Dealing with job market drama & bad behavior

Greg Behrendt has a program about refusing to take "stuff" from jerks. Right now it seems the job market is rife with weirdos, con artists, and general goofs. So what to do?

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos! 

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. I was actually planning for today's topic to get into what Joe Dispenza calls inspired action. This piggybacks a little bit on my topic of scurrying mouse mode, because some people, and in fact, some coaches, some business advisors, will tell you with a straight face, doing something is always better than doing nothing. If you do nothing, then you're guaranteed that nothing will happen in return. So it's better to be in scurrying mouse mode and be here, there and everywhere and freaking out than it is to sit and do nothing. And I'm like, Well, I beg to differ. It's not really that we're capable of sitting and doing nothing, because our brain is running all the time. Even when we're asleep, the mind is still active. You're still in dream mode. Things are happening. So to me, it seems that there are a great many times in life where being still, meditating, opening your mind, calming the heck down is much, much better than going into crazy, scurrying mouse mode, and that's why I like how Joe Dispenza calls it inspired action. Take inspired action, not take random action. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a later date. Hopefully next time around, I can record on that topic, because it's something that needs to be talked about. However, another topic jumped the line, so to speak. And I thought, if I'm dealing with this, somebody else is too. We're in this, like, weird place, I think, just in terms of the year overall, and in terms of it being an election year, because we're getting ever closer to the election. That weird debate between the two was on the other night, and it was like, Okay, this, this really told us nothing. I mean, thanks. The stock market typically has a poor showing in September. The job market is not much better. So we're in this weird space of q3 where it's like q3 is almost over with we're getting ready headlong to go into q4 I don't actually know what happened to the end of the summer. Now, part of that is because I was in book writing mode. For that matter, there are spaces of time that I only remember in really general terms. So when I talk about writing like a woman possessed, I'm being a little bit literal with that, because I remember coming in and sitting at the desk and turning on classical music, really, just to have background filler and just writing, just this, this creation, this baby pouring out of me. It was nuts. But I don't know what happened to the end of the summer. Part of it is because of that, but I am. I'm hearing the same thing from other people that haven't been in book writing mode like it was August, and then I blinked and it was after Labor Day, and September is basically gone. This is a short month. We're coming to the end of q3 the stock market is in the pooper. I wish I could give you something more optimistic here, but, yeah, I'm trying. I am trying. I'm just not sure what's going to play out for the rest of 2024 and here's what inspired me today. I was thinking about how Greg Behrendt has this program. Don't take BS from efforts. I'm going to have to try to keep this PG. It's not my nighttime broadcast. Otherwise, I just say it full out, but not here. I won't you get the drift. Stop taking BS from ephors now drop a link to his website. You can look all of this up for yourself if you want to. And this is unsolicited plug for him. I like him, and his program is cool, but that's not an endorsement in terms of me telling you to go do it, I would just say, check out the website and make your own decision. As you know, I don't give you advice. I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. You have to make those choices for yourself. But I personally like at least the ethos, the chutzpah there, and he has a free meditation that you can download if you join his mailing list and it's only about five minutes long. But one of the points that he makes in said meditation is it doesn't matter if this effort is somebody outside of yourself, or if the effort is you negative self talk, limiting beliefs, putting yourself down, always looking for the worst in any possible situation, etc. So. Sometimes the battle that we're fighting is actually with ourselves, because there's so much in life that we don't control. We're not God, and yes, we can get out ahead of certain things. We can, I believe, anyway, begin to finesse reality, begin to create reality, begin to manifest the things that we want to see in our life, instead of manifesting all the things that we don't want to see in our life. However, at the end of the day, we don't control everything. Sometimes poopoo happens, and a lot comes down to, how do you deal with it, how do you cope with it, and what is the story that you tell yourself when the poo poo happens? Do you fall apart? Do you repress? Do you hold on to it for days or even weeks? Funny enough, this actually is something else that Joe Dispenza gets into. This idea of like how a fleeting feeling can morph into a mood, can morph into a disposition, can morph into your entire freaking