Several weeks on and the train has hardly left the station, but at least it's moving.
After some serious thought, I applied for reduced hours at work. I wanted a 4-day week but would be happy with a 9-day fortnight if 4 days was beyond the limits of what would be accepted. After a 3-week wait, I got a flat refusal. Not even an attempt at a compromise. I was told to my face that I am highly valued in a way that made me feel pretty poorly valued. Special. So all my plans for more creative time, exercise and generally having a better balanced life were dashed and I was pretty devastated.
So I've had to think about how to remodel my activities to still achieve the same goals, and also how not to get so wound up at work.
The former has had one new development, in meeting Stando, a great singer/songwriter who is currently recording an album and want horns on it. WooT! This has got me practising again, as I will need some better stamina for a decent recording sesh. We had a jam on Saturday night which was great fun. I'm looking forward to working on some stuff. Plus my jam buddy Adrian is back from his travels so we return to our regular routine this week and can continue on the path of doing some writing and getting some material polished for gigging. I also want to pursue the mixing path but I'm trying to go easy on myself lately as I've been having a bit of a hard time from a few quarters. Plus I need a free Saturday to go looking at controllers.
The work stuff is a bit trickier. I've been getting extremely frustrated and emotional at work quite a lot over the last few months. It's really exhausting and massively annoying to not be able to control my emotions in a professional scenario. Intellectually, I realise that I can't control the things that are upsetting me and I just need to care less about it, but I can't detach my emotions. I've been having some coaching with an HR rep and sessions with a psychologist and one of the things that have come out of these is that the conflict is partly due to a mismatch of core values between myself and some other people I work with.
So I think my challenge is to not expect my worldview to manifest in the people around me. I can't change other people but I can change myself. So, for instance, I'm pretty attracted to efficiency in all forms so I guess it's a core value. I like to build efficient systems to make things easier for myself and the people around me. But not everyone is big on efficiency. They value other things ahead of efficiency. If I'm frustrated by their inefficiency, it's because I'm expecting them to be like me, but they're not (and I can't make them, dammit! ;o)) So there's no point wanting other people to be efficient if it's not in their nature. It's defective thinking. I haven't got the thinking right yet but I can see the things that are making me so frustrated, and recognise that I don't have to feel that way. I'll keep working on it.
The idea of staying and learning from it is interesting food for thought. I work in a system that is broken. I can leave it to its own devices or I can be a positive force, seizing opportunities to do good things when I find them. In the words of Scroobius Pip: "You see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challenge". The last time I had a serious challenge at work, I eventually left without another job to go to - I was that desperate to get out. I probably could have won a constructive dismissal case but I had no energy left to fight.
But why should I let someone else dictate that choice for me? I enjoy most of the work I do and most of my colleagues. I'm not sure that running away is teaching me anything. Although I am looking at other jobs, I am kind of only half-arsed about it. I guess part of me wants out but another part is willing to use it as an incredibly valuable (albeit terrifying and knackering) learning experience. I guess in the end it will come down to how much energy I can muster.
