Signs That It's Time To Change Your Professional Life.

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Bryan Yates, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

Snark, passive-aggressiveness, withholding, chronic sarcasm….

These are a few clear signals that our relationship with our workplace has soured. They are all methods for avoiding those hard conversations that need having. They are posturally defensive mechanisms to evade the truth.

Fear is what makes us default to these. For many alcoholics, alcohol is the solution, the tool for survival. Similarly, for the frustrated and burnt-out, communication tools like snark, passive-aggressiveness, and withholding serve the same purpose. They are survival measures to cope.

Once fear is learned and internally operationalized, it’s awfully hard to undo. Painfully, not even changing jobs will fully help this—I know this from experience. It’ll alleviate the symptoms, but not cure the cause. We still carry that root fear, which goes more deeply than most of us realize, from place to place and situation to situation. A new work environment can make us feel better, but feeling better is only a temporary mask.

That same original fear is a bomb that wants to go off. It doesn’t want to kill us, but it wants to keep us in servitude. Fear needs a complacent host organism to fester and thrive. Yet, it also works best when it’s stayed hidden in the shadows of your blindspot.

Approached bravely, though, a professional change can open the space to make real transformation. It is an opportunity to inventory our individual resentments, past behaviors, nagging thoughts, old arguments, and the underlying causes and conditions of emotional suffering. This is also a useful process if a professional change is on the horizon.

Becoming aware of your fear is a secret power for building your personal strength. Deep awareness of our own fears creates inner peace for ourselves and deep compassion for others. Facing it takes courage, and can build surprising personal belief in your own possibilities.

In health,

Bryan