How To Fire A Bad Boss (PC007)

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Welcome to Money Monday. Today we are going to talk about How to Get Rid of a Bad Boss – without switching jobs. This method also works for getting rid of a fellow employee you don’t get along with or any other unpleasant person you may encounter during your work day. This is especially effective if you notice that you seem to always end up with a certain type of boss or coworker. Repeating patterns in your life usually point clearly to the source as being you, or more correctly, your subconscious.

Have you ever tried to get rid of a bad work situation by quitting and finding a new job, only to find yourself in a similar situation again? Yup, the problem is that we can’t correct the issue by changing the external world, since the source is coming from within. Of course, if you switch jobs enough, or wait it out long enough the situation is bound to change. We can count on the impermanence of all things. Eventually every good situation and every bad situation will end. However, by tweaking our subconscious we can create a new situation faster. I like to be able to change things for the better as fast as possible.

If you have an unpleasant work situation you have some options available to you. Here are some methods that I have used.

Grin and bear it. Wait it out and it will change.
Confront the problem person. Setting a boundary is working in the external world, but it might be exactly what is needed to break your subconscious block
Take an inventory of the situation and be the change you want to see. If your boss is always critical of what you do, then purposefully stop being critical of everyone and anyone.
Examine your automatic thoughts and consider what beliefs might be creating this situation. Then use the Change Anything Now! Process to delete the blocks instantly.

Let’s consider the first option. You can simply endure your bad situation and do nothing. I’ve done this before myself. When I was a teenager, as I attended college, I worked for a breakfast restaurant. All and all I was there about 4 or 5 years. During part of the time I worked there, one of the cooks hated me. He was cool and critical. It was unpleasant working with him. In fact, I started to dislike my job and didn’t want to go to work. The money was good, so I hung onto the job. In fact, this went on for two years. Then suddenly, and I am not sure why or how, he started being nice to me. In fact, once he warmed up, I sensed a little sexual chemistry. That never got explored and he moved on to another job, but I learned from the experience that things change even if you don’t do anything. At the time I criticized myself for keeping a job that I didn’t like. But in the end, I started loving my job again.

I’ll never know if something better would have happened if I had left the job when I was hating it, but I did learn about impermanence. Everything that has a beginning has an end.

The second option is confronting the person. I’ve heard of people doing this and I think it is a great option. However, it isn’t quite my style. Maybe when I was younger I was a little conflict avoidant, but I also think I have an inherent belief that people already know how they should behave, and if they are not doing it they are not capable of doing it. And when I was younger, I was completely clueless that confronting people was an option. This wasn’t modeled in my family of origin. I can see how the combination of factors has lead me to embrace a model that focuses on changing myself to change the outside world.

What does confrontation look like? If we consider the situation I just described at the restaurant, I know people that would have just confronted the cook, “Why are you in such a bad mood?” or “Why don’t you like me?” The idea would be to get the obvious, but unspoken truth, out of the closet.

I have a different method of “confrontation” – if you want to call it that. If someone is not nice to me, then I can address specific behavior. For instance, if someone is calling me names, I can simply ask them not to call me names. If they don’t honor my boundary, then I will need to take some other action.

As for the cook, forty years later, I cannot remember exactly how the cook treated me. I know he wasn’t friendly and I felt really uncomfortable, but neither is a reportable offense. It is possible that he was just angry and it had nothing to do with me. The unpleasantness I experienced stemmed from how uncomfortable it was to me to be around someone that was angry. So, there wasn’t a boundary I needed to set, given I don’t think asking someone to not be angry is really an option. I think people have a right to their emotions and as long as he wasn’t calling me names or venting his anger at me then there was no immediate issue. Of course, today I think I would not tolerate an angry person for two years without a discussion.

I think that when it comes to confrontation, one needs to be sensitive to who has the problem. In the case of the angry cook, I had the problem and his behavior was within acceptable limits. In the case of sexual harassment or anytime someone does something to me that I don’t like I have the problem and it is my job to assert and maintain boundaries. IF my boss is yelling at me for something I did that they did not like, then we might both have a problem. They don’t like my work and I don’t like being yelled at. The solution would be mutually negotiated.

