Listening to Learn - Day 138

For the past 4 weeks at work I have expressed interest in attending a weekly meeting that is extremely pertinent and relevant to my job description which occurs before work, and so I would not get paid. I've finally received permission to attend the meeting this week, with the stipulation / contingency that I must just observe, not speak.

In a breath I could presume that this is because I have not been officially invited / approved by all of the supervisors to be an active participant in this meeting.

But in my mind I could go into all sorts of anxiety and back chat and judgments and beliefs about my work performance and what my coworkers think of me.

Another conversation contributed to this reaction as well. When I asked if I could attend the meeting, my on-site supervisor said yes, "But just listen," and then went on to say "We have to be really careful about how we interact with each other here" where "we" meant all the staff.

I went into anxiety and back chat that perhaps I had rubbed some people the "wrong way" so to speak, or I had stepped on toes, or stepped out of line, or for whatever reason this same person had had conversations with other persons about me, where others vented frustrations about me.

So to turn this back to myself I can see that I have in the past approached "professional" relationships in this way, where I have had personal reactions to people I know professionally. However I've not seen myself do this here at this job, at least not in a way that I have allowed to define me -- I've processed it when I've seen it.

But this anxiety then leads me to that energy of thinking I can tell what other people are thinking about me. And so again I have to process this and stop myself.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in anxiety over thoughts about if my coworkers do or do not like me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to worry about who I am at work and in work relationships, if people like me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to worry about if I have stepped on toes or stepped out of line or said or done something to offend another person.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to simply ask.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to always constantly reflect in self honesty about who I am in every given moment.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to always be aware of who I am so that I can know for and by myself whether I am acting from a point of egoistic self interest or not.

I forgive myself that I cannot tell this for sure because I have not been always aware.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to define myself in the moment of concern or worry or anxiety that others might not like me or I might have done or said something they did not like.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe and stress over the belief that if I do something another does not like / reacts to, this means they do not like ME as a whole.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see that if another takes what I do / say and extrapolates meaning / definition about me as a whole based on their reaction, that I cannot control this, and also that this is their reaction, this is not actually who I am.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be a people pleaser and want to make everyone happy, want to juggle every person's personalities and reactions so that no one ever reacts negatively to me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to define myself by my perception of how others perceive me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get stuck in defining myself in the moment / point of worry as regret of who I have been and what people have thought of who I am, rather than breathing, being here now, and moving forward to be myself in self honesty and self responsibility, so thus to change rather than get stuck on the point of the possibility that perhaps I have "rubbed someone the wrong way."

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to read into and read in between the lines of what is communicated to me in order to find hidden negative meaning in order to have ammunition against myself in order to judge myself and get myself stuck in anxiety about what others think of me, rather than seeing and hearing what is actually communicated to me -- reality, and all that I can be expected to go off of, because if someone does not communicate with me how they feel then how can I know? -- and taking this as a reference point for who I am, a point of guidance for myself to continue or to change depending on what feedback I receive.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing positive feedback to basically go in one ear and right out the other so that I have no recollection or memory or retention of such positive feedback / direction, and instead search high and low for any kind of negative meaning I can extrapolate from interactions, body language, voice tonality, or words themselves, and then cling to this perception of others perceiving me negatively so that I can fuel the anxiety I feel when I enter my mind and try to figure out "what that meant" when that person said what they said.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to simply stop and breathe and reflect on myself when I feel anxious about who I am and how others perceive me, so that I can use this for myself as my own guidance and feedback for myself where, if I feel anxious about this, then perhaps there are points I need to look at where I have not behaved in self honesty, where I have done the things that I fear others perceive me as having done, because the judgments I am believing are authored by them are in fact coming from my mind.

