How to stop feeling helpless at work and start taking charge of your life
The reason why you feel helpless in your career is most likely not your fault.
Let me repeat this again. It’s not your fault. You can stop blaming yourself.
Most of us work really hard to go to the best college possible and by the time we get a job, we are convinced we have done everything right. So it really hits us hard when our career does not go the way we wanted. The first thing we do is think, “what am I doing wrong?” I struggled a lot with this question when I was still working in Wall Street. But I began to accept my fate and did nothing until Lehman Brothers collapsed on its own. Why did I do this ? Because of “Learned Helplessness.”
The term comes from studies by psychology researcher Martin Seligman in 1967. It happens when a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness from too many failures and they give up trying. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.
A few months ago, my friend was also in a similar state of mind. He has a master degree in Financial Engineering. He worked hard but it seemed that nothing pleased his new manager.
I felt guilty for going on a vacation to Hawaii while he was depressed.
One day, I stopped at a local laulau place. Laulau is a traditional Hawaiian dish that consists of pork wrapped in luau leaf. It needs to be slow cooked for a day and most places don’t prepare it in the traditional way anymore because it simply takes too long.
The restaurant was run down and barely had enough parking spots for four cars. In an open shack next to the restaurant, there was a man trying to get flies off the trays of laulaus.
I decided to eat my laulau plate outside to get some ocean breeze and he sat next to me and started telling me his story. When he was young, he decided to leave Hawaii and go to Guam to be a brick layer. Guam was becoming a popular tourist destination and they needed more hotels.
He was three times more productive than the locals. Soon the local workers hated him. They thought ‘why was this guy from Hawaii making us look bad?’ So they made sure that the boss only came around while he is taking a break. Soon, the boss started criticizing him for not working hard. The brick layer tried to explain but the boss didn’t listen. The boss eventually fired him but he wasn’t depressed. He simply walked to the next construction site across the street and got hired right away.
When his former boss found out a week later that the brick layer was a rock star at the construction site next door, he was outraged. He demanded an explanation.
Here is what happened. Instead of falling into “learned helplessness” trap, the bricklayer made sure that the construction manager from the construction site across the street saw his brick laying skills. He went over to the construction site time to time and taught the workers how to lay the bricks.
The boss was blind sided and had lost his best worker. The bricklayer eventually became a training manager at a construction company in California. After retirement he decided to move back to Hawaii to be closer to his grand kids. I truly hope that the laulau shop will still be there when I visit the Big Island again.
If your manager is not acknowledging your performance and productivity, find a good manager/mentor who believes in your potential. My mentor helped me figure what I want and gave me the courage to move from New York to California.
Also, start expanding your external network. When you feel helpless you will most likely have a cognitive tunnel vision — your brain will focus on one minor part of the stressful situation and lose the bigger and more important aspects. By going to networking events and meeting new people, I realized that my external surroundings can help me with my career problems. Prior to joining Carta, I went to a tech event almost every day to learn more about the industry.
Here is the link that I used to find local tech events : https://www.startupgrind.com/events/
There is hope so don’t give up.
In his book “No Reservations”, Anthony Bourdain talks about how one remarkable restaurant manager managed to run several successful restaurants in NYC despite the intensely competitive industry.
The most important and last lessons I learned from Bigfoot were about personnel management — that I have to know everything…I need to know, you see. Not just what’s happening in my kitchen, but across the street as well. Is my saucier unhappy? Is the chef across the street ready to make a pass…Is the saucier across the street unhappy? May be he’s available…
Great managers are constantly looking for people with talent. All you need to do is find them.
