My Morning Anxiety

So a friend of mine just started to work after graduating masters study. One day she ranted about it and said, "Every day I'm having this sick feeling in my stomach to face each new day like anxiety is kicking in," to which I replied, "me too,". Don't we all? Especially when you're hired as a new young boss in the company, such feeling exists without we permitted it to be.

Strict and Fierce Boss
There's a saying that having a good boss is better than having good colleagues. This may be true at one time but maybe not at the other. But having a strict and fierce boss who likes to curse you when he/she was mad, would be a total headache. This would make you feel like don't want to get up in the morning to work as being at work equals to having a stressful day. I've been working in a total of three companies and all three bosses I've worked with were all friendly and understanding bosses, fortunately. But my current boss does sometimes make me feel pressured by his stern look when I didn't get to do what he wanted me to.

Older/Veteran employees
I felt small when I first entered the company as a newly appointed team leader because of my age. I felt that I don't deserve the position as there're many older employees who had more experiences than me and I just don't know how to give them orders to do the task given by the boss. This also affected my stressful working environment as I know I'm being watched and they'll tell me off every time they got the chance to when I did even a tiny mistake. Some even didn't want to listen to me at all, thinking that my opinions didn't matter as theirs were way experienced.

To these concerns, I had a brother-sister talk session with my boss. As kind as a boss he is, he gave me comforting and wise words of advice to me on how to overcome such problems and handle my emotion at work well so it won't affect my working performance and relationship with other staff;

Ignore unimportant things
I learned that being a boss, young or veteran one, no matter how kind or bad of a boss you are, at some point there will be people or specifically your staff whom just don't like you. I took my current boss for an example. He is a very kind of a boss who doesn't know how to scold his employees no matter how bad the employee's performance is but there're still some who hate him and always talk bad about him behind his back. So he told me that it'll only stress us more if we keep thinking of what others think about us. We should just do our work properly and ignore unimportant things which what he meant was things other than our designated work.

Don't be affected by our surroundings
And by that, he meant that I shouldn't mingle with onions people at the office and follow their footstep at becoming not a good employee - some had the habit of fill in the attendance sheet but never been seen at the office, some had the habit of gossiping around all day at work and some had the habit of delaying one's work. He took an example of this one staff whom he said was a very good, punctual and disciplined worker when he/she first started working in the company but by the end of the day, he/she started to inherit the bad habits and my boss warned me to not be like this particular worker.

Be kind to everyone - respect is earned, not given
The one advice my boss gave me which I think was the most important thing to do; No matter how busy or how stressful your day was, you should think before you speak and make sure only nice words are blurted out. No matter how bad a person was to you, you, on the other hand, shouldn't stoop down to his/her level and be kind consistently to everyone.

At the end of the day, I had no choice but to just face this morning anxiety professionally with a hope to overcome it one day. Do you have the same feeling?

Till then,
Lya