Choosing a vocation
With all the difficulties in achieving success, especially in office politics and the political corruption described in the last episode, the question now is how can Psychoanalysis help people towards a better working life with these problems in the background? Regardless of how things are we have to find a way. Paul Marcus of The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction provides a good overview of how psychoanalysis can contribute to Career Counselling towards success. “French psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours wrote that ‘the relation to work is intertwined with the sexual economy’, that is, with the attitudes and behaviors in the personal realm, including body-ego, body-image and love relationships.” A pure rational pro and con analysis approach has to be balanced with unconscious forces that often nudge one in completely different directions. “As Carl Jung noted, ‘You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.’… Childhood experiences (both positive and negative) and familial heritage have a major influence on vocational choices. People choose an occupation that enables them to replicate significant childhood experiences, satisfy needs that were unfulfilled in their childhood, and actualize dreams passed on to them by their familial heritage…Freud famously said, ‘all love is a re-finding’: it tends to replicate emotional aspects of infantile templates, those impacting early experiences of satisfaction and frustration between parents and children.”
To tolerate this trial and error, and to create new things without a fear of failure, work has to resemble experimentation, a learning orientation, which is similar to play. “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play…The most successful businesses seem to be aware that a hospitable work setting, one that is more likely to facilitate innovation, in part emanates from allowing workers to intellectually play with ideas without worrying about failing.” The impulse to develop play in psychoanalysis is to express love, desire, and aggression in a playful way: Sublimation. Through symbolization, acknowledging one’s emotions in frustration, therapeutic catharsis, and play, one can transform the power of love, lust, and aggression into motivated action.
Sublimation: – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
“All sublimation relies on symbolization, so that, for instance, gardening, an activity that is infused with erotic impulse and is a long-standing metaphor in literature and the arts for sexuality, requires just such instinctual redirection and refashioning, that is, engaging in adaptive ‘desexualized’ and ‘deaggressified’ psychic processes. It is not by chance that horticultural metaphors are often used by people as creative visualizations regarding their career journey, using such terms as ‘growing, flowering and blossoming,’ as well as when the going gets tough as
in ‘being pruned and cut back.’ Likewise, voyeuristic wishes are satisfied by becoming a psychoanalyst or photographer; the wish to hurt or kill is satisfied by becoming a surgeon or butcher; or exhibitionistic wishes are satisfied by becoming an actor or lifeguard. In other words, work represents one very good venue for the individual to negotiate the conflicting demands between desires, that is, instinctual gratifications, and culture, the requirements of normative social reality. As psychoanalyst and Freud translator A. A. Brill noted, from a classical point of view, ‘every activity or vocation not directed to sex in the broadest sense, no matter under what guise, is a form of sublimation…in the service of hunger and love…guided by the individual’s unconscious motives.'”
Connected with a life drive, Sublimation can appear as symbol and belief in the mind connected with achievement in perception. The mind daydreams about putting things together, taking care of them, union, or the death drive as a form of destruction. Whether one can see sexual connotations of foreplay, engagement, and climax in projects, or sexual ideas of birthing a new project etc., creating something timeless to find immortality, or if one can see the benefit of meditation, surrender, disengaging from goals, taking out the trash, recycling, controlled demolition of old buildings, war to protect your country, and the closure of a business, as examples of the death drive, it’s the healthy use of those desires in prosocial economic spheres as a stand in for procreation or dying.
When the above authenticity is tapped into, as talked about in past episodes, and shame is healed, then sublimation can move unhindered. “Developing a sense of initiative versus guilt can impact to what degree a person can create a realistic basis for his aspirations, focus and work-related decisions, including exploring what one might want to do in the adult work world. A lack of initiative often leads to choosing unsatisfying career paths. Acquiring a sense of industry versus inferiority can impact a sense of self-assurance, productivity and that all-important sense of being an agent in the world that can make things work: ‘I am what I can learn to make work,’ said Erikson. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the ability to actualize one’s creative visualizations and projections in real life is a sign of psychological health as well as a necessary constituent aspect of living the ‘good life.'”
