The Toxic Boss Survival Guide - Tactics for Navigating the Wilderness at Work by Chappelow Craig; Ronayne Peter; Adams Bill

Author:Chappelow, Craig; Ronayne, Peter; Adams, Bill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership
Published: 2018-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

ACCEPT PRESSURE

This step builds naturally from recognizing the seven pressures and understanding the stress they can generate if we aren’t mindful and vigilant. To survive and even thrive in your toxic situation, you need to accept that some measure of stress is entirely normal—hardwired even—while simultaneously accepting that swimming in a sea of cortisol from day to day isn’t okay. There’s an illustrative scene in the very first episode of the hit TV series Lost, about a group of island-bound plane crash survivors. The scene in question isn’t the mechanical sounding monster, not the exploding airplane turbine, not Shannon screaming uncontrollably.30 On the day of the crash, lead character Dr. Jack Shephard (more on his painfully obvious last name later), has a gash on his back that he can’t reach. He convinces fellow survivor, Kate, to sew the wound up for him. To calm her overwhelming stress about it, Jack shares a story about a time when he was afraid, almost paralyzed by his stress response, but overcame it.

“Well, fear’s sort of an odd thing. When I was in residency, my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen-year-old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I… and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I’d let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that’s all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up, and she was fine.”

Classic example (okay, a little too fluid-y even for us) of accepting stress, letting it in, and then moving forward with intention. This reminds us that surviving a toxic boss means avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis31 of life-sucking “give-up-itis” on the one side and out-of-control anger and panic on the other. With fictional Dr. Jack Shephard’s helpful prescription in mind, accepting stress is about reframing the situation, viewing the stress you’re experiencing and the elevated levels of daily pressure as an opportunity, as what UC-Irvine’s Salvatore Maddi has referred to as “the courage to grow from stress.”32 And guess what? That’s really what this survival guide is all about—giving you courage and a real plan for surviving and even thriving no matter the size of the smoke monster or the Gorgon lurking in the C Suite. You always have agency, autonomy, and even responsibility for how you choose to respond to pressure, including the seemingly overwhelming and debilitating presence of a toxic boss. So count to five like Dr.

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