Changing your job is stressful. Especially if you are used to being highly efficient in your old workplace and you have high standards for yourself. It happens even if it is your own decision, and you have made the change “for the better.” In this COVID19 period, when everything that could go offline went offline, and human contact was reduced to bare minimum, it may be even more challenging. I experienced this transient period of job change a few times by now (one is recent) and got to some conclusions based on my own experience, self-observance and discussions with friends and colleagues.
What is causing your stress?
This is an important question you need to ask yourself. Stress is dissonance in the state you observe and the state you believe it should be. That is the gap between what the actual situation is and what you expect it to be. To make it more concrete – it is caused by your expectations – you are used to do a lot of work, you are used to do complex work, you are used to work independently, to contribute significantly and to discuss equally with other team members.
Now you can’t do it the same way.
And you are freaking out.
“What is wrong with me?” “I was hired because of my expertise, and I am not able to fully practice it – oh, God, what if they fire me?!” “I am not able to do anything on my own, without asking someone even the smallest thing.”
It takes time to adapt
What you forget in all these sentences is the word JET, and the answer is TIME. Nothing is wrong with you. You just have changed your environment and you are adapting to it. It takes time. You are faced with a lot of new things, even if your new job position is the same as the old one. What you need to process in the beginning can be divided in three areas:
Getting to know your scope of work
Learning and adapting to company culture and procedures
Building relationships and trust with your co-workers
The formal onboarding process helps, but it cannot replace live experience.
Getting to know your scope of work
For example, a job of a software developer is to develop features for an application. Behind this general description it is hidden what you actually need to learn: What the application does and how (business logic), how the code base is built (coding standard and architecture), what tools are in use and how, what is the process of work – what steps you need to follow to produce valuable piece of code. No one is expert in all the tools available in the IT industry. Even if you are familiar with some of them, you rarely know how to use everything – so you need to learn.
This can be applied to any other industry: learn about a product or a service (core business), tools and a process of work. The more experience you have, the easier you will pick up necessary things. I will emphasize that what was an automated action for you in the old workplace, now you need to google or ask someone. That demands more of your energy and lowers your work pace. Now when everything is on-line, the one you ask may not reply instantly which is causing further delays and slowing down the process.
Learning and adapting to company culture and procedures
Of course, you almost never work alone. To collaborate efficiently with others, you need to know how – who is the person responsible for what, how you communicate with them, can you just chat or email them or open a formal ticket, or go to their office and ask (in online version this is not an option). Again, something that you knew perfectly well on your previous job, now you need to relearn – by working and along the way.
Building relationships and trust with your co-workers
You need to get to know people you work with and they need to know you. There is no shortcut here. There is no training that can help you with this. You cannot force it nor speed it up. It is faster when you collaborate tightly with someone, and when the company has an open culture, but still, it demands enough time and shared work. By building relationships and trust, you feel free to express yourself genuinely, to approach directly and to understand fully. Then, the flow starts.
Timeframe
How much time does it take for all these processes? In my experience, and based on discussions with friends and coworkers, the first three months you can forget about any impression you had in your new work (good or bad) – it is most probably irrelevant. After that, next three months, you are catching up the speed and starting to be yourself again – your productivity and efficiency is growing and the amount of stress is falling. After a year, you finally feel that you are on your terrain. These are some general milestones, and of course, dependent on the actual job and people.
What else can you do to help yourself to adapt?
Don’t doubt yourself
Yes, it is hard in the beginning. You are not performing as you are used to. Even if you are well aware of everything I have written so far you are still afraid and doubting your skill and knowledge. Simply don’t do that. “I should have known this by now” is the sentence of the devil’s advocate to ruin your self esteem. No, you couldn’t, and you are learning it now. If you are someone who acted sincerely and genuinely on the job interview, you didn’t cheat on your entrance test, then trust your employer has got a good impression of you and your skills. Also if your employer is realistic, it will expect that you do need time to get to your full productivity. So spare yourself – things will fall into their place.
Focus on observing and asking questions
You might be eager to prove your value, knowledge and expertise to your managers and colleagues, but at the same time fighting with the fact that you are not fully productive or worse that you have the impression that you are doing everything wrong. This causes a huge amount of stress.
First few months are reserved for something else. Instead of focusing on your inability to do the same amount of work as before, focus on observing your new environment, people interactions, attitudes, and ask questions. That way you will learn faster and by expressing genuine interest and eagerness to learn you will be perceived as dedicated (by yourself and others). By the time you start being 100% productive you will have your good starting position to demonstrate your skills and contribute fully to your company. In the same time you will spare yourself of the feeling that you are ”pushing the pull door.”