The destructive drives in work often get lodged in the Super-ego with arguments over self-preservation and shifting blame. For the Ego to work better, and to have confidence, playing has to be allowed to emerge, and the Super-ego conscience has to be ethically satisfied, to prevent remorse and conflict…”The best sublimations are those that ‘fuse’ the erotic with the aggressive. As Menninger points out, ‘If the erotic impulse sufficiently dominates, the result is constructive behavior; if the aggressive impulses dominate, the result is more or less destructive behavior.’ The point is that in civilized society an individual’s aggression cannot have full expression; it cannot find a direct outlet. Therefore it has to turn inward, and by doing so it becomes used by the super-ego. The super-ego in turn forces the ego to use its executive functions to submit to the reality of work with all of its adversity, drudgery and boredom. This internalized aggression [i.e., the ego submitting to the super-ego] is the ultimate guarantee for the maintenance of work and therefore, of self-preservation.’ In this view, instinctual pleasure is not the ultimate driving force of work. Rather, the need for self-preservation is mediated by reason and intellect and reinforced by the voice of conscience. Thus, from a classically based perspective, the pleasure connected with work is the relief from the tension between the super-ego and ego, that is, the harmonization of conscience and reason, and this process allows the person to transform instinctually driven play actions rooted in one’s childhood into reality-driven adult work ones. As Lantos concludes, ‘it is not the object or the skill of the activities which makes the difference between work and play, but the participation of the super ego, which changes play-activities into work-activities.’ In short, at its best adult work is a pleasurable form of purposive play that is judged to be creative and productive…From the classical point of view, at its best work is erotically tinged, if not infused, by love. It is Eros made manifest.” So here if one feels a sense of grind at work, it’s because the Super-ego is micro-managing, bullying and over-processing in order to understand and complete the work. When the “rules of the game” so to say are habituated into skill, to make the work more effortless and effective, then the sense of play and Eros with the Ego can manifest, when one can get a taste of what it’s like to do good work with a feeling of love.
Beyond love, a lot of a good fit with a vocation is the connection with psychoanalytic characters of the ‘anal,’ ‘oral,’ and ‘phallic’ kind. They are characters with a particular type of work style that is comfortable. Anal types are about neatness, cleanliness, and order. Oral types are about taking things in, using intuition, and are less concerned about messes. Naturally those two types wouldn’t work too well together. Phallic types assert authority and domination over others and seek executive circles for networking and social protection from the other two types, because those types call them “dicks.”
One of the big stressors at work is being a misfit for a job and trying to persist when one doesn’t like it. For example, an Anal character “has an emotionally constricted comportment that is overly rigid, stubborn, perfectionistic and stingy, with preoccupation with trivial details and over-concern with having everything done one’s own way, and he displays excessive devotion to work, productivity and conscientiousness. These personality types tend to perform well and are happy in occupations that emphasize technical details, which demand concentrated, logical, methodical ways of thinking and continuous attention to their practical tasks. Moreover, they do well where social interaction is not primary to the work requirements, where decision-making is limited to their narrow technical expertise and where emotional expressiveness is not highly valued. Such personality types perform well on the job in work circumstances where they can control the parameters of work and in occupations that emphasize objectivity and detachment. One only has to call to mind the typical computer analyst, programmer, scientist, accountant, surveyor and lithographer to have an intuitive understanding of why an obsessive-compulsive personality would likely ‘fit’ well in these occupations…”
“Oral characters tend to be discernible by their optimism, self-confidence and carefree generosity, this being a reflection of the pleasurable aspects of the stage. Such people may be drawn to teaching, social work, non-profit work or the performing arts. Oral characters may also be characterized by pessimism, futility, anxiety and sadism, these being expressions of frustrations or conflicts occurring during this phase of psychosexual development. Such people tend to experience their occupation in dark, nasty terms and they are, often correctly, perceived as needy, dependent and moody, these being their main defensive ways of managing their anxiety and emptiness…”
“Phallic characters often express inordinate degrees of narcissistic behavior such as vanity, undue self-assurance, swagger, compulsive sexual behavior and in some contexts, primitive exhibitionistic and violent behavior. Indeed, more recently, such phallic characters are typically described as phallic-narcissistic characters. Political, religious and academic occupations permit such people to take advantage of their personality organization and defenses in which they satisfy their needs and wishes for adulation, self-aggrandizement and dependency attachments in a fairly shielded set of circumstances.”
