298: Five Unusual Things to Be Thankful For - 2023 Edition

If you’ve been a faithful listener of the podcast for some time, you’ll know that I do a special episode each year during Thanksgiving week.

It started out as five unusual things to be thankful for that weren’t specific to me. Somewhere along the way, they became MY five things. The hope has always been that you will look at the circumstances of your life through a different lens after listening to my list.

For many of us – myself included – 2023 has been difficult, so I want to take a different approach to this year’s list. As a former coach of mine likes to say, half of life is A*S*S, and it feels like more than half of my year has been like that. If you’re in the same boat, here’s hoping this years list will help you see the good side of what you may have gone through in 2023.

Here are five unusual situations at work you can be thankful for because of the growth they bring about.

1.    Getting terminated.

Whether for cause, because of a large-scale layoff, or some other reason, what I see over and over again is that clients who get terminated are in a far better place six to nine months after they are terminated.

What they repeatedly tell me is that they knew it was time to leave, but they didn’t have the [fill in the blank with the emotion] to make the move themselves. So the Universe stepped in and took care of it for them.

In the best situations, these people take the time to evaluate what they want moving forward, do the necessary mindset work on themselves, learn from any mistakes they may have made, and march courageously into the next phase of their life.

You have the choice when something like this happens to you. You can play the victim, you can argue with reality, or you can ask yourself “now what?” I highly encourage the third approach.

2.    Recognizing that your attitude sucks.

I’ve talked about one of my clients before – she came to me earlier this year because she had lost her work mojo. She knew she was phoning it in yet was resentful for others getting promoted instead of her.

She is in SUCH a different place today. Ironically, she DID get riffed recently, but because of the mindset work we did together, she was able to handle that termination in a completely different way than if she was still stuck in sucky attitude mode.

This client had a choice: she could keep blaming her boss, her coworkers, her employer…or she could look in the mirror and deal with what she saw. She chose to do the latter, and that has made all the difference.

Remember…always, in any situation…the only person you have any control over is YOURSELF. That’s the work.

3.    Being dissatisfied with your career path.

Perhaps the path you’ve been on has run its course, or perhaps it’s been the wrong career path for you from jump.

Either way, there’s such beauty in recognizing that you want to make a career pivot or reinvention.

When I do this work with clients, they learn so much about themselves. They often bring up a long-ignored career path because it [fill in the blank with the career path’s shortcomings] and realize their passion for that thing hasn’t diminished over the years.

When I work with clients to connect the dots between what they have been doing and what they now want to do, they experience a tremendous surge of confidence and assurance that they can succeed in this new field.

Other clients have absolutely no idea what direction they want to go in now, so we do the excavation work to uncover the artifacts of their life that will give us clues.

Still other clients want to engage their altruism more…their life experiences have soured them on their current corporate treadmill and left them longing for more meaning in their professional lives.

Whatever situation you find yourself in, if you are experiencing seeds of discontent, be willing to work with a career coach like myself to figure out what’s going on…and to work through what you want to do about it.

4.    Failing.

We all know this intellectually: We learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. (BTW – don’t like the word “failure.” I like to think of it as winning or learning.)

But, let’s face it: failing sucks at the time. What’s great about failing, however, is the opportunity it presents us.

Not just to figure out how to do the thing differently next time, but what it teaches us about ourselves.

We might have to fall on our sword and admit our culpability.

We might have to apologize to many people.

We might have to go to great lengths to fix the problem we’ve created.

We might have to deal with our inner demons, telling us WE’RE failures. WE aren’t worthy. WE’RE bad people.

Each of these potential outcomes presents us with an opportunity to grow, both professionally and personally.

Not to mention, we now have a great story to tell when our next interviewer asks us about a time we failed.

5.    Working with a terrible boss.

The research is clear: more people leave due to a bad boss than for any other single reason.

If you haven’t had a terrible boss, you’re blessed – and most definitely in the minority. Most of us can rattle off a handful of horror-story bosses.

Here’s what I learned from mine: How I DON’T want to be as a boss…which helped shape how I DID want to be as a boss.

I learned how to individualize the support I provided for each employee. Some needed and wanted more than others, all needed different types of support.

I learned how to determine their motivators and how to reward them (hint: I asked).

I learned how important it was to me to have my birthday and other life milestones recognized…so I did that for my employees.

I learned how and when to give praise and constructive feedback. I learned to NEVER ambush an employee at their performance evaluation.

I learned that my job as a boss was to advocate for MY team…vigorously. It wasn’t my job to care about the other departments that answered to my boss. I needed to have MY team’s back at all times and in all situations.

Whether you have a bad boss, a PITA co-worker, or a direct report who you spend 80% of your time trying to make competent…LEARN from these situations and apply them to becoming a better boss.

I hope you’re able to take at least one of the things on my list to heart as you navigate the fallout from 2023 or whatever is ahead for you in 2024. Remember: Winning or Learning.

I wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings to those of you here in the United States, and a retroactive Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian listeners (who, BTW, have it right for putting more space between Thanksgiving and Christmas).