In the end, if the stress doesn’t stop – maybe that was not the best place for you after all…
https://milanamilosevic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/austin-distel-gUIJ0YszPig-unsplash-scaled.jpg17072560Milana Milošević Minjahttp://milanamilosevic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/logo-canva.pngMilana Milošević Minja2021-02-23 08:25:182022-03-22 07:48:30Reduce Stress of a New Workplace
I was raised as an exemplar girl — the one to be star school performer, straight A student, and always to strive for more and better. My education was straight forward — primary school, highschool Mathematical grammar school, graduated as one of the top students from School of Electrical Engineering. Everything seemed as planed. Than I decided to start a PhD and to start building my career in software development in a private company. My outer world seemed perfect, by my inner world started to collide. The “musts” and “importants” stopped being effective for me to feel good about myself for completing them. Everything seemed to absurd and dull, and I felt miserable despite of my work, education, fitness, relationship and friends. It is than when my personal development journey has started (eight years ago in the moment I write this article). There was a lot of things that poped up on the way, and one of them recently captured my attention — perfectionism.
Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting high performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations [1][2] .
(Wikipedia)
That was me during my entire education, and it worked well for me than, but once I stepped out of that world of defined expectations, it became the most powerful self destructive mechanism. This is my reflection of the topic from personal experience.
1. Perfectionism focuses on only what is missing
You set one goal and accomplish it. And the next one, and the next one. And there is always something more that you should have done, but you didn’t. In personal life, if you are good at work that you do, there is someone better. If you are the best at what you do, there is someone who earns more. If you are satisfied with your career, friends and fitness, there is someone who is more satisfied with their family life. If you are married, there is someone who already have kids.
To give a real example, recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is 25, and here is the part that illustrates focus on what is missing: — Him: “I work already a year as an executive director, and currently I am also working on an innovative project with a friend… (continues explaining the project)” — Me: “That is impressive! You really are one of the most successful people I have met!” — Him: “Thanks, but then you don’t know so many people. I still don’t own a company, I work for someone else. So I wouldn’t call myself successful. Because I know a lot people, younger than me, that have their own projects, and also it depends on how we define measure of success…” He left me confused — I was simply giving a compliment, sharing my impression of what he just explained to me, and instead of receiving it as is, he decomposed it in rational and self cruel manner. I know that he is a humble person, but I didn‘t expect this reaction.
Looking for what is more to accomplish is a habit, a thinking pattern, repeated over and over again during years, enforcing us to focus on things that we didn’t do or didn’t do well in order to improve and succeed. And it works well during school to push us harder, to develop some parts of our potential and build working habits. But over the course of years, strong focus on what is missing, trains our mind to seek and spot whatever is missing, discarding accomplishments and value we deliver without noticing any importance.
We don’t alow ourselves to enjoy our successes, to celebrate them, to celebrate life, but only go to the next challenge. We are able to see only what is not in there and fail to appreciate and value what we already have, which makes us dissatisfied and unhappy. Our life seems empty, without purpose, we fill bad about ourselves. And all of this comes from a simple fact that we fail to realize what is what we already have, what we have done so far.
Antidote: This is hard to change, especially because it is blind spot. The person would rather say — “No, I cannot change taking task after task and pursuing goal after goal. Than I would not be myself, I would not be hard working and deserving success!” The truth is you do deserve success, and if you are not the one to take the time and apritiate and value your work and accomplishments noone else will. And you do that by intentionally breaking the habit of non-stop task chasing and focusing on value: When a stream of destructive thoughts threaten to overwhelm you, you have to tell yourself: “I am valuable. I did this and this and that and all of this has value”. In the beginning it will seem silly, and as nonsense, but gradually it will improve your sense of self value and value of your work. You have to be patient and persistent.
2. It stales your action
Eventually, in trial to do everything perfect, with no errors and failures we need a plan of action. But not any plan, we need a perfect plan. For any real-life situation, the perfect plan cannot be made, since there is always some uncertainty and information missing. Or if it is made it will take forever. We get discouraged with “buts” and ideas of all the thing that can go wrong and eventually ruin our idea. We become exhausted of our own thoughts without even actually doing something. Anything. We overthink, our thoughts are just so complex, we try to find the perfect solutions avoiding all setbacks. An example of this behaviour is one of my coworkers, who was so worried how he should format some report, what to put in there, how it will look like to superiors, and most nagging all the time that he has more important work to do, that he spent entire week debating about that — with me and anyone who would listen. I bet he could write a report and get two feedbacks in a meanwhile, instead only thing he did was worrying. My example was with shower doors. It took me almost a year to make a call to the store that sold me the shower to explain that people who worked on bathroom renovation didn’t know how to set it up and that I need from them to send me someone to do it properly. Once I called, I had the shower doors set up in less than a week, they didn’t even charged me! My flow of thoughts went from deciding if it is better to ask from the store licenced workers (they could say no) or to try to find someone by myself, how can I do that? who can give me recommendation? when will that person able to come? will it be able to do the proper work this time or I will need to call again in a month time. At that point I was visualising shower door lose again and again in a need for someone to fix it. And overwhelmed I was giving up.
This pattern I also discovered in conversation with people who are really close to me. If that person had a problem, it would overthink it and any solution presented to them will be easily decomposed in “what is not good about that” and “what is a risk in it” and “146 ways why it will not work for them.” The main failure here is to realize the process of moving into action:
“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”
Goethe
Antidote: Start going. Eventually, redirections, clues and questions will rise along the way, but once you start moving action will follow action and with every action you will be closer to accomplishment. Overthinking will leave you at the exact same point where you were yesterday.
