My Manager is so mean!

My manager can be cruel and often implies that I'm stupid. Although she doesn’t directly call me stupid, she makes remarks like, "That was stupid," or "Wow, you didn’t know that would happen?" These comments leave me wondering if I should just accept them. It seems I can never do anything right in her eyes. I never receive praise for the things I know I do well; I only hear about my mistakes. I’m starting to believe that maybe I don’t do many things right at all.

Contemplating Change

Have you ever had a manager who was downright mean and hateful? I've had mine for as long as I can remember, and I’m considering quitting. I want to tell her to take her negative attitude elsewhere because I’m tired of working for someone so ungrateful and mean. Just the other day, she told me I was gaining weight and looked rough. Who does that?

When you think about quitting, you have to find something new. That’s what I’m doing—looking for something more positive that will benefit me as a person. I need something that will cause less damage. Years of listening to negativity have left me in a bad place. It’s dark here, and I struggle to see the good. Doesn’t it make sense to change and let in some light?

Realizing the Source

This was me before I started seeking something better. The manager I speak of was myself. I would say cruel things to myself, and if anyone else had said them, I would have walked away. If a manager at work spoke to me like that, I would have quit immediately. We spend the most time with ourselves, yet we are often our own harshest critics. The things we say to ourselves are things we wouldn’t say to another person, yet we accept them internally.

Transforming

But can we walk out on ourselves and replace our inner critic with something else? Well, we learn how to treat ourselves based on what we hear growing up. We often hear what we can’t do more than what we can. Parents, teachers, friends, and siblings point out our mistakes to protect us from harm. Although well-intentioned, this creates a lasting negative connotation in our minds. Fortunately, not all hope is lost.

The wonderful thing about being human is that we can continue to learn and grow. We can change anything we choose and adopt better ways of thinking. Our minds absorb everything around us, but they filter out most of it to help us focus on what seems most important.

Implementing Positive Change

So, how do we change this? It’s simple: we start listening to and learning new inner dialogue, transforming the cruel voice into something more beneficial. We use our amazing brains to help us. We replace damaging self-talk with beneficial self-talk. Look for recordings of positive self-talk and play them in the background during normal activities. Over time, your mind will absorb these messages and shift your self-talk from damaging to beneficial.

Positive self-talk should include the messages you want to adopt and the reasons for them. I find this approach works best. Listen to these recordings for at least 15 minutes twice a day. It’s often said that listening to someone else’s voice is more effective than your own, perhaps because we’re not as fond of our own voices.

Empowering Your Manager

We’ve done some of the hard work for you and created audio recordings to help. Our beneficial self-talk store is below, or find another source. Our goal is to help you feel better. You spend every day with your inner manager, so make it the best manager around. Don’t accept negativity—help yourself, and it will make a world of difference. I know it has made a significant impact on my life.