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How We Get Stuck In A Rut At Work (And Why It’s Exactly Like Runner’s Chafe)

August 5, 2019 by Wendy Toth Leave a Comment

A lot of my clients come to me guilty.

They’re ashamed of being stuck in a rut at work.

If you are stuck in a rut at work, or in life, the last thing you need piled on top of that heaviness is guilt.

I’d like you to absolve yourself from the guilt right now, by taking a closer look at how we get stuck. To do so, I shall compare your work rut to one of my other least favorite annoyances in life: the chafing that comes with long-distance running.

This will be fun. I promise.

For our purposes, I’ll focus exclusively on inner-thigh chafing.

Back to the subject at hand.

It’s not such a bad thing to get stuck. It’s much better than inner thigh chafing, or any chafing. And both incidents provide you with a wakeup call.

At work, it starts to happen when you get these weird, sort of out-of-body moments, where you feel like you’re living someone else’s life. Things you have been doing for years start to feel uncomfortable and even unfamiliar. It creeps up on you.

In running, you get in a groove and you sweat. It’s a nice day. You’re a good enough runner to cover maybe five miles no problem, so you push on a little farther and then…a burning sensation sets in.

Every single one if us is surprised at this moment. We all want to know what the F happened?!

I will tell you what happened. YOU ARE GOOD AT YOUR JOB/ RUNNING! You can’t even get to the point where you experience this much pain if you aren’t a hard worker who has figured out how to get ahead.

All of us get ahead by doing certain things or pleasing certain people, but over time if you don’t make any adjustments or plans to account for how far you’ve come, you start to chafe!

Chafing is literally caused by the thinning of your skin due to friction.

In running, maybe you start wearing tights under your shorts, or using BodyGlide. At work, maybe you need a raise, more flexibility, or more and different responsibilities that align with the values you’ve picked up as you’ve grown and gotten better and wiser.

And that’s not anything against you–right? You are allowed to grow as a person and have your values shift. If that’s not happening, you have issues that reach beyond the scope of this slightly uncomfortable blog post.

If you don’t take time to think about your goals, your big-picture career development, and the life you want to be living, and adjust–you start to care about the wrong things.

You take your eye off the finish line and worry exclusively about your thighs chafing.

So what’s your “thigh chafe” at work?

It’s different for everyone. Whatever it is, I can guarantee that you are spending too much time being preoccupied with it: Thinking about it; Getting sucked into long complainy conversations about it. It might be a project, a person, or a task.

Consider it your wakeup call. Change your strategy so that you can spend less time on it, and use that time to consider your next goal.

What do you want to learn next? What do you want to work on? Do you want to work less? How do you make that happen?

Whatever you do, don’t feel guilty for being great enough to get to this point.

Image by F. Muhammad from Pixabay.

Filed Under: Finding Balance

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