So I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to reflect on myself and give myself feedback and to see that feedback, but to not direct myself in a self honest response to that self-feedback, instead projecting the feedback as being sourced by another so that within this I can react in victimization of feeling judged and believing others do not "like" me.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see how I feel about / react when other people do things that I do not necessarily agree with, within this seeing that it is possible to not define another person solely by one or a few actions with which I disagree, realizing that people make mistakes, everyone does something at some point that I might not ever do, etc.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that another's reaction is really about me and is definitive of me rather than speaking about who they are and what their level of understanding or flexibility is in terms of existing in equality and oneness and being open to different perspectives / change, so that even if there are staff who do not "like" me, this is probably a lot more to do with their reaction to the overall changes and less to do with actually me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that IF a person does react to me personally, as in I have said or done something to offend them, that this means this is who I am, and who I am in their eyes, and I cannot change, and I cannot change in their eyes.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that once a mistake is made, failure is constituted, a permanent failure that cannot be recovered from and so within this an energy of that I might as well just give up.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto the memory of another telling me I am too abrasive, within this believing this is absolutely who I am, not who I was, not who I do not have to be, and then within this also using this as support for the beliefs and self judgments that others do not like me, rather than looking at actual interactions as feedback.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use a memory from 5 years ago as feedback for who I am today.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself the time and space to grow and change and learn.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to sometimes forget that I am young and that in some ways I am naive and so I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to direct myself from an unawareness of my own naivety such that I might make those who are much older than me or who have been working at this school much longer feel like I am just a know it all.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to realize that if another has decided they do not "like" me it is very likely that they feel somehow threatened either by me or by the change that I in my position and as my behavior represent. I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see, realize, and understand that no reaction is really about me but it is about the person reacting and where they are in their process.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to be absolutely sensitive however, and to always check in with myself as my breath in self honesty before I do or say anything because there are emotional investments in this job and my goal is success and there are ways I can sabotage my own effectiveness through impulsively saying or doing things as if I know already or as if I have the total picture.

That was one of the things my on-site supervisor said. He said, "You all just see pieces. I see the whole thing. I see people coming in here and telling me, and I piece it all together." He might have just been talking about students, but I got the impression perhaps he meant staff. Perhaps for example my perception of "the way things are" as I have communicated it to him is in-congruent with the way he sees things as the "total picture." This is likely because I have only been here 4 weeks whereas he has been there 8 years.

However, he may have merely been talking about the students. The point here is that what I saw, what I perceived, how I reacted, tells me about myself -- I know that I am not fully aware of myself and how I behave in my position as a newcomer, as a young person in this field. I talk a lot, I have many ideas and suggestions, and perhaps sometimes it would be best if I just listened.

So regardless of what my on-site supervisor meant, I have been telling myself actually for weeks that I should just listen more. And now here, maybe he meant that, maybe not, but here it is again, along with anxiety because here I did not listen to myself, and now I believe I have made a mistake by not listening to myself telling myself to listen more to others -- did I offend someone? But to not get stuck here now. To breathe, and listen.

So when and as I see myself believing I know the answer to the frustration or to the ways that things are presently not working at my job, I stop and I breathe. When I have a suggestion, I stop and I breathe. I breathe and I ask myself if there is any perspective I am not considering. I commit myself to listening more, observing more, but to still doing my job with integrity and still running ideas by particular trusted individuals to get feedback on the quality of the idea. I commit myself to humility at work rather than allowing myself to feel prideful with a belief that "I am good at my job" and "I am valuable" and "I am smart," because it is in these beliefs that I take the filter as my eyes off myself, trusting myself to be infallible when the reality is that I am inexperienced in many ways. I commit myself thus to caution in my interactions at work, to respecting others by treating them as I would like to be treated, which is to be listened to. So I commit myself to listening more, and talking only after I have checked with myself in self honesty, and talking only from the starting point of making a suggestion and looking for feedback. I commit myself to "knowing my place," in a way, where here I am really quite at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of employees on campus. However I also commit myself to not shying away or going into a polarity of believing I am always wrong. Simply I commit myself to be aware of myself and aware of others all as one as equal so that we can truly cooperate and collaborate and respect one another as we work toward a common goal. I commit myself to the realization that I am here to learn as much as I am to get paid, and so I commit myself to take a more listener/observer role in that learning, then acting/living what I have learned. I commit myself to listening without thinking or judging, but simply to understand, to gain as much perspective as possible.