Turn Your Job Complaints Into A Positive Plan of Action

“We owe almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed, but to those who have differed.” – Charles Caleb Colton (Lacon, 1825)

Are there things about your job that you don’t like? Do you feel frustrated by them? In “Fearless Living,” Rhonda Britten has some good advice on how to turn those frustrations into positive change.

1. Keep a log of your complaints. Be as specific as possible. Do this for a week.

2. Review your complaints. Identify which are serious and which are trivial. Figure out which you can solve quickly and easily and which are more problematic.

3. Reduce your complaints to a manageable few: five or six. If you have more than five or six complaints, you should get another job or see a psychiatrist. (This last is my advice, not Ms. Britten’s.)

4. Turn each of your complaints into a challenge. Instead of saying, for example, “My boss is unfair,” say “I need to find a way to either get my boss to change his behavior or learn to be happy with it as it is now.”

5. Transform your challenges into action plans: In the case above, for example, you might decide to meet with your boss to discuss the issue, write up specific requests as a follow-up to that meeting, and push for a resolution by a certain date.

[Ed. Note.  Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]