I’ve never been in this position career wise.
No worries. It wasn't my intention to put you in a particular perspective. My intention for the question was I was simply curious as to what you meant when you generalised never being in a particular position. It could mean that you've never made a mistake, or that you've never been put at significant risk of having an untimely closure on your work contract, or having had responsibility for someone losing out on a team issue, or something else. What helps me that I want to share with you is that when we get specific and dig in to detail on work things, often it ends up being a lot less painful than our anxiety may lead us to believe. That seems to be very true when I make a mistake at work. That's where I was going with that. By the way--it seems you weren't that specific with your answer.
Following on our previous discussion about prayer; for the worst situations--like big gaffs at work--I try to go to bible. Just post and I can share a little more on this one.
So to try to keep it brief and narrow the scope to your issue, I think a key thing is what you shared here. I'll go logic→feelings→scripture.
(1) I’m feeling bad because I feel responsible for the operator getting fired. (2) He definitely should’ve caught the bad parts that were being produced just like (3) I should’ve caught my bad setup parts.
Items numbered.
(1) It seems to me in the hierarchy of your company, that this operator isn't under your headcount. Therefore, you're not completely responsible for releasing him based on competence. Feeling like you contributed to his release is important to distinguish versus "I'm responsible for his firing". I think if you take the second way, it's easy to feel that, "perhaps I deserved to get fired, not him", because you did have a role in the mistake.
(2) If he definitely catches the bad parts, that's 100%. Even in highly accurate organisations, there's often still 1 - 99.99966% = 0.00033% that don't meet the desired standard. So should he really catch 100.00% of the bad parts?
(3) Same goes for you. If you don't expect 100.00% accuracy on the totality of what is done by a colleague you seem to respect, then why hold yourself to that same impossible standard?
Logically, that seems to be the case here. So even after drilling down the situation, I sometimes
still honestly feel crumby.
At this point, I know my feelings pattern quite well, so I will often go straight to scripture. To show you how it works, and hopefully it'll help you figure out implementation in your own relationship with God, I'll detail how it played out before. *So I'll identify the specific issue I
still feel crumby about, then search for guidance. For example, my personality profile shows that I like to please people at work (this came out in typing as "pleasure people at work" rofl)--very true. So when people think poorly of me, it can be a source of exceptional anxiety, versus other personality types. My bosses (or customers) are usually my most important stakeholders--therefore, I feel anxiety when
I think they think less of my performance. Probably exceptionally compared to others. Even with evidence to the contrary. So the narrow, narrow, issue is that I feel anxious about judgements levied on my performance and the situation I was in. At this point, it makes a lot of sense for me to go to scripture, my plate feels full.* The parts in between the *'s is the detail I skip through.
The scripture portion is here. "Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." 1Pet5:7(partial)NIV.
Here, my example was uncertainty about my boss's judgment of me (or specifically of my
performance, as the self aspect). So easy scripture to go to for my issue is,
"Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. (partial quote)" 1Heb13:17(partial)NIV.
If you combine this with empathy by putting yourself in your manager's position, you can see they have to answer for a crumby judgement they may have laid upon you. So knowing they are responsible to God for both (i)
their decisions and for (ii) leading
you;--to bring it back to first person--then that helps me to see that I truly may have executed to a T, but if my boss judges me poorly, that'll be his fault in execution (of his duty of judgement of competence) which is
out of my control. In a business-speak way, what this is, is "let the other person do their job (they're being paid for)".
In the context of
your other thread, people forcing you to do things, even pushing Roman Catholicism upon you, they have to answer to God to what they did. If they deprive you of the goods of the faith because of how they intermediated the relationship between you and God, that's
their responsibility. Leave it to God. I think that's magnitudes easier than trying to change a parent or wringing hands on wanting them to be different. So hopefully you can pray to get help from God, rather than waiting to be in a desperate need. I don't think God's that stingy with His time. Even if He was, I'm sure there's tons of less capable people praying all the time, so why not give yourself a voice?
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