Toxic people

The self-help book I am reading advises to avoid toxic people especially when trying to improve oneself. Good advise as I am getting bored with the usual crowd I have lunch with almost every day at the office. There is to much argument and back-biting and criticism of other people at work. With my experiments on cognitive restructuring (wow!), I am trying to correct my faulty thinking. This is especially helpful when I myself am criticized by the internal customers I worked with at the office. The boss of the company we support has called me many names such as a marshmallow (because I keep changing my opinion), a ghost (because I should not tell the customer what they need but just listen) and weak (because I cannot protect my views with other assertive people).

I think in the back of my mind that he is saying these because he wants me to improve. In fact he is a nice guy personally and it is only in the business environment that he is very demanding. He has a well-deserved reputation for being a tough boss. So my self-esteem is a bit fragile these days and being around toxic people is not helpful. I may descend into a spiral of vindictiveness and self-pity if I always listen to negative people. I think the key word is to be positive. This would be difficult because I often like the crowd I keep who are really capable and decent people and one cannot have a perfect environment.

Last night I attended a photography club meeting where a professional photographer gave an interesting lecture. It was a good night with a lot of picture being shown. I should have joined a photography course much earlier. I focused more on the stock market, which was not bad, except that I increased my investments just before the recent market correction. Now I have to wait until the market improves and rises again. I guess life really has it’s ups and down!

Tomorrow I will have our monthly meeting with ‘the boss man’ himself. It is always a stressful event though I tend not to show it. Sometimes I feel that I am running out of things to say especially with my recent failures on the data warehouse project we were doing. I guess I should strategize and plan how the meeting should proceed. I am too emotional during the meeting which I cannot help it because ‘the boss man’s attitude is very accommodating and charming and I cannot help bring down my defenses. Perhaps I mistake him for a father figure that I try to please him by bending backwards on my positions. Now that is a new thought! In fact, despite the negative rating I have gotten last year, I still have this hope that he will help me in the end in case the retrenchment hits me.