The Easiest Way to Stop Feeling Frustrated at Work? Do Something About It.

You’ve got problems at work, but you feel like you can’t do anything about it. You get frustrated because you wish you could change things and make it better, but you know leadership won’t listen to you. And worse, you don’t trust them to make the right decision.

You’re not alone. A recent study found that only 48% of employees trust their employers.

So yeah, we’ve got trust issues.

When things go wrong at work, where do we turn first? Our first impulse is to look upwards–the company put you in this situation, and they aren’t setting you up to succeed. So you blame leadership. You blame the process. The spiral begins. You start to blame everyone… but yourself.

This isn’t a defense of corporate leadership across the country; there are plenty of bad bosses and managers in leadership. But when we’re in these situations, our frustration consumes us, and we forget the solution to the problem is right under our nose. It’s us.

According to a study by Deloitte on Millennial work habits, Millennials do not feel empowered to solve their problems. 71% of people looking to leave their jobs felt like their leadership skills were not being developed.

I see this a lot, especially with junior members of the team. They feel frustrated because they’re being held back from doing their best work (or the popular alternative, “When I start my own company…”). Seeing the problems above you is a useful skill, but it’s not where true change happens.

True change occurs when you take the issues you see above you and turn them into things you can actually tackle in your immediate situation. When we shift our energy from frustration and start thinking about how to change the things around us, change happens quickly. And as things change faster (and better), the things we’re able to change grows.

It’s what farmer’s market tote bags have been telling us for years: think global, act local.

Often, we get stuck at think global, fantasizing about the things we want to change inside our organizations. But those global issues aren’t going to change overnight. Or by yourself. If you spend all your time thinking about the global, you’re going to drive yourself crazy because you won’t see any change.

While it’s important to see the bigger picture, you can’t let that paralyze you. You have to bring it into action. If you can channel your global frustrations into change on a local level, people are going to notice. And you’ll find that people above you will ask for your opinion on the global–and that the global slowly becomes your local.

Let’s say you work in an environment where you feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, that you can’t make any progress because there are too many stakeholders offering feedback at different times. (And worse yet, key stakeholders that don’t offer feedback until the last minute.)

You could rage. You could gripe that the system is setting you up to fail (and you might be right). But if you get stuck dwelling on frustration, you’re going to drive yourself into a black hole of unhappiness, never to be seen again.

Instead of getting angry at your stakeholders, think about how you can streamline your review process. Is there a way that you can set expectations and get everyone on the same page faster? Can you set a calendar of structured milestones and distribute it to the team so stakeholders know when to give feedback? Can you work to schedule feedback sessions at a specific time, with everyone in the same room, so feedback is consolidated? Sure, it takes more work to set up, especially if project management is not part of your job, but it will pay off in the long run. Your projects will run smoother, and people will notice. Then you’ll be asked to take the lead on more projects (and people). And soon you’ll be responsible for structuring your team’s check-ins based on how you’ve been improving the process. Before you know it, your local has grown without you even thinking about it, because you were using your energy to change the things around you.

It’s already happening in companies across the country; more and more Millennials are entering the boardroom and taking their values with them. Those values are the ones they crafted changing their local. As your local grows, so too does your global. Change doesn’t happen by looking up. It happens by looking straight ahead.