How I tamed my inner jerk and spared my coworkers some serious suffering
This article was published June 10, 2020 in the online magazine The Startup, the largest active publication on Medium.
For most of my adulthood, a central feature of how I encountered the world was that when I was displeased, disappointed, or disgruntled, there was a pretty good chance that everyone around me knew it. I could be a real jerk.
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Not with everyone, and not all the time! For instance, I did well with people who communicate clearly and folks who do exactly as they say. I coexisted just fine with people who have their egos in check and individuals who respect boundaries. And I rarely snapped at people who chew with their mouths closed.
But with everyone else, and to be honest, that was a lot of people, I could be curt, peevish and crotchety. A peer at work who submitted his portion of a project a few hours late? He got the tone. A boss who just asked me to do something completely out of step with the direction she gave 2 weeks earlier? There’s a pretty good chance she got full-blown terse-lipped head-snappin’ attitude.
Such behavior was entirely justified in my admittedly underdeveloped estimation. Not that I was contemplative about it, mind you. I was a sticklerfor excellence. People should know that if they want to dabble in mediocrity, there are consequences. And while dispensing consequences is a dirty job, someone’s got to do it.
Yet because perspective tends to accompany maturity, by the time I hit my mid-late 30s, I started to at least see a few downsides to being an on-again off-again ass. I realized that, at times, I was leaving coworkers, including those who I really liked, feeling defeated, diminished and hurt. My righteous indignation was often dispensed unevenly, more out of my own fears and insecurities than out of anything the poor victim had said or done.
The sum total, I realized, was that far too often I was failing to do something that is really important to me, despite everything that’s written above. And that is to treat people with dignity and grace.
I’m not proud of the fact. It’s difficult for me to read the words as they come off my keyboard. But I can be honest with myself and others today. Because I’m successfully kicking it.
The ultra-grouches who came before me
I’m not one to shirk accountability. Although I confess at times it’s slightly tempting to place some blame for my bad adult behavior at other peoples’ feet. If I were to, just for kicks, my truth would go something like this:
>> My old man was a volatile drunk who every so often crossed over into abusiveness. I managed to turn my anxiety about home life into getting the beat down at school. Every time my pops learned I had refused to defend myself from bullying, he became infuriated to an extreme. That created a vicious cycle that rendered my childhood pretty colorful, to put it delicately.
>> For 3 years in my mid 20s, I reported to someone who punctuated each week with at least one fit of temper pointed at me. She also had a really clever sense of humor that mated nicely with my quickness to laugh. She’d lull me into dropping my guard. Then she’d let me have it.
>> Shortly thereafter I spent a half-decade under a boss who said literally whatever mean thing came to mind. Sometimes she was calmly mean — once she asked me in a growly whisper to agree with her that I would never be strategic, knowing full well that was the very thing I desperately wanted to be. At other moments she was straight-up volcanic, like the time she threw a binder at my feet then stood over me screaming as I hunched down subserviently to regather her papers.
>> I worked for a startup headed by a well-known CEO in the telecom industry. In that job I oversaw development of a minty-green corporate brand. When the CEO saw the new letterhead and business cards, even though he had earlier signed off on how they’d look, he completely lost it. He threw boxes of letterhead while screaming “GOVERNMENT GREEN!!!!!!,” papers and cardboard exploding as they landed. Mid-tirade, his assistant sobbed as she crawled across the floor attempting to clean the mess while trying not to be struck in the head. Even though I sat very near that guy’s office, he never spoke to me again.
Today I’m at least 20 years removed from most of these people. But it’s almost shameful how long it took me to apply myself to make damned sure I didn’t become just like them.
When and where I discovered the need to fix
I was in my late 30s when I started to realize I really needed to fix my mean streak. And it didn’t happen at work but, oddly, on the adult recreational-sports field. In 2006 while living in Denver, CO, I was the pivotol person in the start of an adult flag-football program for LGBTQ people and their allies.
I became one of the league’s primary leaders. In a not insignificant way, the league was the love of my life. It was also the love of many of my fellow players’ lives, people who were deeply grateful to me for planting the seed that grew into something they cherished.
But that didn’t mean they wanted to play on a team with me or have a beer with me after a game. Not one bit.
That’s because during games, I often behaved terribly. I was critical of my teammates’ on-field play, including people who were brand new to the sport and just there to have fun and make friends. The league was founded to be welcoming, yet I made people feel like they didn’t measure up. I coached without permission, I rolled my eyes, I bossed, and I criticized.
Let’s be clear: we’re talking about local recreation-league LGBTQ flag football. It’s not like my household income was on the line.
My perpetual state of exasperation was having a terrible effect on people for whom I had real and genuine affection. And a detrimental effect on an organization I loved. My habit was out of control, and I felt powerless to stop it.
New tool in the kit
In March 2016, I suffered a major concussion. Recreational sports had been rough on me — it was my second concussion in a 3-year span and my third in 10 years. And I was beset by severe Post Concussion Syndrome. Nine months after the incident, I awoke most mornings still feeling like I had knocked back a bottle of tequila. I suffered periodic vertigo. It was a super unpleasant way to live.
