درسنامه اصلی

Bad Jobs – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ and welcome to this month’s lesson. A kind of a favorite topic of mine, a funny topic for me, Bad Jobs. Oh, I could write a book. I could probably write several books about this topic. I have had so many bad jobs in my life. Let me think of a few.

One summer I worked for Greenpeace, the environmental organization. At that time, I think they were a better organization. Now they’re more corporate. But at that time, I liked what they were doing but, man, I got a really bad job with them and my job was going door-to-door, knocking on doors, collecting donations. And I’ve told this story before, but basically at the knock on the door, someone would answer and then I would have to try to convince them to give money to Greenpeace.

Oh, and I was so bad at it. I was terrible, right? Not a good public speaker, not a good salesperson, and it was basically a sales job. And it was so stressful and on top of that, because I wasn’t very good, I made almost no money. I was…I was so, so, so poor during that time. And I quit that job after just one summer. I just couldn’t survive on it. The money wasn’t enough.

Later in my life, I worked as an emergency room social worker. I’ll give you an example of a typical day as an emergency room social worker. So I’m sitting in my little office. I get to work early in the morning for a 12-hour shift. They were long days. Get in, sit down, get information about the current patients and then suddenly I get a call, “Hey, we got a new patient in one of the rooms. You need to come and talk to them, talk to him, because he’s kind of agitated.” Agitated means upset, maybe a little bit angry.

Well, I go there to the room and I look inside and there’s this guy and he’s completely naked but he’s got a bunch of like stuff on him, like things like stuff…I couldn’t tell what it was so I asked a nurse and said, “What is that stuff on him?” and she said, “Oh, that’s poop, dog poop, he found dog poop and he rubbed it on his body.” And then he was walking around the room like talking crazy and very angry sounding. I don’t remember what he was saying, it was just quite random, crazy stuff.

And so the doctor came and it was my job, I had to go and interview these new psychiatric patients, right? The new people with mental problems or drug-abuse problems. That was my job. I had to go talk to them, find out what the problem was, and then discuss with the doctor what to do. So, I’m like, oh my god, I have to go into the room with this guy. So I went into the room and he’s…he looks at me, like this and he’s like…

“Hi, hello,” and I sat down against the wall. And then he started walking back and forth screaming and telling me he was going to kill me and he’d walk up to me and go “Aaugh, unhhh,” and then he would walk

back and…stressful! Every time I thought he was going to jump on me and attack me and I was ready to, oh my god, I’m going to have to fight this guy.

They called the security guards. They waited right outside the door. He smelled terrible, as you can imagine. And this is kind of like a typical day and after all that then I would have to go and interview someone else who had tried to overdose on drugs, and it was just all day, 12 hours, non-stop, just running, running, running all the time. Almost never a break, super stressful. And I could go on and on and on.

The truth is, for 22 years of my life, the first 22 years of my working life, I hated my jobs. The truth is, I didn’t like any of them because the real truth is I just didn’t like having a job at all. I didn’t like the idea of jobs. I didn’t like it, okay? Now some, I hated a lot and some were so-so, they were okay. But if I tell you the truth, I really didn’t like any of them. I just didn’t like working for other people. I just didn’t like jobs at all.

But so many of my jobs were horrible. Horrible because they paid terribly, low, low, low pay. I mean I was so, so poor for many, many years of my life. Horrible because the bosses were terrible. Just jerks, y’know? I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you get a boss and they, oh they just think, “I’m the boss now. I’m the manager. I’m the big guy (or the big woman).”

And then they just, they treat their employees terribly, right? They’re just rude and they’re bossy. We say bossy, it means you’re telling people what to do all the time. So I’ve had many bosses like that. Oh my god. I’ve had very stressful work environments, like the emergency room. I’ve had combinations of all of those. I’ve had jobs that just were terrible, terrible hours.

I was a security guard that worked, y’know, the night shift for a few years. And the actual job was easy, just sitting around, but working the night shift is actually very tough because all your sleep patterns become strange, right? You’re trying to sleep in the daylight when everybody else is awake and doing things.

People are always calling you during the day. You’ve got to turn your phone off. You’ve got to try to close the curtains to keep the light out and it just seems like…and then when you have a day off, your friends, of course, they always want to, y’know, do things during the day like on the weekends, and that’s when you normally sleep so sometimes you have to skip your sleep to have a social life and it just really can cause a lot of problems with your sleep and make you tired all the time.

So anyway, I’m not complaining, I’m just sort of discussing with you, sharing with you that, believe me, believe me, I understand bad jobs. And I know you may have a bad job now. Maybe you have had bad jobs in the past. Maybe you’ll have another one in the future. Most of us experience bad jobs in our lifetimes. But, y’know, when I think about it now, with hindsight, meaning now that I’m looking back to the past, I can see that I did benefit from some of these bad jobs.

I learned new skills, even when I was not having fun, even when I was not enjoying the job, I was learning at many of them. That Greenpeace job, door-to-door, I learned sales skills. Now, I did not become a super salesman, but I did learn some basic sales skills. I had to. And because of that job, I started reading books about sales and that later helped me when I started my own business, Effortless English, because suddenly I had to sell my own lessons, my own business. I had to do some selling and so I could use some of those skills I had learned in the past. I thought I never would use them again but, in fact, I did.