Of course, one could develop all elements of those types to try and balance out the weaknesses one has since many occupations require skills in all areas for some of the duration of the work day. If one also wants to work in areas that are opposed to their psychoanalytic character, they would want to emphasize skill development in those areas, so if an area is considered uninteresting, then if those activities eventually become skilled habits, they can be acted on with less friction, even if the work is mostly joyless. Both Anal and Oral characters could see the advantages of being more Phallic with assertiveness in areas of their job where it may help. Phallic types could also learn how improving their accuracy and increasing their creativity can balance their over-confidence. Anal characters can infuse creativity in areas where there is some wiggle room, and Oral characters can make their projects more robust by adding due diligence to their work.
Sexuality Pt 2: Infantile Sexuality – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html
One has to keep in mind what a person risks if they work against type, which is a common scenario. “Individuals who have a ‘job’ and ‘career’ orientation toward work tend to have personal identities that do not significantly overlap with the actual work they do; to a large extent they view what they do at work as distinct from the rest of their life. They narrate their lives in terms of having a ‘work self’ and a ‘non-work self,’ and rarely do they feel they are a ‘whole’ or ‘complete self’…In contrast, a ‘calling’ is a work orientation in which a person views their work as deeply satisfying and socially beneficial. That is, an individual chooses an occupation that he ‘feels drawn to pursue,’ often powerfully. He anticipates it to be ‘intrinsically enjoyable and meaningful,’ especially as a socially useful endeavor, and he views it ‘as a central part of his identity.’ As such work constitutes a practical ideal of activity and character that makes a person’s work morally inseparable from his or her life, and it links the person not only more intensely to his co-workers but to the larger community.” The trick with connecting hobbies with work is to be able to monetize the activity one likes, and if one wants more control and choice over their work life, running a business can be the vehicle. Connecting passion for the product or service can also help sell the enjoyment of the products and services from the standpoint of one’s own personal experience.
Matching the personality to the work can stabilize a strong sense of self by extending authenticity from home life to work life. “Such people are impressive when you encounter them, for one can sense there is no marked discrepancy between what they seem to be and what they are.” In a way, the unconscious authenticity is powering the work behavior that one sees outwardly. “As cognitive psychologists have shown, ‘most processing performed by the human mind for decision-making and behavior initiation is not performed at the conscious level’ and ‘introspective access to cognitive processes is limited’…The path of a career calling is a continuing, reciprocal and cyclical process which includes deep exploration of personal needs, wishes and goals, trial and error efforts, and critical reflection on failure and success, all of which constitute thoughtful career self-exploration, judgment and decision-making. Most importantly in this formulation is the ‘feedback loop,’ as it ‘completes the success process and makes it self-reinforcing as a cycle.’ Thus, given that unconscious meanings are in significant play with regards to the individual’s trajectory of a career calling, from a psychoanalytic point of view it is best to view a calling as both discovered and created, encountered and imposed, and found and made. Regardless of how one comes to one’s sense of having found/created one’s ‘calling,’ the fact is that it is based on the heartfelt assumption that no kind of work is insignificant if it uplifts humanity, if it enhances individual dignity and significance. Therefore, whatever work one does it should be engaged in with painstaking excellence.”
To tolerate trial and error in developing skills to the level of excellence is partly explained by the sublimation descriptions above, but partly the endeavor to give one self more fully so as to guarantee that employers and customers will appreciate the efforts. Through visualization of growth, development, union, building, and creative destruction, one has to inhabit the other person in the exchange by “radiating out into intersubjectivity, expressing our ontological rootedness and togetherness.” It’s done through admiration of good qualities, but also authentic appreciation. This steps one out of having too much self-consciousness. You feel less blame when you know you put your current best into something. Also, excitement at work comes from knowing that you can do something well and can anticipate the steps to completion. “It is a psychological paradox that to give the best of oneself is the surest way one can receive. Research inspired by Frederickson’s ‘broaden and build’ theory has found that, in the workplace, institutionalized care-giving and supportive attachments and other pro-social behaviors that are rooted in heartfelt collective values that reflect ‘organizational virtuousness’ generate upward emotion spirals, so compassion begets compassion among employees.” This can also follow through in romantic relationships where one gives as much of oneself as realistically possible, but in relationships with reciprocity, partners give back the same. To engage in this reciprocity, one has to have the ability to feel admiration and appreciation for others. You can recognize their value because it can be withdrawn from society as they choose.
