Almost 40 years ago, I found myself in a deep hole... . .

Reflection

Almost 40 years ago, I found myself in a deep hole. I had given an organization, a company, almost 12 years of my life, working about 12 hours per day. I had become a valued person, a junior manager type in my early 30s. I had many varied responsibilities, and managed them all well, with not a single negative remark.

Then to my great surprise I found myself being avoided, shunned and ignored by the CEO. When I would go in to see him about some business, he shuffle his papers, not look at me, act as if I was a bother. He had arrived at some erroneous conclusions about me.

He had conceived a giant new vision for the organization and needed to sell it to his management staff. He would bring aspects of the project to meetings for discussion and ask the rest of us what we thought. I made the mistake of assuming that he really wanted an honest answer, so I was ready to ask some hard nosed questions. Which it turned out he did not like at all. It was evident later that he had already made up his mind in these issues and was only looking for support and reinforcement. Unbeknown to me, to him I became a leader of the opposition, and he proceeded to take it out of me in a number of demeaning ways, which I will not go into detail about, but I was not only disappointed. I was in fact devastated. No one ( I felt) had been more loyal, more organized, more energetic to do all the assignments I had been given. It was actually the beginning of the end there for me, although I did not leave for awhile. When I saw some of my old friends from those days many years later, they told me they had watched the CEO bully me for my questions. At the time, I was just floored and did not know what to do.

I was in my early 30s and did not have awareness of my feelings nor any way to deal with them. I simply felt stymied, blocked, dismissed, categorized, and unfairly labeled. I did not know what to do and it took me a long time to figure out what my choices might be. Actually to learn to sort out my feelings and risk expressing them.

So It took me almost thirty years to learn this method --how to handle negative feelings in the workplace, and about another 10 years to refine it by teaching it in a number of settings and getting feedback from many managers.

The biggest roadblock in any organization is the presence of negative feelings, When skills do not exist, it becomes the Achilles heel of the organization, no matter how successful that organization is. Can you tell me what some of the outcomes of negative feelings are for the workplace? (Backbiting, hidden agendas, cliques, works low down, blaming, stereotyping, and very much passive aggressive behavior,. Get backs, get around, get over, get by...)

So out of my blood, sweat and tears, and a deep personal painful setback, I developed this method of dealing positively with negative feelings. For more now, go to Win Win Finesse blog by clicking on the Win Win Finesse logo on my website, www.paschalbaute.com

Once you learn this method, you will always have a way to handle negative feelings. This does not mean that it will always work, as I later explain the 4 types of persons it will not work with or work well with. But for 80% of the populationor more it works and works well. Even when they know already what you are doing.

More later.
April 16.