The emergency room job taught me how to stay calm under extreme stress. When people are going crazy, even aggressive and violent, to be able to stay calm in the moment, not panic. And that has been a valuable skill in my life in many different situations, many different periods of my life I have used that skill that I learned from that bad job.

Now another thing all these bad jobs forced me to do was to question myself, to question my priorities. Your priorities are the things most important to you. And as I would be in a job and not liking it, or even hating it, sometimes even miserable in the job, I would ask myself like, “Oh, what do I want to do?” I was constantly asking myself, “What kind of job will make me happy? What would be a good job for me? Why am I so miserable in this job? Why do I hate this job so much?”

So I was constantly asking myself these questions. The truth is, for many, many, many years, I could not answer these questions. But every bad job forced me to think about it again. And eventually I figured out the answer, I realized, “Wow, there is really no job that I want, so I guess I have to start my own business.” Right? The bad jobs helped me to realize that. The bad jobs helped me to figure that out.

If all my jobs had been okay, y’know, not so bad, maybe I would have gotten comfortable, not happy, but not miserable and maybe I just would have continued. But because I had so many terrible jobs that I hated, I was forced to ask myself, “What…what can I do? How can I be happier? What kind of job, what kind of work will make me happier?” And that forced me and led me to the answer of starting my own business. So thank you to the bad jobs for that.

Another skill I developed because I had so many bad jobs, job interviewing. See, because I had so many bad jobs, I quit them frequently. I just couldn’t stay in those terrible jobs a long time. The Greenpeace job was only three months. The emergency room job was just a year. So my habit was to get a job, usually to be unhappy in the job, sometimes miserable, and then quit, hoping I could get a better job and so I’d have to job interview.

I was constantly job searching and job interviewing. And that’s actually a very, very useful skill that helped me as I got older, the ability to interview for jobs, to be good at job searching, it gave me a lot of confidence. I lost that fear of losing my job because I knew, “Oh, I can find another job. I can do well in interviews.” That was good, too. It was another great skill that I learned because of bad jobs.

And so what about you? Maybe right now your job is bad. Maybe it’s just so-so, okay. Maybe it’s good but how do we deal…the bigger question, I think, is how do we deal with those bad situations and it’s hard in the moment, it’s hard in the moment when you hate your job. I know. Every day, you don’t want to go, you don’t want to do it. It’s hard to have a bigger view. But try.

Try to have that bigger view and try to think more long-term, meaning that how can this bad job help you for the future, or maybe how have your past bad jobs helped you now. So if you’re in a bad job or just a bad situation, instead of just complaining all the time, “This sucks. This sucks,” it’s okay to complain, maybe you need to get it out a little bit.

But also, also try to learn, so when you’re in that bad situation, ask yourself, “Well, what skill, what useful skill can I learn from this bad job or this bad situation? How can I use this bad situation to learn a useful skill that will help me in the future?”

So the Greenpeace job, it was a bad job but I learned a useful skill, selling. The emergency room, it was a bad job but I learned a useful skill, actually more than one, but I learned how to communicate with people who are very aggressive and maybe upset, learned how to be calm when things are very, very stressful and the situation is very stressful.

And in other bad jobs, I learned other useful skills, that all helped me later in life. At that time, I didn’t realize it but they did help me later in life. And so you can choose this while you’re in a bad situation, instead of just complaining and doing the minimum amount, instead actually try to find challenges that will help you grow.

So imagine you’re in a job, I don’t know, let’s say you’re working in a bookstore. That’s another bad job I had. Working in a bookstore at the cash register and your boss is kind of a jerk and telling you, pressuring you all the time that you have to try to sell more stuff to the customers. Sell more stuff to the customers, this is called upselling. And you don’t like doing it. It feels weird. It feels unnatural. You don’t like selling. You’re not happy.

So you could just complain and not really do it. But instead, why not take the challenge? Why not say, well this is a challenge. This is a skill I could try to learn, selling. I don’t like it. It feels weird. I don’t really even agree with it but I might as well use this to develop a new skill, to challenge myself to get something new. So that when I leave the bad job, I go to something else, I take a useful skill with me.

See, that’s the thing. If you just sit in a bad job and do nothing, or do the minimum, when you finally leave, you take nothing away, just your little bad paycheck, probably, right? That’s all gone. But if you have a bad job and you learn a useful skill, you keep that useful skill for your whole life. The job was bad, maybe the payment was bad, but you come away, you take away a useful skill that will help you in the future, in all your future jobs or your life.

And so you get something good from the bad. You change the good into something…I mean change the bad into something good. You take a bad situation and you learn a skill that makes it good.

So that’s my challenge to you this month. Look at your life, you probably have at least one bad situation. Maybe not your job but there’s probably something in your life you’re not happy about. And ask yourself, in this area of my life, what skill could I develop instead of just complaining and being unhappy, how can I use this bad situation to develop a useful skill? Ask yourself that. How can I use this bad situation to develop a useful skill?

Pick a skill and then work on it. Work on it. Work on that new skill in that bad situation. Alright, tell me about it on Twitter if you can, my twitter is ajhoge.

Have a great month. Lots of love to you. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.