The dangers of people not liking their jobs, relationships, and their feelings of alienation from society, is a threatening insecurity and helplessness that can bleed into criminality and destructive political beliefs. “Some people experience the urge to admire as a moment of radical diminishment. To admire someone else’s intelligence, work product, good character or looks, for example, is experienced as humiliating and, hence, is vigorously resisted. Such people are extremely suspicious of any act of recognition of someone else’s superiority in any domain. In fact, they resent such acknowledgment of another’s superiority. For such people there is ‘a burning preoccupation with self at the bottom of this suspicion, a ‘but what about me, what becomes of me in that case?’ According to Marcel, what people who cannot admire, hate, is the awareness that the acknowledgment of superiority is an ‘absolute’ judgment at the time it is given: ‘[the judgment] indicates that this new light can make me pale into insignificance in my own eyes or in those of others whose judgment I must consider since that judgment directly influences the judgment I tend to have of myself.’ Such people experience the admired other as having power over them, while further fostering their beleaguered sense of self-control; hence, they often feel resentment, jealousy or envy. Where the jealous person feels bitter and unhappy because of another’s perceived advantages, possession or luck, the envious person, in addition, wants to aggressively ‘steal’ somebody else’s success, good fortune, qualities or possessions, take it all for himself, and leave the ‘victim’ with nothing. Perhaps what the person who cannot admire most profoundly resents and is jealous of is that [the] admired other lacks the ‘inner inertia,’ as Marcel calls it, the self-enclosure, low self-esteem and poor self-concept that the person who cannot admire feels. Thus, for the person who refuses to admire, the main self-deficit is that he will feel that his own dignity and pride are [permanently] damaged if he admires; he will experience a profound and lasting narcissistic injury that becomes fertile breeding ground for narcissistic rage; for the person who is unable to admire, the main self-deficit is that he is self-enclosed, hermetically sealed from allowing the unique otherness of the other inside himself. To do so would be too disruptive, disorienting or over-stimulating for him to let the other enter him; thus he pretends to himself that he does not notice the admirable qualities in others…There is an enfeebled self that consciously and/or unconsciously feels under siege from the condemning self-judgment that is evoked in the presence of someone or something who they believe is superior to them. Secondly, in both types the greater plenitude that one feels and derives in the presence of someone or something that transcends us is denied and they are less of a person as a result.”
The capacity to admire others is similar to how one can admire things in the world. Like a meditation, one is concentrated in one’s own activity. One can move to the next appropriate challenge, get absorbed, and repeat. “For example, when we look at a beautiful rose, we stare at it, note its loveliness and, when satisfied, move on to the next perception without clinging to the memory of the rose or trying to interfere with it. We simply engage the rose on its own terms with the fullness of our entire being. We then move on and become temporarily attached to another beautiful object of perception. ‘Life, in other words,’ says Yearley, ‘is a series of esthetically pleasing new beginnings, and all such beginnings should be grasped and then surrendered as change proceeds’…The best way to go through the world, including in the workplace, is to experience life as it is lived, on its own terms, at least as one construes it, without trying to hold on, direct and/or control the experience. With this kind of moment-to-moment awareness, the mind is less likely to be ensnared by an experience, but instead can move effortlessly and continuously, seeing the world as a series of movie frames, some more pleasing than others but always changing, just as Nature does. The trick is to be able to become a person in whom the ‘Tao acts without impediment.'”
Failing these standards, a person can resort to magical thinking and look for gurus, political leaders, and other powerful people for guidance, even if these people cannot possibly know your job or prove they have any deep knowledge of politics or economics to make the world change in any perceivable way. With buzz words like “alignment” and “abundance” these rituals can take over the mind. An article on Courier, describes one of these problems: Money manifesting gurus. At one point or another, whether a person is dealing with something psychological or not, they inevitably look for a guru to deal with poor finances, which are big reason why many people have psychological problems in the first place. “…All of [these financial gurus] seem to have one thing in common: they tend to be excellent at marketing and self-promotion…The manifesting coaches rely on anecdotal evidence (especially their own) as proof of their methods. But there’s no peer-reviewed science linking techniques like the law of attraction to real-world results.” There is also an economic reality that if everyone kept day-dreaming themselves into abundance, what would that actually mean in terms of work and output in the economy? The reality is that if people got 30% richer on the average, and unless Artificial Intelligence takes over the work world and does most of the work for us, people would have to work 30% more to produce that extra wealth. Certainly in economics, there needs to be more effort for there to be more output. The remaining successes from the Law of Attraction are examples of confirmation bias where we focus in on positive situations and falsely attach those successes to seminar speakers or Tarot cards, without any evidence or self-examination, and usually by discounting our own efforts. “While coaches themselves are clearly making a success of money manifesting, it’s less clear whether their course attendees are getting value for money.” Some might say that it’s just your outlook, and that it should be unrelentingly positive, so the Universe will bring you these opportunities, but the details of what’s happening and what skills you have to develop can’t be overlooked. There’s no guarantee where you’ll end up. Trial and error as a method may take a long time or be for the rest of your life.
