. It's dead. Like it's not coming back, right? So I think of myself as a palm tree, and I'm like, yeah, if I get my feelings hurt, like it comes down. Like I might be down for a bit, but I come right back up, right? And that is the work of having your own back and learning the difference between behavior that is okay and behavior that is not okay with you, right? And depending on what you grew up with. You wouldn't know necessarily. You wouldn't be like, oh, that's not acceptable behavior. No, you wouldn't. You would have an automatic body response that would have you respond in the way that would protect you the most, right? It would keep you safe. And in that, in that case, for me, it was fawning, right? Have you ever heard of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response? I fawned. So fawning is people pleasing. It's like saying, oh yeah, I'll do whatever you want. So I don't get in trouble, so you don't hurt me, so I'm safe, so you don't fire me, right? Other people might have just frozen and said nothing. Other people would have quit the job right away. Other people would have, um, had a conflict with her and argued with her and gotten defensive with her and said, hey, you didn't tell me I needed to do that. Why didn't you tell me? That's not my fault, right? But I didn't do that. Instead, I fawned, right? So we're gonna have a response that's gonna keep us safe, and it's going to be an automatic response. We're not even going to be able to Think of it consciously, we're just going to do it, right? So it really depends on what household you grew up with, your experiences, your emotional blueprint. But our job now is to be able to see that stuff and decide very intentionally who we want to be and how we want to respond in situations like that. And all of this guides our future. It guides who we allow into our lives, where we stay, like what kind of environments we stay in for more than a couple of months. If it's if we've done everything we believe we can. Can and is still not healthy for us. It's going to guide who we decide to marry or who we decide to be with, what we put up with from our friends, from our family, how much we get paid. It's going to guide all of that, right? So it's very important that we intentionally decide. And this all comes back to how you value yourself and whether or not you know how to value yourself accurately. And most people don't. So if you'd like some help valuing yourself accurately, I have a quiz that I've created. It's called the Value Vision Quiz. It's going to share with you, after you answer a few questions, how you actually value yourself, and it's going to give you a score. So you're going to see on a scale of 1 to 10 how well you're doing with that. And if you have work to do on it, I can help you because that's essentially my mission here in the world is to help you value yourself so that it can get reflected back in your bank account, in your relationships, in your life, and you can elevate yourself from the inside out. So I hope that story has helped you to see, and hopefully you can see yourself somewhere in that story. Like, ask yourself, I always say when I'm— when you're listening to me talk, always ask yourself, how does this apply to me? How is this like me? Or how have I moved through something like that already? And use it as a celebration moment for yourself. Or where do I have work to do? Where would I like some additional help with this? Right? So you can get that, you can sign up for that quiz below and you'll have your score within 3 minutes, 3 to 5 minutes at the most. And you can also sign up for the free training I have. It's called Own Your Value, Get Paid More. And in that, I run through several different ways to communicate your value to decision makers in many different ways. There's lots of, lots I have to teach you. So if you are interested in valuing yourself more and you're committed to living a life where you actually get to elevate what you attract into your life based on how you value yourself, then this is for you. So sign up below and I will meet you soon. Thank you for watching the video. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up. If you don't like my videos, give them a thumbs down and then don't watch them anymore. And if you'd like to get any of my freebies, I've got so much good free stuff for you. So just hit the links below. I've got the quiz to see if you value yourself accurately. You'll get a score within like 3 to 5 minutes. Um, I've got trainings. I've always got trainings going on. So sign up for my next one coming up below. And when you sign up for the training, you'll get a bunch of free PDFs. So one of them, my favorite, is if you're going to get, uh, if you're getting a lot of interviews but no offers, I've diagnosed that for you and I can tell you exactly why that's happening. Um, and my other favorite is the 10 Examples Guide for how to tell stories that land job offers and are compelling and hit all the notes. So you can get those below. Um, And if you want to subscribe to the channel, I would love to have you as a subscriber. And thank you for being here, and I will see you in the next video.