Bitterness, Anger and Rage: Why You Should Let Go
Perhaps it’s the week — the Jewish Passover started last night and today is western Christians’ Maundy Thursday — but it seems like a good time to look at another thing that happens when Hidden High Potentials get stuck.
Bitterness, anger and rage.
Anyone want to guess why working at a job that is too small can make you sick?
It’s not hard to see how this can happen. You have the capacity for doing bigger work, more work, for solving problems that other people aren’t seeing. But no one sees you. You toil getting less and less while other get more and more. Soon it feels like even the little you have is taken from you and given to him who has.
This can be pretty draining on most of us.
After awhile, most people either become sick from depression and cave to the (absolute untrue) idea that they are to blame for all this, that they are inherently losers.
Or they become bitter and hateful.
You’ve seen it, I’m sure. As an old IT consultant, I saw it all the time. Information security, an undervalued field that requires a great deal of capacity to do well, always had the worst of them but you could find them through the IT organization. They become angry and controlling, telling you how stupid you are.
Because working beneath your capacity takes its toll.
Niklaus Weckmann (Werkstatt): Gefangennahme Christi, Ulm um 1520 , Lindenholz; Fassung durch Caspar Strauß, Augsburg, 1625 (aus Kloster Zwiefalten)I’ve talked in the webinar about why working at a job just one level too small actually increases the pressure by factors of 3 or more. You have to cope with that pressure somehow.
Some of you cave. Some of you explode in rage.
I’ve done both — is there anything worse than a raging depressed person? — so I’m not being judgmental here. I just want you to know that this happens. A lot.
Sometimes you even get so angry that you hyper-identify with the system that is killing you. You take what is being told to you and apply it ruthlessly to everyone else. You become the enforcer of a system that is destroying you.
Ian McDonald reported that when they reorganized the New Zealand Aluminium Smelter according to work levels, the social services in that company town reported a 30% drop in reports of domestic violence. Some men were coming home feeling so pressed by the bad fit that they were taking it out on their wives. Not to excuse it or to say that everyone who batters a spouse is in a bad job. But it shows what working at the wrong place does to you.
It’s hard to live where no one gets you, where people don’t see who you really are. It is so lonely, so bare, like living in the bleak gray emptiness of Lewis’s endless city of hell. You await some good news but as you age and grow even farther from where everyone else is, the hope of it grows dimmer and dimmer.
You don’t need to learn how to cope with this horrible experience. You need to learn how to find your place in this world. Let’s get as many as we can work that fits.
Because you are the killer app.
2 comments from recovered original
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Michelle Malay Carter { 04.10.09 at 08:15 } -
Hey, didn’t your fine friend Michelle just say this? How come when she said it, your response was anger and rage?
Michelle