personality. We all, I guarantee you, everybody listening to this today, we all know somebody that fits into the category of acting like an Eeyore, a pessimist. The glass is always half empty. Nothing is ever right. Every time that you talk to them, it's just bad news, and they like to play the martyr. Nobody has ever had it as bad as them, etc, etc. And it's like, oh God, having to be around this person is like the want wall pedal. You already know, if you call him on the phone or you bump into him in the supermarket, it's gonna be like and they're gonna drag your mood down, and then you're gonna have to spend time getting back into a positive, elevated emotion and kind of like shaking off the psychic debris after you've been around them. But we all know at least one person that's like that, and I would just say, how about we challenge ourselves to not be that person again, like I'm trying not myself to avalanche and catapult into pessimism here, we just don't know what's getting ready to happen politically, and we Don't know what ramifications that will have on the job market. As I said in a previous episode, so many things boil down to confidence, whether it's real or imagined, whether the confidence is based on anything that's true is almost beside the point. It's about confidence in the market. You'll see stocks go up based on hot air and hopium. Well, the same thing can happen in the job market. It is entirely possible. I'm not going to go so far as to say probable, because we're too far out just yet, but it's entirely possible that the job market, the CEOs, the fat cats, the power brokers, if they begin to feel confident that the Orange Man is going back in office, if they start to feel confident that the Fed is going to cut rates, and we're going to go back into an era of easy money, where it's easier for them to get loans, it's easier for them to finance projects, etc. There may be some of that. Rah, rah, happy days are here again, and we may see some kind of rally in the job market. Now I'm not saying that's based on anything real. I'm just saying it's all a confidence game that could happen. But we just don't know. We have no idea what's getting what's getting ready to actually occur in the coming months and how corporate America will respond to it. I try not to get political on here. It is a bit difficult in an election year, because those things inform the economy and the job market by proxy. There has been talk that the Orange Man may appoint some corporate America big wigs. I'm trying to think of what to say some some corporate America fat cats into his cabinet. Rumors of people like Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink going in for various roles. I mean, six and one half a dozen in the other we see this over and over again. Wall Street begets Capitol Hill begets corporate America. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oh, this guy's the Treasury Secretary, and then he's back at Goldman Sachs, and this guy's on Wall Street, and then now he's in the Department of Commerce. And it's like, oh God, just I've said it before. I feel like they're all a bunch of piggies that eat slop from the same trough in a crony capitalist system that does not care about John and j and q public and I it doesn't make any difference to me, if you're talking about red or blue. I don't I don't really think that that matters a bit. However, as I've just said. Fed, it's a confidence game. So we may see some kind of rebound in the job market sooner rather than later. If these fat cats believe that the Orange Man is going back in and that they will benefit from that, we could also see it based on what happens with the Fed and the interest rates and the age of easy money to be determined. They certainly do not counsel with me before they make any of these decisions. I'm just spitballing possibilities out here for you so you can think ahead and try to make decisions for yourself. Those of us who are involved in the job market, day in and day out, know that it's still a hot dumpster fire, and it's difficult even with freelancing opportunities. I have seen so many watering holes go dry. It's it's been a challenge to keep a positive frame of mind and to stay in a in a mindset of money, a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity and lack. It's been a true challenge, for sure. So what was I talking about with stop taking BS from efforts? Here's a point. These corporate big shots and company owners and high level managers, they are aware that the job market is in the dumper, whatever the mainstream media might be putting out in terms of hot air and hopium for John and Jane Q Public, please know and understand that the corporate fat cats don't pay attention to that. They know it's a line of bull and they're not they're not even engaged in that. They know it's fake. And this has empowered some of these people, not everybody, to be clear, but it has empowered some of these people to really treat employees and freelancers like dirt. And you have to decide, how much of that are you willing to put up with? I've recorded an episode before about how dirty is the dirt sandwich? Do you have to eat a dirt sandwich, or can you throw it in the trash? You know, that's a question that only you can answer, and a lot of that's going to depend on where you're at. Financially, we