Stop Listening to Your Horrible Boss — the One Inside Your Head
They promise to make you more productive, but they’re actually holding you back. Here’s how to demote them.
The garden fork
I was going to visit my family overseas in a global pandemic. I had to schedule three different Covid tests in a 10-day period in two countries. I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork designed by government bureaucrats who had apparently never seen a website before. Plus I had to do laundry and pack and all the usual things. And I had to do it in time to be ready for a 5 a.m. airport pickup.
But I did it. I was gulping down a cup of coffee at 4:58 a.m., with everything by the door ready to go, when something out the back window caught my eye: the garden fork, leaning against the wall where I had left it probably three weeks before.
That fricking fork! How many times had I seen it and told myself to put it away? And how had I still not done it? Why had I left it out there in the rain, probably rusting and falling to bits? This was why I never had nice things, why I never felt like a proper grown-up. Because no matter how hard I tried, I could never truly get my shit together.
For a minute, seeing that garden fork canceled out every single thing I’d done to get ready, not to mention all the work I did for my actual job. Because I couldn’t manage to take care of everything, it felt like I had done nothing.
But what happened next is the important part: I remembered my actual priorities. And I immediately felt better, because I knew the fork wasn’t one of them.
The Horrible Boss
Most people I coach have lives filled with an endless stream of fork-type moments. They tell me about messy offices, unread emails, stalled remodelling projects, crafts abandoned after a week. They describe the length of their to-do lists as if confessing to a felony.
But when I start to ask them questions, it’s clear that there’s another, much longer list of things they ARE doing, that never gets an airing inside their own heads. Instead, they march through their lives tallying up every unfinished task and unmet goal and unorganised corner, and they…