Inside the ‘money manifesting’ myth – Courier magazine issue 41
Money Manifesting – Abraham Hicks: https://youtu.be/4Jk5FsAPVhI
Receiving Prosperity – Louise Hay: https://youtu.be/78gNJ3t5EfE
Cult Psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html
Some Might Say – Oasis: https://youtu.be/HPKeoRgdhzI
Even further, any skills that provide money are jealously guarded by the professionals who have them, to protect against being replaced. Because education is mostly a scam, because very few of your textbooks are usable in the workplace, many masters program students have lots of debt and no income to justify the risk they took. In the end, the most important knowledge is passed on from supervisor to employee when it is the right timing for the supervisor to move onto something better. Employees can practice all they want, but if they have no access to that knowledge, they have to reinvent the wheel, or search for another opportunity in another company. If there are generational imbalances, where there are plenty of older people who need the money and will work very late in their lives, there can be intergenerational conflicts when younger couples are looking for that all important promotion, to provide consistent sums of money for years, so they can get married and raise children. All bottlenecks demand a creativity out of employees to branch out into new businesses or to find underappreciated employment elsewhere. Those who remain in the wrong careers they chose in University are destined to fall into an endless cycle of narcissistic injury, until they change tack.
The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give it Back: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781786491220/
Beau Is Afraid: https://youtu.be/XrCg9G_OHAA
Deliberate Practice
So let’s say that you do find a position where you have all the resources necessary to perform well. What would that look like? Part of the sense of living a ‘Tao without impediment’ is being able to play. A condition for play is having enough challenge to push against, but also balancing energy so that one can go into new territory without complete exhaustion. The modern expert on this kind of high performance is Anders Ericsson. Despite what many self-help gurus say about doing easy things, and “let the universe do the rest,” etc., people who actually meet their potentials in any arena have to assess their study and learning methods. “Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.” This requires a lot of concentration emotionally. It means that when the cobwebs of the unconscious are resolved and relaxed there should be less avoidance distractions. Certainly looking at the above information and seeing what types of jobs are more in the wheelhouse of one’s character helps a lot. Owners prize workers who live and breathe the industry and naturally try to separate the wheat and chaff. For generalist jobs, low paying jobs, or jobs that have high turnover, authenticity is not demanded as much. Some jobs are considered desperation jobs, entry level jobs, or jobs only for people with criminal records.
Nowadays there are lots of YouTube videos with doctors talking about how they study, though the gist of it is “stay on top of things” so the anxiety decreases. This isn’t so easy if there’s not enough energy or motivation. For so many, just about anything else is more interesting than their job. A recent Gallup poll found that only 15% were engaged. Typical of slavery mentalities, if people don’t see progress, don’t have time to celebrate progress, have no rest, it can move into extremes where there are mental health consequences. “To demonstrate the historical seriousness, stress and clinical burnout and subsequent suicide rates in Japan have caused the government to intervene. The current practice of management is now destroying their culture — a staggering 94% of Japanese workers are not engaged at work…It is significantly better in the U.S., at around 30% engaged, but this still means that roughly 70% of American workers aren’t engaged. It would change the world if we did better…Our conclusion is that organizations should change from having command-and-control managers to high-performance coaches.” If the mind is focused squarely on the job as something to look forward to, with a sense of meaning, and an anticipation of growth, people won’t feel that they are missing out when they are at work. This is why it’s crucial that people try different things out before they put all their eggs in one basket with a career. “Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees — especially the stars — join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager’s fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce.”