have all, all of us, at some point or another, performed a job or a freelancing gig just to get the money. We didn't like the people involved. We didn't like the work involved, but we had to paste on a smile and be super friendly and be super nice just because we wanted to check. We've all had to do it. I think for me, an important goal is getting away from those types of situations. I had a couple of really just weird experiences over this past month or two. I'm gonna have to be necessarily vague, but it just really was like, I don't even understand what these people are talking about. I don't understand where they're coming from, and I don't know what makes them think that treating their contractors in this way is acceptable during the Great resignation, when all of that really was going strong, these people would have gone out of business, but now they feel empowered to treat people like dirt. How much of the BS from efforts do you have to put up with? Again, I can't answer that question for you, but I think that from my experience anyway, the more that you can go out into the marketplace with a sense of confidence and a sense of self, like I know my value, I know my worth, I know what I bring to the table, that in and of itself, that shift in energy can be super helpful. Something else again, just speaking totally from personal experience is how much do I want to allow this person to disturb my peace. If somebody gets really aggravating, how much do I want to allow that to push my buttons? And then for how long, an amount of time I know I've talked on the air before about Kennedy's quote to a friend that he was just damn near peace at any price. I get it. Something happens, I think, to us around I hate the term middle age, but I'm going to use it anyway. Something happens to us around middle age, around the 40s or the 50s. For some people, it hits later, but definitely for me, it hit in the early part of my 40s. I'm just like, No, no. It's just not worth the drama. It's not worth the argument. There are some people that would argue with a signpost. We used to tease, and when I worked in the oil and gas industry, we used to tease about engineers. Don't argue with an engineer because it's like chasing a pig through the mud. The pig actually likes it, but all you get is dirty. Probably every profession has those little jokes like that, but it's the same concept. Some people feed on the drama. They feed on the conflict. They're like they're jonesing for a fight. And then some people it doesn't like they're passive aggressive in their personality style, and so it doesn't really matter what you say, they'll sit there and they'll. Be like, yeah, yeah, I totally get it, yeah, Mm hmm. But I still want you to do everything that I told you to do my way, even if it's stupid. Miss, some people are like that, and you can't you can't tell them anything. You can't really help them. You have to just figure out what's the strategy here for me to do what I need to do, collect the money and then hit the door. Some projects are going to be like that. I wish I could tell you that we lived in some utopia where every job that you work on is going to be great. Everybody's going to leave and they're going to be holding hands, and it's going to be like Kumbaya, no, especially not right now. I just think people are feeling so empowered and emboldened to be turds to their employees and to their contractors, the pendulum will swing back. Now, it might not swing back as aggressively as it did during the Great resignation, but eventually, if we can get back to some kind of actual movement, some kind of actual progress in the job market, the pendulum will go away from that and it won't be as debilitating for people as it is right now, to be determined what length of time that will be, I don't really know where there are too many variables for me to really rough out a good prediction for you. I just don't know when the pendulum will kind of go back to the middle. God, I hope it's sooner rather than later, because it's certainly making my life difficult. I would just say we really want to think about how much BS do we need to take from efforts. There's always another client. And I would amend that to say there's always another good client. We can't lose faith when we encounter somebody that just works our last nerve, or somebody who says, oh, I want you to work for 40 hours. No, actually, I don't. We can only afford 20. Ha, ha, sorry. Or I want you to work for three months. This is guaranteeing we're gonna really need you. And then two weeks into it, no, we've lost funding. We're gonna have to pull you. The more that I think we can just say there's always another client. I'm not going to argue, I'm not going to fight, I'm not going to tear this person apart and get into a battle of wills. I'm just going to go and find a better opportunity. Surely, the Lord has cleared this out. The Universe, whatever you believe in, fate has cleared this opportunity away from me, because it means something even better is on the horizon, and if these people can't afford to pay me, then heaven knows, I don't want to run up a tab that I never actually see the money for just some food for thought. Stay safe, stay sane, stay healthy, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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