Well, I sinned and committed a colossal career no-no. I rescinded a job offer I had previously acception. If that wasn’t bad enough, I took back a resignation, too. None of this was me at my finest, but career mistakes happen.
I’m a wannabe boss bitch, but somehow I spent a year and a half feeling the not good kinda “hardcore unemployable.” In retrospect, it seems silly, but exhaustion makes accepting limiting beliefs tackier. And this girl slogged through 2022.
After a long tepid job search– an offer came– with a $24k salary bump and a promised primarily telework schedule. The prospect of this new job should have brought joy, but it didn’t.
I spotted a bunch of red flags about the new company: the rushed nature of the interview and the timeline, the punitive employee handbook, and the impersonal nature of the discussion with the hiring manager.
However, on a Friday and after three days of rushed deliberation with a pushy recruiter, I said fuck it and ‘ok’ to the new job. Because I didn’t want to short my company on two weeks’ notice, I promptly resigned.
I scare easily, but still, I didn’t trust the new job I accepted in a bitter, exhausted, and emotional state. Somehow, I (erroneously) believed I had no choice but to take this job I didn’t actually want.
So, I sat with my new job decision for a week. The prospect of leaving my current role stirred up a longing for the work I wouldn’t get to finish and the people I’d miss.
In the throes of this (mostly unecessary) drama, my boss said it wasn’t too late to withdraw my resignation.
So, I did it. I oopsied it all. The job acceptance. The resignation.
Mistakes and messiness are opportunities to practice self-compassion. Maybe, exhaustion or your ego got the best of you, and you f*cked up. Be kind to yourself, take the lessons, and move on.
Here are some of my lessons:
- Use your f*cking voice and ask for you want. Hinting and hoping are a recipe for bitterness and resentment. Instead, ask. If someone declines your request, don’t take it personally. Instead, use that ‘no’ as a potential data point for later decision-making and move on.
- Choose empowerment over victim narratives. Where I used to feel trapped and all victim-y transformed into, I chose this f*cking place. If there are things I can’t accept, I try and change them. My ability to adopt this empowered perspective was there all along. But, unfortunately, I needed some painful lessons to see it.
- Save decision making for when you aren’t emotionally reactive. When you are hopped up on cortisol and stress hormones, decide nothing unless it’s life or death (and it’s probably not). Thank you next those pushy people. No good decisions will get made in this state. If you’ve f*cked up and unwittingly created chaos from a hasty decision, give yourself ‘grace.’
Lastly, lets end on these much wiser words.
Sometimes not disappointing yourself means committing a career faux pas (or deux).