The World’s Broken Workplace – Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken-workplace.aspx
Mindfulness: Letting Go: https://rumble.com/v1grbjr-mindfulness-letting-go.html
Study Techniques I Swear By As A Medical Student – StudyMD: https://youtu.be/QrLzs2oIfe8
Not everything is incumbent on the manager to facilitate motivation for employees, but there is that entitlement expectation that managers and owners have this duty. Filling jobs frees up time for executives for their other projects and there’s a sense of duty to motivate new employees to keep from having to terminate employment only to start all over again. There are also political considerations. Managers don’t want to let people into their job, yet employees want to see a pathway forward. This is why there’s plenty of poaching between companies. For many managers their current role is as far as they want to go and they want the stability to work at a place for many years. This creates another separate group of employees, ones who want to limit the amount of change and resist to the point of burnout when forced to accept change, and those who excel at their roles and want to improve things. They look at change as part of the progress. When there’s individual dynamism to manage oneself, the manager can relax and get out of the way. This is so much so that another Gallup poll found that “employees who work exclusively remote or hybrid tend to have higher levels of engagement (37% engaged in both groups) than those who work exclusively on-site (29% engaged).” Being at close quarters with other employees doesn’t always enhance motivation. It has to do with connecting work with home, which adds meaning, and the reduced levels of the usual bullying, sexual harassment, while maintaining privacy from employees who may want to steal your ideas, judge you on looks, what you wear, and lifestyle. There’s also less room for the usual slander and false accusations that Cluster B employees heap on the workers in jobs you have to commute to. Some workplaces are so toxic that employees dread going to work. Working at home means one can focus more on the work, and this is the same benefit that parents find when home schooling their kids. With bullying that goes unpunished, school shootings, inane juvenile cultures, all the parent’s efforts at conditioning their kids for success, can be derailed very easily. The negatives of working at home is still down to politics, and in this case the politics of getting promoted. If you’re never at the office how are you going to be considered?
The complexity of world wide politics is also clearly connected with office politics. The left and the right only want to work with people who agree with them, because the values are so different. With the influence of China and the CCP style Environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores, there’s even more intrusion from corporations that identify with globalist policies to hire based on affirmative action and there’s a nationalist push back where workers, who are also consumers, are boycotting companies that don’t support their family values. People are now voting with their money, as you can see with organizations like PublicSq where you can shop not based on price, but based on values. Scandals and accusations of trying to groom children, adolescents, and teenagers with Disney and Budweiser are obvious examples, and now that sales for Bud Light have plummeted, there’s now a Woke Alert that will send emails to let people know which companies are pushing a left-wing social agendas to replicate bans on those products.
An example of culture wars in my life was being hired by a narcissist psychopath in a brief Accounting job, and at the Christmas party one of the other guys that was newly hired brought his boyfriend and the psycho accounting partner was completely shocked and said “what? They’re gay?!” and walked off from the table to pretend to be a social butterfly with clients who were also invited to this dinner theatre. Just imagine a guy with a permanent facial expression of repressed sadism and vibes out of an Ari Aster movie, who could at the drop of a hat start a human sacrifice, with a barely controlled aggression, and no authentic self, yet at the same time call himself a Christian, and as expected, a pillar of the community. On the other hand you have cancel culture which is also full of Cluster B types who are more interested in threatening lawsuits than doing actual work. They support a Neo-Communism that’s not based on class but on race and sexual orientation. If you don’t fit with an alphabet group or a marginalized ethnic group, you’re an oppressor. There are even some people who fake ancestry to a marginalized ethnic group just to tap into that sympathy and attention.