The third option for dealing with a bad boss I learned when I studied the law of cause and effect. The law of cause and effect suggests that the things that occur to us are not random, instead they are caused by us doing a similar action in the past. The law of cause and effect has four attributes:

When we think or do something we plant the seed for the same thing happening to us in the future
If we experience something we did a similar thing in the past
While the cause might be small, like an acorn, often times the result is large like an oak tree. So, a small act of kindness may result in a generous offering of goodness to us in the future. For instance, we move a hose so someone won’t trip and a few years later someone saves our life in a fire.
Every time we think of do something we plant a seed and these cannot be lost, but you can weed them out and prevent them from growing.

They say the law of cause and effect is very complex and hard to see. What I like about it is that it makes me 100% responsible for what is occurring in my life. I am no longer a victim. It means that the bad boss is coming from my past deeds and that I can create a good boss by changing my ways. I like this kind of power over my life. More importantly I have tested this out and gotten good results.

Here is my story. I once was hired at a treatment center for substance abuse to work as part of their wellness program. The center was in the process of being sold to a new owner. I was hired by the CEO and operations manager, but within a month there was a new CEO and most of my closest colleagues had left. I was put in charge of the wellness program which was an integral part of the old center’s treatment. However, studying the new management’s material I realized they had a very mainstream treatment program that focused on pharmaceutical and cognitive behavior interventions. What I was doing was not at all supported.

What I experienced was chaos. No one really knew what was going on. I was treated by the other professional staff like an insignificant player (asked to fetch books for their sessions) instead of like the Doctor that I was. I was eventually moved from my prominent office in the admitting are to an obscure attic room because the cook wanted my office.

My boss was likewise surprising. He seemed to treat the job placement as a vacation. (I have to admit it was sort of like that for me too. The treatment center was housed in a former five star hotel and restaurant in Sausalito – overlooking the SF bay. The 28 day program went for $60,000 for a single occupancy room and the lunch buffet was to die for – hence the cook got my fancy office.)

In my few interactions with my boss, he would tell me about other members of the staff that had approached him wanting my job and how I need to create alliances to get what I wanted. And at my three month review he marked my all zeros on every criteria. It was crazy. I have a 4.0 from UCDavis and I don’t get zeros. When I asked him what he based his assessment on he admitted he didn’t actually have my job description.

To summarize the environment was not supportive at all and people were competing with each other. So what did I do? Well I sensed that there was no real way to salvage the situation, so I focused on not reacting and creating the opposite environment in the future by applying the law of cause and effect. Since I was not supported I supporting others as best I could.

I also had just read the work by Dr. Len and attended his workshop. He is a practitioner of Ho’oponopono. He used a specific clearing statement to actually treat patients he never saw at a treatment center for the criminally insane. It is a great story. As a result of his practice the institution became a safe place to work and patients got better. After a period of two years the institution was closed because of not enough patients. So, I made a list of the staff and clients at my center and replicated his practice.

The result? Well I was let go at the end of my fourth month. I then proceeded to focus on meditation practice for several years. However, the next job I got was the complete opposite. I was completely part of a team. My bosses and coworkers supported me. I was accepted for who I was and encouraged to totally express myself. Did I create that? Of course, I did. The mind is a powerful thing. Either the law of cause and effect is real or my belief in that law created the effect. Either way, I created a fabulous work environment and two great bosses. Like I keep saying – It all begins with a choice. Choose what you want in your life and then ask what it will take to create that. Your answers are within you -but don’t forget to pay attention to outside clues. Dedicate yourself to creating an amazing life. You will never regret it.

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening. Take a moment to give me five stars and write me a review. This will help the podcast reach more people.

CREDITS:

Music
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Voice Intro:
Dylan McClosky
https://www.fiverr.com/dylanmcclosky