Plum crazy

Lately I’ve been craving plums. We bought some at the grocery on Saturday, and ate a jar full of plums in juice, plus I’ve eaten at least 3 more fresh ones as well, and we had a plum sauce with chicken on Sunday. Boy, talk about being regular! Feels almost as if I have control over this bodily function.  Plums in, er, um, maybe I won’t finish that thought.

Control feels good, but I’m not experiencing it at work at the moment. I have a rather insane boss, but good insane mostly. What she really is, is scatterbrained. Scatterbrainedness doesn’t flow so well with my engineer’s need for clear objectives and structure, so I frequently feel out of control at work.

For example, we are all supposed to get objectives from our bosses. She never did them last year, and I felt as if I didn’t achieve anything all year. That made it hard for me to provide inputs to my performance evaluation, so I didn’t. I was confident that I would get a sucky review, but instead I got a good review, the highest salary increase in the group, and a fat bonus on top of it all. Probably helped that she knew I was looking for another job last year.

This year I’m taking more charge of my career by writing my own specific objectives, based on her mushy ones, and it has helped enormously. However, I still experience this paralysis. One thing that has helped is to review my objectives every morning, and acting on those based on urgency.

Today I got paralyzed twice. Once in the morning (I don’t know why), and again about 2 hours ago. A colleague came by and we discussed how to make progress on a common objective. I know that I am behind on this objective, and so is he, but the result of the discussion was paralysis. Nothing is an emergency, but I do need to keep working on this and other objectives, yet I can’t. Stuck. Frozen. I feel panicky and out of control and like a failure, even though it’s not even remotely true.  Funny how I feel like a failure when I don’t completely “wow” everyone.

This is all mental. Sometimes I feel inadequate to do the task, sometimes I feel rebellious and just don’t want to. If I weren’t so panic-stricken and paralyzed, I could do one or two things this afternoon that would make progress. It doesn’t even matter what I do, as long as it’s something. So I decided to write this post, because I couldn’t start on the work.

What does it take for me to get going again? It used to be food, then a plunge into a low cycle, then getting on with the activity. The permanent solution is to calm my feelings and accept that everything is actually ok. There’s no disaster looming.

Things that make me feel in control, now that I don’t use food for that feeling all the time:

• Writing blog entries. I can feel my stomach relaxing even now
• Reviewing my objectives and choosing the next steps
• Telling myself that I’m not a failure and backing it up with data
• Making a task list of the next few small things to do
• Breaking a bigger problem into chunks and attacking them in pieces
• Telling myself that I don’t have to be right all the time, don’t have to get it all done, don’t have to do it perfectly
• Remind myself how much I get paid for doing this really neat job
• Remind myself that it’s impossible to amaze everyone all the time, and that particular expectation has no place in a rational life
• Remind myself that I don’t have to want to do a good job all the time, and that often good enough is good enough