3. Perfectionism it is not the same as demand for high quality
We hold out-of-dated parts of our personalities and obviously unusefull behaviours whenever we have some use of them. That something is usually highly unconscious, grounded in past and only an illusion. What keeps perfectionism alive in a personality is a belief that if we let it go, we will become mediocre, lose what we have build so far, we will stop delivering high quality work. And none of this is true. Once we stop worrying about what might go wrong, and things that might been done better, fearing that someone will discover imperfections and shame us in public, overthinking and worrying on what we think it is important to do, we will stop being so stressed and we will be able to actually listen to what is important to our superiors, customers, co-workers, we will be more open to honest communication, feedback and we will be able to deliver what is of most importance not to deliver what is perfect. In one sentence we will become wore effective and more pleasant to work with. Antidote: Just let it go and seek for what really brings value.
4. It is highly disengaging for co-workers
Having perfectionist as a co-worker is not fun at all. It is frustrating. It will tend either to criticize without ideas for improvement, or will grab the work for himself/herself failing to participate in teamwork because he/she thinks “I can do it better”. If perfectionist is a superior it is likely that he/she will micromanage and that he/she will fail to truly delegate. In both cases, the result for co-workers is the same — frustration and disengagement.
I will illustrate it with examples. First example is some manuscript we were preparing together. I was writing the main text (since I was more comfortable with writing in english) and he was giving feedbacks, comments and suggestions. It took us an eternity to put it all together. I was desperate with vague comments that he doesn’t like some sentence or that something doesn’t sound well and that should be refreshed. Well if I knew better I would write better! Every iteration I had less and less motivation to correct anything. In my eyes, we didn’t need to create a perfect text, but understandable one — our supervisor would give his feedback and we will need to correct it anyway so why lose precious time on something that will be probably rephrased. Not to mention that a lector was the one to correct it in the end. Eventually, after numerous iterations and a lot of frustration we submitted the manuscript and got negative response from journal — we got a lot of useful comments on what was important to editors and what we should improve. That is what brought to our consciousness what really is of importance vs what we thought it was of importance. The second example is another perfectionist co-worker who was never satisfied with a text, rewriting it over and over, endlessly. Moreover, with each iteration, something else was poping up, so that starting idea was expanding, things were adding up, and the process led from something that was “almost finished” in one month to something which is still not perfect a two months later. The text the other co-worker suggested as starting point and an idea was decomposed and vanished in this process. In a meanwhile the project become deprioritized for the perfectionist co-worker and put aside, waiting for him to declutter his schedule and approve what should be final version. The filing for the other co-worker was complete hijack of his work and ideas, and complete detachment for that project.
Antidote: Even if you know you can do something better, you cannot do everything. So let other people live, create, and make mistakes. With your help and honest feedback that can learn and improve and than it will be easier for both of you. Resist temptation to do work instead of others and only in your way!
5. It limits your career
Perfectionism makes it almost impossible to learn from experience and enjoy it. Experience implies that you have done a lot of things, and not all of them were successes. Some of those things were the best what could be done at the moment but still haven’t yielded good results. For a perfectionist this is quiet disturbing. I identified this by looking back on numerous situations I went through as a project manager, which were overwhelming and very stressful for me. At any given moment I tried to optimize my behaviour, to do the right thing, to keep customers satisfied and in the same time trying to prevent pressure fall on my co-workers. I was examining everything that I did living in terror that I could have done something better, that I should have know better and that circumstances should not be the ones that are know if someone (other parties included in project) had thought it through. I felt that I failed when I didn’t know what to do. Stress was inevitable. Burnout was inevitable. Overwhelmed by the imperative to do the optimal thing, and that I have to know and recognize what the optimal thing is, with numerous of factors changing everyday I failed to realise that I, and what I was doing, might not have been perfect, but it was bringing important progress to projects. Someone else might have done things differently, but it doesn’t mean that it would yeald better results. The other important thing I let pass was precious advice and input from more experienced and older managers, and their way of handling things when I didn’t know what to do.
Antidote: If you are someone who strives to improve, you will always be better today than you were yesterday. It is nonsense to torture yourself with “I should have known that” and feel as a failure for that. Instead, ask questions, look for advice, look for solutions, and believe your gut rather than overthinking.
It is possible to overcome it
The key here is (1) to become aware of your own behaviour (2) not blame yourself for that, but rather focus on learning (3) lear to value yourself and your work despite it is not “perfect.” As simple as it may sound, it demands personal decision, dedication and a lot of self-awareness to persue the path of value rather than path of perfectionism in a non-perfect way.
What are your thoughts on this topic? You know someone who should read this? Share and comment.
Author: Milana Milošević
[1] Stoeber, Joachim; Childs, Julian H. (2010). “The Assessment of Self-Oriented and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism: Subscales Make a Difference” (PDF). Journal of Personality Assessment. 92 (6): 577–585. doi:10.1080/00223891.2010.513306. PMID 20954059. [2] Flett, G. L.; Hewitt, P. L. (2002). Perfectionism. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. pp. 5–31.
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