Today I was reading a post on Michelle Yozzo Drake’s blog called “Howto: Get Over Feeling Overwhelmed at Work” and her step 3 reminded me of a story I want to share about attitude. Here’s what she says:
Control what you can! In many circumstances there may be policies, rules, other’s attitudes, and constraints that truly are out of your control. Focus on changing what you can control. Your own approach and attitude about your project is contagious. So make it a positive attitude that is catchy, not a negative one.
And here’s what happened to me:
I came to Boulder, Colorado, in 1984 with a BA in English and 3/4 of an MA, but the only job I could find was as a secretarial assistant for $6 an hour. I enjoyed the people I worked with, but the work itself sucked: running copy; typing (with a typewriter) into forms that were in triplicate and full of government language (and I was not a good typist); delivering paper memos into internal mailboxes; stapling, filing, blah blah blah. And one day when I was standing at a recalcitrant copy machine running 50 copies of a 5-page document that would have to be stapled and hand-delivered, I groaned and thought, “What could be worse than having this job?!” and a little voice inside immediately answered, “Doing it poorly could be worse.”
Aha!
I decided right then (on a spring afternoon at about 4:05 PM Rocky Mountain time) that I would be the best darned secretarial assistant that government office had ever had. Two weeks later when my boss went to a staff meeting and asked for a 50-cents-an-hour raise for me, his boss decided to give me a dollar. A few months later, the editor of our group had given notice and asked if I’d like to take over her position. She trained me, I became an editor, when I moved to California I worked for Apple, when I came back here I worked for US WEST and my last job was writing proposals for a public safety/9-1-1 company in Longmont at a nice salary.
When I was running copy, I had a bad attitude and no career. Within two years after adjusting my attitude I had my first tech writing/editing job and I was on my way to doing something I loved, something I was good at, and something that was highly valued.
Attitude is everything. It’s the one thing we do have control over. We don’t know where it will lead us, and that’s exciting. We don’t know where a victim attitude will lead us either, and that’s scary. So what will you choose?
Posted on Sep 21st 06 by Verna Wilder.
Verna's joy is helping people find and refine their writing voice, and she does that by coaching, editing, and leading writing workshops. She's a writer and a reader and a lover of good books, good music, good movies, good food. For the past 25 years, Verna has given her best energy to working in a cube; now she's taking that experience and giving her best energy to her clients. Life finally makes a little more sense. http://vernawilder.typepad.com/out_of_the_cube/
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