Starting Over
I started a new job on August 1. It is with a startup. I am grateful to have a job.
I un-learned one very important thing while finding this job. One of the behaviors that I had to un-learn during the process of looking for a job was a tendency of normal big company non-listening. After getting out and meeting with people, I realized in big companies very often people have their own agenda and are on their own empire building campaign, and as a result, people would not listen. They weren’t really interested in helping you or solving the right problem, they were interested in proving how smart they were (the engineers) or how powerful they were (the business people). Or both. In order to survive, at times I got caught up in that way of thinking. But it left me very empty inside. I think more people feel that way than they will admit. When you are under stress, you can become very myopic in your behavior.
I un-learned this tendency by becoming more open to what I was actually feeling when I met with people. I had sincere desire to build relationships but I saw that my non-listening was leaving me out of many opportunities to understand people and what made them tick. It was easy to sacrifice my non-listening behavior when I understood what I could get out of it.
I am still human and no one is perfect so at times I may let my own viewpoint get in the way. But on the whole, I do find myself learning more, and feeling happier about life.