I remember many years ago being very de-motivated and stressed thanks to a young, inexperienced but over confident and bullying manager. Her style engendered an environment of conflict and doubt.

It was a terrible time as I was very stressed and de-motivated and yet tasked with achieving very challenging targets. The job market was not healthy and the only thing I could do was endure the situation

To help myself I had to devise a way of coping. I decided I needed a plan and very briefly here it is:

Personal Inventory of Success – Boost your confidence and reinstate your sense of achievement. Look over the past five or ten years of your career and work and celebrate your milestones. These could be your qualifications the plans and projects that you lead and completed.

Decide to ditch negative thinking - the brain is trained by your thinking. If you look for the negatives it will look for the evidence. Look out for what is going right and keep a journal to remind you and reinforce the positive.

Learn from Mistakes – If things don’t go according to plan, assess the situation and decide what you can do in the future to avoid the same happening again.

Make a Plan – long and short term. Everyday before you start work take a few minutes to decide what one important thing you’re going to do. It could be part of a big goal or a task that you can get done. Have a long term plan too over six months or longer of the things you need to get done and then chunk down in to tasks.

Review Highlights Everyday – As mentioned above train your brain to look for the positive. Take a few minutes at the end of the day to acknowledge what you achieved and how much closer you are to achieving the bigger goals. This begins the mental reinforcing and embedding of achievements and progress made. Also it helps you have some real evidence to show what you’ve been doing and what you’ve had to overcome.

Keep your Sense of Perspective – When you’re unfortunate to suffer the effects of poor management your motivation is easily sapped and your stress levels rise. Knowing your strengths and what you value in life and celebrating them helps you win through.

Collect your Evidence. In my plan I reviewed my work and performance and looked for any form of paperwork that showed I had indeed been working steadfastly towards goals.

With all of the above I felt more prepared and able to answer any questions about my projects and performance. The feelings of doubt subsided and I even made some progress towards the impossible targets I was set.

Then the boss suddenly left under a shroud of secrecy. Nobody missed her. But I was secretly grateful that the experience had taught me how plan for and endure the bad times.

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