{"id":7749,"date":"2024-06-13T15:00:08","date_gmt":"2024-06-13T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=7749"},"modified":"2024-06-13T15:27:16","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T15:27:16","slug":"i-had-a-difficult-childhood-it-made-me-an-amazing-employee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=7749","title":{"rendered":"I Had a Difficult Childhood. It Made Me an Amazing Employee."},"content":{"rendered":"
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A writer reflects on the moment she understood the roots of her workaholism.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCOME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU\u2019RE IN,\u201d concludes the flurry of Slack messages from my manager, an all-caps tirade that began at 4:56 a.m.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a Monday morning in 2017. I\u2019m sitting in my car in the parking lot of my newish job, my body frozen, my eyes glued to my phone screen.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 45, and after decades relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, I\u2019d landed a high-profile, C-suite \u201cdream\u201d job and published my first book, a career guide for misfits. I\u2019d become an in-demand speaker, traveling the country to deliver talks on \u201cmaking it,\u201d my platitudes-with-a-twist quoted in business magazines, written up in women\u2019s lifestyle blogs.<\/p>\n

To the outside world, my success was unimpeachable. Inside I am a mess.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d worked through the weekend and, because I worked most weekends, the days and demands had all started to blur. My husband and I had moved to Los Angeles five years earlier, but I still hadn\u2019t made any friends.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019d skipped the parent social at our kid\u2019s new preschool because of a work trip. I\u2019d turned down an invitation to a neighbor\u2019s potluck because I knew I\u2019d be at the office late, and had said \u201cno\u201d to enough coffee requests from the few people I knew in the city that eventually they stopped asking. Instead of putting in the effort required to build a community, I spent nearly all of my energy in service of my career.<\/p>\n

The Slack messages are followed in short order by three calls from my boss\u2019s assistant. When I don\u2019t pick up, the accompanying voice messages, each more frantic than the last, remind me that our boss wishes to see me, post haste. The crisis, like most work crises, does not warrant this level of urgency. But it feels like a five-alarm fire to me.<\/p>\n

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A writer reflects on the moment she understood the roots of her workaholism.\u201cCOME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU\u2019RE IN,\u201d concludes the flurry of Slack messages from my manager, an all-caps tirade that began at 4:56 a.m.It\u2019s a Monday morning in 2017. I\u2019m sitting in my car in the parking lot of my newish job, my body frozen, my eyes glued to my phone screen.I\u2019m 45, and after decades relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, I\u2019d landed a high-profile, C-suite \u201cdream\u201d job and published my first book, a career guide for misfits. I\u2019d become an in-demand speaker, traveling the country to deliver talks on \u201cmaking it,\u201d my platitudes-with-a-twist quoted in business magazines, written up in women\u2019s lifestyle blogs.To the outside world, my success was unimpeachable. Inside I am a mess.I\u2019d worked through the weekend and, because I worked most weekends, the days and demands had all started to blur. My husband and I had moved to Los Angeles five years earlier, but I still hadn\u2019t made any friends.I\u2019d skipped the parent social at our kid\u2019s new preschool because of a work trip. I\u2019d turned down an invitation to a neighbor\u2019s potluck because I knew I\u2019d be at the office late, and had said \u201cno\u201d to enough coffee requests from the few people I knew in the city that eventually they stopped asking. Instead of putting in the effort required to build a community, I spent nearly all of my energy in service of my career.The Slack messages are followed in short order by three calls from my boss\u2019s assistant. When I don\u2019t pick up, the accompanying voice messages, each more frantic than the last, remind me that our boss wishes to see me, post haste. The crisis, like most work crises, does not warrant this level of urgency. But it feels like a five-alarm fire to me.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7751,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7749"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7752,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7749\/revisions\/7752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}