Employers are also worried that work quality cannot be judged without one accusation or another. One viral short video explained the conundrum for employers. “So if I was like hiring, and I saw pronouns, so here’s what I’m going to assume. I’m going to assume you’re obviously very liberal. So I’m going to assume you’re one of those people that is super far left. Hey. I’m going to assume you’re not a very hard worker. You are either a female or you’re a probably not straight guy. So everything in the office is going to have to cater to you, your feelings, your needs, and your emotions. So everyone around you is not going to be able to be themselves and walk on eggshells. Why would anyone want someone like you unless everyone is like you? In a work environment you’re going to be the laziest person. You’re going to be the most entitled, complain the most, and I think you’re going to be the first to sue. So shocker that pronouns weren’t helping you guys.” Even when every side of the culture war pays lip service about diversity, people are tempted to find people with the same politics to work with. People with the same values feel more comfortable working with people who are the same. On top of sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity, people go out of their way to hate those who are single, old, and ugly. Needless to say, that 70% minimum of disengagement at work sounds about right. Some years ago I remember meeting a marketing guy who told me, “Richard. It’s really easy to be in sales. Just be like your clients.” The pressure to be unlike yourself is so strong that it is not a shock that personality disorders where people don’t have an authentic self are common. Being an actor is so well practiced that it bleeds into life outside work. Ideally, all that should matter at work is the work, and at home people can have their own lifestyles, but humans with power love getting into other people’s businesses because they want to force one kind of imitation or another so they can feel they are working with people who are a mirror image of themselves. The only people in the end they are comfortable working with. In a way, cancel culture has always been there and it’s leverage comes from being the decision maker on who can join the staff. When people chase power by saying the right things until they gain power, and when they get that power, they begin the process a new of making people into clones of themselves and rejecting more independent people. You have to ask yourself, if you had power would you do any differently?
Public Square: https://publicsq.com/
Woke Alert: https://consumersresearch.org/wokealert/
She has a point – Employers vs. Pronouns: https://youtube.com/shorts/JZ0YZvC6u-Y
U.S. Employee Engagement Slump Continues – Gallup: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/391922/employee-engagement-slump-continues.aspx
Tar Offends BIPOC Pan-gendered Person During Lecture: https://youtu.be/VTAXQYic9uU
For those employees, regardless of lifestyle, who are interested in work, there are some things that they look for from employers that creates a better environment. In Management innovation roadmap, by Vittorio D’Amato, what many employees want is:
• responsibility for doing something useful,
• high level of freedom in the way results are reached,
• opportunity for professional growth and skill development,
• opportunities to work with professional people,
• recognition for having done a good job.
A big part of management is to provide regulation where necessary, but employees want to preserve a certain amount of freedom to engage their personality in the work. Again, these are employees who are self-managing, and we are talking about jobs that allow for that kind of creativity. That process of training and pushing back, allows managers and employees to feel out how self-regulating an employee truly is and supervisors can gradually allow employees to continue with more freedom. Similar to Super-ego and Ego functions, they work well when there’s no conflict along with that freedom. The Ego employee agrees with the regulations implemented by the Super-ego manager, because they are commonsensical, and in turn, the Super-ego trusts the Ego to use freedom responsibly. If one is willing put in as much effort towards self-management as one can develop, there’s less need for an authoritarian management style.
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
The complexity of this topic expands when accepting that employees and managers have differing views on what abuse is and what are reprimands for mistakes and irresponsibility. The workplace is full of situations where people are measuring interactional justice, which “describes the fairness of the interpersonal treatment received at the hands of decision makers or the quality of treatment an employee receives from his or her supervisor.” This moves into attribution theory and locus of control, which are about those who put responsibility on themselves for outcomes or blame external forces, respectively. This is a tricky area because one has to be scientific enough to blame others where there is appropriate blame, because there’s ample evidence, but to not scapegoat others for one’s evidential failures. All arguments need to have some evidential basis. There’s also a disconnect between managers and employees when they have differing values. What one manager thinks is justice may mean something totally different to an employee. Beyond checking for evidential support for abusive claims, matching employee values with the organizational values, there are situations of corruption and abusive supervision that are observed.
Emotional Exhaustion is a term used for what can be objectively seen in the consequences to workers. Typical Abusive Supervision includes obvious mocking and belittling. This isn’t the same as highlighting weaknesses in job performance to motivate change, which unfortunately some with an external locus of control can’t handle. It’s the type of comments that craft a negative identity that reduces self-esteem and low self-esteem means low performance. The workload is also another obvious externally provable metric. “When employees take sustained effort to meet the demands but cannot adequately recover, job demands may turn to stressors, resulting in energy depletion and subsequently impaired health.” High performance simply means being able to handle more because of increased skill and efficiency, and the term High Performance, should not be confused with workaholism and burnout, which many types who like to grind through their workday think it is. Similar to the Management Innovation Roadmap above, researchers posit Perceived Job Characteristics (PJCs) that include dimensions of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, as a way to counter emotional exhaustion due to repetitive task overload.