One of my doctors, otherwise out of treatment options, urged me to try mindfulness meditation. The mere suggestion annoyed me. But I was desperate. So I downloaded the mindfulness app Headspace, the first one on the list in my app store, and gave it a whirl.
During the guided meditation sessions, the Headspace narrator (Andy Puddicombe) whispers tips for carrying meditation principles into your daily life. In one particular session, he explained a concept I had never heard before. He said that stress occurs in the space between the experience you’re having in any given moment and your expectations of that experience. If you want to reduce stress, then reduce the space between the two. Or at the very least downgrade your expectations into mere preferences.
It turned on a light bulb. I thought, “Could it be that, my entire life, I’ve been measuring everything that happens around me against expectations that I’ve subconsciously formulated and then allowed to harden? All without even realizing it? And that somehow, other peoples’ fidelity to those expectations matters to me??”
If so, then if I could follow the app’s advice and ease up on that cycle of expectation setting and comparing, then maybe I could lighten up on the people around me. I could be free.
Using the tool
The epiphany about expectations happened to come right after I began a new job as a COO. The job presented me the perfect laboratory for an experiment.
As I moved through my days, I made a point to begin identifying little expectations that emerged in my mind, even on the most perfunctory of matters. For instance, when preparing for a meeting, I realized that I formulated opinions about what other participants should or should not say, or do, in that meeting. Or how they should say it.
Then during the meeting, I would expend a significant portion of my available energy enumerating the ways that other people were saying or doing was somehow not up to a standard. The habit occupied much of the mental space I should have been using to respond without judgment to the good people right in front of me, colleagues with perspectives that are every bit as valid and worth hearing as my own.
As I watched it unfold, I realized I’d been doing it my entire career and, in fact, my entire life. It happened all the time, like an operating system running just beneath the surface. I thought that, if I could address it, I might get at the root cause of my bouts of exasperation and volatility.
In the days that followed, I identified every instance in which one of these mindless expectations started to formulate. To help, I sprinkled little reminders across my desk and devices. When I’d catch an expectation formulating, I was very intentional about releasing it.
This will sound silly, but I somehow developed a quirky little mental ceremony for the release process. When I detect an expectation, I pop it out of my brain so that it floats in space, hovering just above and to the right of my shiny bald head. Then a cartoon hand sweeps in and brushes the expectation away with a swift flick of the imaginary wrist. There is even a little “whoosh” sound. I’m not kidding.
The rewards
The rewards of my many practice sessions at expectation-releasing were almost instant. I felt a lessening of the constant pressure in my chest, something I’d never even noticed until it it went away.
So I stuck with the new routine religiously. What happened was extraordinary. I found myself receiving and responding to things more and more at face value. I used my old judgmental tone of voice less and less. I became less irritable. And my coworkers became more at ease, less on guard, and more creative around me. I daresay I even struck some as amiable and easy going. Everything just got radically better and has only gone up from there.
And it’s not like I merely bite my lip now. I haven’t learned to contain anger. I’ve learned to release it. I identify and dissipate exasperation before it builds. When I note a new expectation — “Oh, look, there’s another one!” — I pop it out of my head like a slice of toast exiting a toaster. Then the cartoon hand sweeps it away. Again and again. All day every day.
Those who know mindfulness will know this is the fundamental trick. It is the key that is espoused in the leading books on the topic. For those readers who might be intrigued, I encourage you to check out Wherever You Go, There You Are by John Kabat-Zinn, 10% Happier by Dan Harris, and/or The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. Each has been colossally formative for me.
I never imagined myself utilizing mindfulness in any aspect of my life, much less at work. I didn’t even know what it was, to be candid. But here I am, a card-carrying Type A hard charger, writing that it’s become pivotal in my professional and personal development. Adult growth is an amazing, astonishing thing.
And you know what’s come of it? I’ve gone from being an ass to being a leader who people want to be follow. Because the people around me — boss, peers, or those who report to me — are not afraid to say the wrong thing, their creativity flows. They solve problems. They produce, they get results, they thrive, and they seem more fulfilled by their work. And I can see, clear as day, the ways my behavior contributes to that.
For those who share my weakness
For my fellow prickly perfectionists and hotheads, those individuals whose exasperation tends to put the people around you on edge, it’s worth trying to address it. You’ll never get the most from others if they are always waiting for you to snap. And their commitment to your leadership will be tissue-paper thin. I encourage you to try it, using the mindfulness approach that worked for me, or something else. There’s a palpable sense of relief and peace to be found in the result.
Honestly, I’m not claiming victory, not by a long shot. This will be a lifelong journey. If I were to drift from my mindfulness meditation practice, I’m almost certain the exasperation habit would rear its ugly head again. I don’t care to let that happen. Thankfully I’ve now fully experienced what it’s like to be someone who leads by persuasion rather than coercion. It feels really, really good.