Should I give up on success?

What should you do when you feel like you just can’t win at work? That’s the question we answer in this week’s episode of Per My Last Email—the podcast about what to do when work gets weird.

Failure. For a lot of us, this is the real F word—the one that haunts us. The one we’ll do pretty much anything to avoid. 

But something I’ve been seeing a lot in workplaces lately is that people feel like they’re being set up to fail—asked to take on too many jobs, switch contexts too many times a day, and generally spread themselves so thin they can’t realistically be good at anything. Add in corporate gaslighting that makes them think it’s all their fault, and they often wind up in some pretty dark places—burned out, or worse.

That’s where our latest letter-writer on Per My Last Email found themselves. Here’s the dilemma they shared with us:    

I am in a 50/50 global manager/individual contributor role. I'm also the domain mentor for my team so aside from recruiting and hiring, I also onboard and upskill them. I'm expected to increase retention and engagement on my team, and improve team culture. Problem is: there is quite a bit of corporate (and senior leadership) gaslighting going on.

How do I come to terms with failing? Should I give up on trying to personally succeed and thrive? Or—as my partner suggests—should I simply care less? 

I really feel for this person—it sounds like they’re being asked to do at least three different jobs, and simultaneously are being told they’re not doing enough, or doing them well enough. That’s a painful, deflating place to be. 

But… I don’t think that means they need to give up or stop caring, as tempting as that might sound. Because doing so might protect them from feeling like a failure—but the price they’ll pay is feeling numb. And that numbness tends to make people feel empty, lonely, and disconnected. It makes every day a slog—there are no wins, no bright spots. How depressing.  

So what might they do instead? My suggestion is to start by unpacking those terms, success and failure. According to whom? What’s the definition of those words, and where did that definition come from? 

In my experience as a coach, I find that a lot of people have never defined those things for themselves. Instead, they're reflexively relying on someone else’s definition—their company’s, their parents’, their general sense of what “society” expects. 

Those external forces do matter—most of us need a job to survive, and part of living in society and having relationships is caring what other people think. But we need our own definitions, too. Especially in times like this letter-writer is facing—when the gaslights are so bright you can see them from space, and there’s no way to hit the bar that your organization has set for you. 

Knowing what you care about, what you believe really matters, doesn’t make it easy to cope with corporate nonsense. But it does give you a way to orient yourself. Instead of focusing on caring less, which makes every day feel like a shrug, you can instead get selective: What, specifically, is worth caring about?  

There’s so much more in the episode, so if you’ve struggled with these worries lately—feeling like you’re failing at work, no matter what—I hope you check it out. Listen and subscribe here

And we’re still looking for new dilemmas for the rest of this season! So if you want coaching and support with a screwy work situation, tell us about it

Should I give up on success?

Time to talk about the other F word.

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