If you’re lucky, you’ve had at least one job with a great manager. Someone who made you feel valued, respected your strengths, and helped you actually enjoy your job. If you’ve been this lucky, you know that you’re more likely to do your best work for this person, and that a great manager can bring any job up a couple steps on the ladder from miserable to satisfying.
Odds are, you’ve also had a terrible manager. You know how much that person can make you dread going to work, and you’ve learned to hate the sound of their voice over your shoulder. A bad manager can turn even a good job into forty hours a week of suffering. When your manager is especially bad, you might even start to hate yourself a little bit.
I’ve had both good and bad managers in my life, and not always where you’d expect. Although my BEST manager had an MBA in human resources, my second-best manager was a twenty-year-old shift-boss at a McDonald’s in my hometown. The same goes for the other end of the spectrum. One bad manager in retail, but another one who held a senior position in the career I thought wanted to pursue, until they convinced me I wanted to quit, instead.
Then one day, I got a job where I was managing myself, because I was the only person there. I discovered that I was terrible at being my own boss. I made my life miserable. I made myself hate that job, and the next one that followed it. Being your own boss isn’t that great if you’re a bad boss.
I left that career behind, but not before learning a very important lesson: you still have a manager when you’re working alone. And maybe, if you’re not consciously trying to be a good one, you accidentally become a bad one.
Here is an incomplete list of ways you might accidentally be managing yourself badly:
- You demand high levels of productivity no matter what external circumstances are interfering with you.
- You demand the same amount of productivity even when you’re sick, or haven’t slept for three days, or when you’re deeply worried about something in your personal life.
- You make unreasonably long to-do lists, and then get mad at yourself when you don’t finish them.
- You never say no, to a project, or a hare-brained idea, or a time-wasting reorganization of something that was probably working just fine.
- You don’t reward yourself for doing hard things.
- You don’t celebrate your wins.
- You think of “time off” as something you have to earn.
- When you look back to last year, last month, or even last week, you can’t remember what you accomplished, or what got in your way.
- You don’t give yourself time, energy, or resources to learn and grow.
- You get the “Sunday Scaries,” for the days you plan to work on our creative projects, even when things are going well.
The good news is, if any of those things sound familiar, you can learn to do better. The better news is: learning how to be a good manager for yourself, when you’re at home working on your art, will help you be a better manager and employee at any other job you hold, even when that job comes with external supervision. Turns out, once you’re good at being your OWN manager, you can survive someone else’s mediocre attempts.
I’ve learned a lot about this over the last eight years since my major life-changing burnout. I’ve done a bit of research, and a lot of experimenting on myself, to get better at being my own manager. I’m going to be starting a periodic blog series diving into it, and also pushing myself to do more research along the way. Join me?
This is such a good idea! You should write a book!
Aw, thanks, Kim!