In which I don't look so good

I manage a large team at work, and we are in our extremely busy season. All of us are putting in 60 to 80 hours a week and will be doing that until nearly the end of October. Last year when things were this crazy, I’d sometimes bring snacks. I couldn’t ease the workload but I could provide something to nibble on. The company didn’t pay for these goodies, I did, and it was no big deal.

Now we are down to the lesser of two incomes. Right before Kent got laid off, I’d brought in snacks—about $30 worth of clementines and a large package of those individual sized bags of assorted chips. We have a fairly open seating plan at work, and my team isn’t isolated. In fact, three other teams sit in the general vicinity. That means others not on my team saw the snacks and (as happened last year) helped themselves. Last year, I didn’t care. This year . . . yeah, it bothered me.

So I’ve been wrestling with that ugliness in myself for the last week or so. I brought the snacks in to be eaten. They were eaten. That some of the people who participants weren’t on my team shouldn’t matter. Yet I felt that internal stinginess.

I’ve struggled with this off and on throughout my life, always when times are tight or trending that way or I think it will be that way. I remember worrying (yes actually worrying) in high school how I would earn enough money to pay for rent and food and of all things tampons once I graduated from high school and moved out.

In my 20s, my ex and I made very little money. We couldn’t afford things like cable TV or two cars or air conditioning in the house and I worried about money all the time.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I worked with a man in the Army Reserves who had a very different attitude toward money than I did. I came at it from a position of scarcity, as though it were an extremely limited and hard to get thing. His attitude was this: it’s just money and I’ll make more.

That blew my mind. To have that kind of confidence that I could earn more any time I needed to was not how I felt at all. But I wanted to have that confidence, that knowledge that I could take care of myself no matter what.

In the years since then, I’ve mostly been able to stay in that frame of mind, except when one of us gets laid off. Then my old fears come right back. This time those fears aren’t based in fact. We have enough. We’ve run the numbers and can scale down enough to fit my salary. Sure, Crazy Trips™ are off the table but we can have the occasional date night at our favorite place. We won’t lose the house. I can afford to occasionally bring in snacks (although probably cheaper ones).

It’s easy to be generous in times of plenty, when the cost is minute in the overall scheme of things. I want to be generous, full stop, no qualifiers. That means I need to stay grounded in reality, not in my fears from the past.

So I did this instead

In the EAP session last week, the counselor assigned me two tasks—one to be completed in the first week and the second one to be completed starting today. Then next week we’ll talk about the assignments (he gave two assignments since I’m going two weeks between sessions).

Only—and I don’t know how to say this without sounding a little snotty—the assignment misses the mark for me. Not the idea of it but what he gave me to use. Let me explain.

He’s using cognitive therapy techniques, which is actually fine by me. These techniques have good supporting research that indicate they’re generally successful. I’m supposed to pick from a list of 16 styles of distorted thinking from a hand out he gave me, and track how often I think that way. Everyone has distorted thinking from time to time, and I am no exception. Only the hand out uses such polarizing language that I find myself—well offended isn’t the right word but it’s close enough. You can read the list here (this isn’t from the place I’m going, but it’s word for word what’s on the assignment).

Just over halfway down the page, you'll see one about "should." I have a lot of shoulds in my world. I definitely think I should be doing this or that pretty often. But I think it about me, not about you. So the rest of the statement (people who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty if you violate the rules) isn’t quite right. Yes, I do feel bad or guilty if I can’t do whatever it is I think I should be able to do, guilt might even be the right word. But if you don’t do it? Well I might get annoyed, sure, or maybe go do whatever it is I thought you were going to do myself. But anger is something I don’t indulge in all that often. And to say “anger you” puts me in the passive role. No thanks!

Last week as I was mulling this over, I realized that tapes (which I wrote about here) are nothing more than distorted thinking. And I realized that really the point of this exercise is more about continuing to identify my tapes and replace them with something that’s more effective.

I have two competing tapes that tend to run, often at the same time. Which is kind of crazy because they definitely compete with each other and remind me of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland where she says she's believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast:

1. I’ve created this mess/bad situation—at my most irrational, I will take responsibility for things clearly outside my control (oh no it’s raining, my fault!—I exaggerate but you get the idea). This isn’t the same thing as having power, though. It’s all about feeling bad, like I’ve failed.
2. Everything is just fine. This tape served me well in some pretty bad times but it wasn’t accurate then and it’s not always accurate now. I can’t find a solution if I’m not able to admit that something is wrong. 

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve picked both of those tapes as things to track and yes, it can be a little surprising to realize how many times they run through my head, especially when it’s at the same time. This week I’m moving on to part two, which is using rational comebacks for those tapes.

Setting aside old tapes

Years ago when I lived in Germany, two friends took a quick trip to Paris where they were mugged. The muggers told them that the reason they mugged my friends was because they were American. That’s always stuck with me, and not in a good way, so Paris has never been a place I wanted to visit.

Delta doesn’t fly into Bangalore but one of their partners, Air France, does. So I was on an Air France flight from Bangalore to Paris last week, and ended up having probably the nicest flight attendant I’ve ever had. Since I’ve flown at least 75,000 miles a year since 2010, and plenty more in previous years, that’s saying something. But he was fantastic. And of course he was French*.

On that long 10-hour flight, I found myself reconsidering my opposition to going to Paris, and long story not so long, realized it was time to ditch that old tape. After all, I’ve definitely seen that India is not full of people like the Ferals, so why would Paris be filled with muggers who hate Americans?

I have no idea when we’ll go—this has been the year of home maintenance and repair, not travel—but look for us to make it over there hopefully in 2016.

*He told me a couple of hours into the flight that he was pretty good at identifying where people were from. He pointed out one he'd known was Italian, and another who was British. But, he said, he'd thought I was German. I laughed and said that I'd lived there three years so maybe that's why I seemed German.