Development in soft skills, including skills in constructive criticism, is a big way to help reduce turnover. Managers have to resist the temptation of sadism and mockery towards employees, especially in areas totally unrelated to behavior, and employees have to develop more of an internal locus of control, like having an ability to learn from legitimate criticism. A lot of readers may laugh because this basic level of attainment is actually quite hard for both managers and employees to achieve, and this is especially true for those dealing with persistent mental illness. Sometimes there’s denial before one can move into acceptance of one’s own faults, and it’s important to know that all personality tests find each type has some weaknesses. Teams with this kind of self-awareness can avoid obvious bigotry on one side and political correctness on the other.
So let’s say that you have an internal locus of control and your employer provides freedom for creativity and constructive criticism. What does Ericsson think is required for high performance? Deliberate Practice for Ericsson is not just rote repeating to lodge skills into memory, but a particular type of practice where there is a reflection on what good performance looks like. When there aren’t examples, one has to experiment to find new standards beyond the current ones. “The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of ‘practice’ during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.” Instead of trying harder and grinding, it’s better to try differently, which is similar to the maxim “try smarter, not harder.” It also means that organizations have to accept experimentation and there’s always an edge to one’s skills so that no procedures can be permanently codified. A new edge means new procedures. This can be a strain for those who work as a means to an end and are not jazzed up that they have to take more of their personal time to learn new aspects of a job.
There has to be a curiosity to see how far one can go before it’s decided that this is the edge of the universe. Many limits are self-imposed because making mistakes and having an overactive Super-ego is draining. “In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve.” Internal and external signs of improvement make it easier for people to accept changes and also believe in their own ability to improve. The longer it takes to see results the higher the probability one will give up. The way to improve motivation is to work with the sense of self and monitor progress. “…once he started to see improvement after the first few sessions, he really enjoyed seeing his memory scores go up. It felt good, and he wanted to keep feeling that way…It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.”
There are different ways of doing this depending on the work or activity. One can reorganize information in the mind with self-tests, although the closer the test is to reality, the better. There is some upfront effort that is needed to create tests where none exist. When tests are matched to realistic scenarios, confidence increases as it normally does when one feels prepared. A lot of what makes up self-esteem is self-efficacy: knowing you can achieve. There is a version of you before Deliberate Practice and the version after. These two different self-images come about based on signs of progress and signs of failure. The pleasure comes from achieving personal goals and collective goals within an organization. Most important are the personal goals, and there have to be enough of them with frequent feedback to maintain motivation. When there’s politics at work and difficult challenges, a learning orientation that can accept failure is needed to prevent burnout that comes from repeated resistance to setbacks. Employees that can lead themselves put themselves in a good position to negotiate with employers. Individuals working at their cutting edge can decide if where they are working provides enough satisfaction. Deliberate practice also clarifies what commitment is needed in order to be the best one can be. Each person has to assess how much personal time they have to give up in order to perform at this level. Is the trade-off worth it?
Initial successes and confidence with this method can provide a life long interest in deliberate practice. Things that seem to work well tend to be repeated. “If we can show students that they have the power to develop a skill of their choice and that, while it is not easy, it has many rewards that will make it worthwhile, we make it much more likely that they will use deliberate practice to develop various skills over their lifetimes.”
The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction: How to Flourish in the Workplace by Paul Marcus: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138211650/
Aryee, S., Chen, Z. X., Sun, L.-Y., & Debrah, Y. A. (2007). Antecedents and outcomes of abusive supervision: Test of a trickle-down model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(1), 191–201.
Lin, W., Wang, L., & Chen, S. (2013). Abusive Supervision and Employee Well-Being: The Moderating Effect of Power Distance Orientation. Applied Psychology, 62(2), 308–329.
Martinko, M. J., Harvey, P., Sikora, D., & Douglas, S. C. (2011). Perceptions of abusive supervision: The role of subordinates’ attribution styles. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(4), 751–764.
Tepper, B. J. (2007). Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations: Review, Synthesis, and Research Agenda. Journal of Management, 33(3), 261–289.
Calcagno, A. (2010). Hannah Arendt and Augustine of Hippo: On the Pleasure of and Desire for Evil. Laval Théologique et Philosophique, 66(2), 371.
Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations by Volney Patrick Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780791411841/
Management innovation roadmap by Vittorio D’Amato: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9788823844711/
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise – Anders Ericsson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780544947221/
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance – Anders Ericsson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781316502617/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/