Sometimes I feel like I'm doing battle against myself. I do so much self-sabotaging; it's a wonder how I've gotten this far. For example, I had a list of things to do today and woke up nice and early ready to do them. Then, however, I somehow ended up falling back asleep and slept in way too late again. When I finally awoke, I sat for a while irritated, disappointed, and depressed that I somehow wasted another day. In college, I would've dreamed of days that I could've slept through and now they happen so frequently that it's even more bothersome.
There are so many things I'm trying to accomplish and I feel pulled in so many different directions. My sleeping in all day most days isn't helping matters. If anything it's making things worse rather than better. Another Monday and Tuesday have come and gone with little to show for it. I'm not worried about the next two days. On the days when I don't have to work, I seem to function just fine. I wake up, eat healthier, more frequent meals, exercise more than enough, and actually accomplish many of my tasks before 5pm which is normally when I'd have to be at work. Why exactly do I find myself unable to do these things the rest of the week? It's obnoxious and I'm not a fan.
Could it be that I unconsciously view my work as something that I quite literally need all my strength for? Sure, it's not the most glamorous profession but it's like all of a sudden I find myself fretting and needing to feel "prepared." Maybe it's the new trainer who they hired (instead of me) to listen in on all our calls. In my last review, I had to listen to them all and got a decent lecture on the ones that weren't up to snuff. Not that my experience was any different from anyone else's but I think I allowed it to affect me in a way. Of course, I'm not saying that I am the perfect customer service rep but I think there are far better ways to help us learn to handle the more difficult calls.
For example, bringing us into a conference room where we listened to the calls that were handled well and discussing what the rep did during the call that made it go so well would have been a better beginning. Yes, I get that I was trained as a teacher but I didn't realize how little "modeling" is done in the real world. Instead, people talk at you and then tell you, "okay go do it and we're going to listen in and keep a record of your mistakes because we want you to improve." Children don't learn that way and neither do adults. You don't tell kids how to do a math problem but you show them. You don't tell kids, "I want you to draw a picture with this, this, this, and this without showing some sort of example." Adults learn the same way and I don't understand why that concept is so difficult for people to understand.
Regardless, that is not how things are being done at work currently. We know that every call we take could be the call that we get "coached" on. It adds this sort of pressure to make every call perfect because you know that out of all your "correct" calls, they are going to choose the ones that you already know are terrible. There's also this rumor that she's going to place us on teams and have us compete against each other to see who scores the highest in our call ratings. Really, the last thing I want to do is compete with my colleagues. In fact, one of the things I love about my job is how there's such a team atmosphere in my office. I really don't want that to change. Add to that the constant changing of procedures and growing list of instructions, it's become kind of absurd.
So perhaps this is why I choose to sleep in all day during my work days because I somehow feel like I can't handle the job if I don't. This of course makes me want to punch myself because seriously, it's taking calls and dealing with a bit of criticism. It's nothing that I haven't dealt with before. Perhaps it's the bitterness that the person they hired to do this job really has no clue what we do and has never actually answered any of our calls but somehow is considered qualified to "train" those of us who have been doing this for years at this point. It just seems a little backward but then maybe walking and working backwards is the way of corporate life. Listening to others' stories, they don't sound all that different.
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