What fabulous timing this email from Narel was – showing a very personal example of anger in action in two very different ways, well three actually, This is longer than 30 seconds, but hey I think you’ll think it’s worth it!
My situation at work crept up on me, I look after a whole chronic pain team in our local hospital and it has grown considerably since I started there as the first person in the position. So I guess I had gradually adapted myself to “cope” with my job over the last 4 years I have been there.
In the beginning I was managing just fine, but over time more and more work was being added to my role and I was gradually pushing myself harder and harder to just “get on with it and get the job done”. The past 2 years has seen me pushing myself to the limit to get my job done in 2 days a week and I was so incredibly exhausted at the end of my work days that just walking to my car has been an effort.
On top of that is the fact that in the public health system we cop a lot of abuse doing our jobs, so add a day like that to the mix and many times I have had to sit for a good half hour and calm myself enough to even be ready to go home and be in a state good enough to be with my family.
I have never taken leave except for when the department I work in is shut down and doctors are away, so when we decided to take a family holiday outside of these times I had to face the prospect of training someone to fill my role.
That is when the red flags started going off about how long I have had the blinkers on at work. The thought of even trying to impart everything needed to another person to do my job was daunting about where to even start. Creating a training manual made me realise also how complex and huge the role was.
Then when I began training another staff member who is highly competent in our systems, and she began vocalising how incredibly huge, intricate, and complicated the role was (and with incredulity that I had silently just done this without saying a word to them all for so long). I started to see the whole situation with new eyes. Her reaction and me waking up to this all made me realise how deeply this job was affecting my health, happiness, emotions and more, so I decided to take some action.
I let my managers (from another facility) know by email and phone messages and went on leave. But when we are stuck on a treadmill that is so busy (I also work extra days at the hospital in other roles) it is very hard to step back and see or have the energy to deal with how to change anything.
While I was away for 3 weeks on a trip I gained a lot of clarity and set some strong intentions about how things had to change if I was to stay, and I did want to stay. I had an incredible holiday that felt like a giant reset on many levels.
On my return day to work I was thrust into a full day of patients, with no hand over, a huge backlog of work that the fill in staff member had been unable to manage, over 150 emails, a full phone bank of messages and the phone ringing off the hook. I was verbally abused by a patient in my first half hour back, then one of the site managers came by to give me the heads up on another aggressive patient expected to contact me soon about an issue.
While she was telling me this he did ring and one of my colleagues who answered the phone was copping an earful from him. The manager said, “so how was your holiday then?” I replied, “it was just fantastic, exactly what I needed, but this here (gesturing around me) is (insert big expletive).
I told her nobody at head office was listening to my calls for help from just before I went away, and that I was not going to do this anymore. I felt my anger rise yet it felt different this time. It felt pure, said from a grounded place and said with power. I was not lashing out, just stating my truth and the fact I would be giving them a time period to get me some help, stop ignoring me and listen or I WOULD be leaving.
I had never made any real noise before as I watch so many colleagues frustrated and asking for help and it is never given in adequate ways despite their repeat asking, but by now I felt a bit emotionally detached after being away, so did not care in “an emotionally helpful way” if that makes sense. I felt quite detached from an outcome, just set it out there and then let it be.
I was whisked off soon after to the managers office where two of them sat asking questions and saying “oh dear” a bit, promising help but I just thought “yeah whatever”…
I went back to work and in no time at all I was given a huge amount of help that helped me clear my workload, and then the higher level managers who had been ignoring me came to the party that very day with phone calls and an email request for a full report on my position. I began to receive weekly help but I got the impression they did not really think it was that bad, after all I had just done it all for ages.
And then just this week (some 4 weeks later than this happened) I was advised by one of the managers that they were shocked how much assistance I had required that was deemed necessary, could see what I told them was accurate, and that a business case was being put forth to apply for extra hours for my role… now where I work this NEVER happens so I am still somewhat in shock.
The thing I want to re-iterate is that this anger felt clean, pure, sure and grounded.
I believe there are no coincidences and just to highlight the difference and “cement” this in me, I have also experienced some other anger this week which felt the opposite of this. It felt like an anger I wanted to keep quiet about because I felt ashamed of being angry about this subject. I had not understood and cleared up the root cause of it – so it felt loaded and dirty. As a result, I became quite sick with a head cold and skin rash that felt equally “angry, dirty and unhelpful”.
The gift of this comparison is that I can now see with crystal clear vision how anger can be pure and helpful if everything behind it is cleaned up and the energy can flow from the right space and therefore have amazingly transformative helpful qualities, or if the opposite, it can be quite destructive to ourselves.
I share this with Jenny’s prompt that it will help someone else, 🙂 Narel
There’s all kinds of ways of achieving the “miracle” brought in by the lovely grounded pure anger (what I’m calling the Heart Anger) that Narel is talking about in her story here. Our journeys are as unique as our feelings. My suggestion is to start with simple curiosity. Are miracles really routinely created by the process of achieving what I’m calling Heart Anger? Is that really true? This is a personal invitation to come in to one of our free live events and experience it for yourself. Link under the photo below.
Because if that IS true, it changes everything hey?
The photo is one of Narel’s. There’s an incredible feeling of security and rightness in this way of being. I imagine that the baby in its mothers pouch feels a similar security.
